by Liam Kloef

Created on: November 06, 2011

The concept of economic class is a recent addition to our vocabulary. Although people have always divided themselves according to wealth and prestige (the books of the Old Testament are tales of kings and their charges), it was Marx in the 19th century who fashioned his ideas of a proletariat and a bourgeoisie: the proletariat being the working class (i.e., those that worked in factories); the bourgeoisie that that owned the factories. It was capitalism that produced these classes, which for Marx was nothing more (during the zenith of the Industrial Revolution) than the ownership of means of production by someone other than those that operated them.

But there was more to his concept of class: Marx insisted these classes were active and homogenous and would act in unison. Hence there would one day be class warfare. We know now that Marx erred: a class identity and unity did not follow from experiencing similar life conditions. Marx thought it did and that the result was class as an objective category. This was the perspective that most people that called themselves Marxists took: that motives for action would result from a united perception of similar life conditions.

Not everyone views their circumstances in the same way, however, and Marx’s anticipated class warfare never came about. What was quaintly known as Marxism survived as long as it did by groups of power elite (Russia, Cuba, N. Korea) enforcing this notion that the workers were unified: workers knew better, but that was where the secret police came in.

So it is rather comical to see headlines citing threats of class warfare here in the US of A because Wall Street runs things and because so many people are unemployed. You’ll never see a Wall Street Elite float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. The charge that a few well-placed individuals represent a conspiracy of elite is the product of the long-ago discredited Marxist belief that class was an objective category. The trouble is that the people that make this charge (professional advocates, editorialists) are completely unaware of Marx.

Today, the notion of class has little to do with him. We see ourselves divided into upper, middle, and lower classes; divisions produced on the basis of wealth, but amount of wealth is correlative and a matter of personal taste and ambition and not a matter of class interest.

These divisions are now more a matter of cultural oppositions, created by academics

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>