by Gill Hands
Class in the capitalist society
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx described how capitalism had divided society into two opposing camps:
Proletariat – Workers who have no capital or means of production of their own. They are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. ‘The proletariat, is, in a word the working class of the nineteenth century.’ (Engels, Principles of Communism)
Bourgeoisie – The class of capitalists. Owners of the means of production and employers of wage labourers.
Bourgeois is a term that is often used today in an insulting way to describe someone with narrow-minded middle-class tastes, but Marx based his structure of class on economic factors alone and not those of taste or habit. The use of the word in English probably came from the French Revolution, for the bourgeoisie were originally the French middle class, a class of merchants and small businessmen who became more powerful after the nobility fell out of favour with the masses.
Marx used the words bourgeoisie and capitalist interchangeably to describe the class that derived income from ownership or trade in capital assets, or from buying and selling commodities or services. He did make some differentiation between what he called ‘functioning capitalists’, those who manage industries, and ‘mere coupon clippers’, those who live off interest from shares or properties, but basically they all belonged to the one class. Their relation to the means of production was the same, for they owned them and used the labour of their workers to make a surplus product and extract profit.
On the other hand, the proletariat, or workers, did not own the means of production and had to sell their labour to the capitalists in order to live. There is no other way for workers to survive under a capitalist system, for they rely on wages to buy their means of subsistence: food, clothing and shelter.
Marx did acknowledge that other classes existed, but he believed they were becoming increasingly a part of the two main classes and these were becoming more and more polarized as capitalism progressed.
The self-employed or ‘petty bourgeoisie’ were usually those who had small family firms, owned some means of production and worked for themselves. Competition meant that they were increasingly being taken over by larger firms or put out of business entirely. The successful ones would rise to the ranks of the bourgeoisie, the rest would be pushed down into the proletariat.
In Marx’s day there was also a huge mass of domestic servants who had a better standard of living than many factory workers. However, they were dependent on their masters for their living and were basically still just selling labour power to the highest bidder. They would have more to lose in any class antagonism than factory workers for they were less independent.
Managerial workers, such as factory supervisors, are also wage labourers but they are slightly more privileged than ordinary workers and again less likely to come into conflict with the capitalist than the workers because of their position.
Peasants worked largely on the land without much use of machinery up until the twentieth century and they still represented a large part of the European population in the time of Marx. He acknowledged that they were a separate class, but did not think they would be easy to involve in any class struggle. He wrote about this in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, which examines the way that Napoleon III of France was supported by the peasants. Because they were isolated from each other, unlike the workers in factories, they would be difficult to organize but he believed that the urban proletariat could lead them into the class struggle.
There was also what Marx called the ‘stagnant element’, the ‘lumpenproletariat’, the large mass of unemployables who do not really fit into society at all: ‘thieves, vagabonds … the demoralised, the ragged’. Marx believed this class would get bigger as capitalism grew but he did not see them as being important in any class struggle because he felt they were too unreliable. Because they are not being exploited directly by the system as the workers are, they are less likely to come into conflict with the capitalist.
Marx recognized that these other classes did exist but he saw that under capitalism this class structure was becoming simpler and polarized into extremes. The bourgeoisie had created the need for the proletariat and now capitalism had expanded voraciously and was like a ‘sorcerer who is no longer able to dominate the infernal powers he has conjured up’. In The Communist Manifesto he predicted that they had created the class that were going to be their gravediggers.
Marx saw that exploitation and oppression of the workers was the norm of the society he lived in; ‘political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.
The proletariat were being exploited, so why weren’t they doing anything about it? Marx believed the answer lay in the alienation of the workers and in something he called ideology.
Ideology
According to Marx, each society is unique and has its own ideology: each society has its own assumptions about the nature of humanity and has its own morality and values. At the time that Marx was writing, most philosophers believed ideas and consciousness were the shaping forces of world history. Marx’s materialist view divided society into the ‘economic base’ and the ‘superstructure’. He believed that the way people thought was a reflection of the economic base of the country that they lived in.
The economic base is really a combination of two things: ‘productive forces’, as Marx called them, and ‘relations of production’.
Productive forces are material things used to produce commodities. These include things such as raw materials, machinery and the labour power of the workers who use them. For example, in a feudal society a weaver might use a hand-loom to turn sheep’s wool into cloth, so the wool, loom and the work he does with them are productive forces.
Relations of production are the relationships between people or between people and things. For example, the loom may belong to a family of weavers who use it to make cloth that they can sell to rich customers. The relationships in the family, and of the family to their customers, are relations of production. In a feudal society, the relationship between a serf and his lord, described earlier in this chapter, is one example of a relation of production. Marx saw this economic base, formed by the productive forces and the relations of production, as intrinsic to the development of the superstructure of society.
The superstructure of society consists of its laws, culture, customs, religions and government. In a feudal society the economic base of society depended on its hierarchical structure. The loyalty of the serf to his lord was fundamental to the way society worked, so the superstructure of that society emphasized morality and religion, ideas of co-operation, obedience, and loyalty. This was entrenched in the morality of the Church and in the property laws. People ‘belonged’ to other people and to the land they worked on and they had a fixed place in the class hierarchy that was difficult to change; it was only in fairy stories that the goose girl got to marry the prince.
Marx believed that the economic base leads the development of the superstructure; the superstructure only exists in the form that it does because of the economic base. The productive forces changed radically during the Industrial Revolution. For example, small hand-looms were replaced by huge steam-driven ones in large factories, which needed hundreds of workers. It was no longer possible for society to function on a feudal basis; workers needed to be available on the free market and not tied to the land. The new relations of production were between boss and worker and so the political and legal superstructure had to change to accommodate the ideas of competitiveness and freedom of the individual.
Social consciousness, people’s ideas, assumptions and ways of thinking reflected the society that they lived in, so society was shaped by the modes of production prevalent at that time. Marx believed the same economic base would sustain many different kinds of society, depending on historical and political factors. Even two fairly similar capita
list countries can have different social values. For example, although Britain, France and Germany are all capitalist countries in Europe they have very different cultures. Marx believed that the contradictions in the economic base were the driving force in historical struggle. He was not content to generalize on this point and spent a great many years of his life researching and analysing political and ideological data on class struggles in the histories of many countries.
Marx believed that the ideas that rule any country, and the laws that develop from them, must be the ideas of the ruling class. These rules naturally develop from the society as it changes. They are not worked out in advance. When feudalism developed into capitalism, nobody sat down and worked out that they would need to have a population that was free to move around the country to find work instead of being tied to the land. It was just that the new necessities of life meant that society had to develop in the way that it did. People had to take risks and work out solutions to the new problems that the new economic structure posed. Because the way that people actually think is influenced by the society around them and the society that went before, people find it difficult to develop entirely new ideas. They can only think in the way that their language and the concepts handed down to them allow. When people cannot see the way their beliefs are artificially constructed by society it is known in Marxist terms as false consciousness.
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Insight
False consciousness is an important tenet of Marxist belief but it was a phrase that Marx did not use in any of his writings, although it was used by Engels.
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Most people tend to believe that the world around them is in a finished, fixed form which cannot be changed. They do not examine the way in which the society around them came about or what processes it went through to get there. This makes it difficult for them to envisage any kind of change to the system. At the time Marx was writing, the divisions between the capitalist and the worker were seen as part of human nature and the natural order of society. This was reinforced by the fact that the capitalists control information, education, religion and entertainment. For example, in Victorian times most people would go to church. If we take a look at one of the popular hymns, All Things Bright and Beautiful, it contains the lines, ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate’. It was also a fact that most working-class people were not considered worthy of education and were not eligible to vote during most of the time Marx was alive. This must have affected the aspirations of people, as they would have valued themselves as not worthy citizens.
Marx believed that the only way to counteract this kind of thinking was a revolutionary workers’ party, which would educate the workers so that they understood the ways in which they were being exploited and help them to revolt against it. Today we are much more aware of the conditioning of society and media manipulation, but only because Marx brought attention to the problem over a hundred years ago.
Class struggle
In the nineteenth century everybody took the class structure for granted, as if it had always existed in its current form. Marx believed that classes had never existed in exactly that way before because the economic structure of society had not existed in a capitalist form before. He believed that class structure had actually become much simpler than it had been before and it was the needs of the capitalist system that had actually brought the working class into existence. The capitalist system needed wage labourers to survive, but in creating this class it had actually sown the seeds of its own destruction.
The aim of the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, was to increase their profits by any means possible. The aim of the proletariat, or workers, was to improve their living and working conditions. Marx believed these needs were obviously in conflict and would lead to class struggle and ultimately to revolution. Class struggle does not necessarily mean violent struggle, although Marx did believe that this would occur. Class struggle can be any social action that results from the different interests of classes; for example, demonstrating or writing a letter of protest.
In Marxist theory it is seen as necessary to allow class consciousness to develop. Marx talked of a class ‘in itself’ and a class ‘for itself’.
A class ‘in itself’ refers to a group of individuals who share the same relationship to the means of production and share common interests.
A class ‘for itself’ is a class that is conscious of these interests; a class that has discovered that it is alienated.
The way for workers to realize they are alienated is through education and by political means. Marx believed that the very act of taking part in the class struggle would allow the working class to become aware and educated and would be of great benefit to them. ‘In revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances’, he wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach.
Marx thought that the workers were in a unique position within the capitalist system as they were the only class capable of bringing about a revolution. They were the only class in society who could achieve a new form of society, a communist society.
Workers’ power and education
Although the dialectical view of history states that capitalism will eventually bring about its own downfall, Marx did not think that it would happen automatically without anyone having to do anything. Although he was a great philosopher, he did not just talk idly of class struggle, he was also actively involved in the workers’ movement, especially in his early life. Exiled in Paris he met with workers and was impressed by their character and strength; this led to his involvement with the League of the Just and the Communist League.
There were very few properly organized workers’ groups in London when Marx moved there. Many of them had to be very secretive for fear of reprisals; anyone seen to be causing problems within the workplace was likely to be dismissed at the very least. But there were some movements towards change in society that had large elements of worker involvement.
THE CHARTISTS
Taking its name from the Peoples’ Charter of 1838, this was a movement for political change in Britain. Although the Reform Act of 1832 had given many more people the vote in Britain, it was still true that most of them were middle-class property owners. Those who did not own property were not allowed to vote. From a modern-day perspective, this seems patently absurd and gives the lie to the idea that there is a long history of democracy in Britain. The Chartists were in favour of universal male suffrage: every man over 21 should be allowed a vote. Women were not even considered as voters, again this is something that seems absurd today, especially as many of the Chartists were women, including Engels’ partner Mary Burns. The Chartists were a very diverse group, made up from many organizations and from many areas of society, but many were workers. At one rally it was estimated that 300,000 people attended and their weekly paper, the Northern Star, regularly sold 30,000 copies a week. Marx was very impressed by one of their leaders, Ernest Jones, and regularly wrote for his ‘People’s Paper’.
Although Chartism eventually petered out, the fact that there had been riots and demonstrations showed the feeling of the workers in the country and their desire to change the system. They could see that there was strength in numbers and value in being able to work together for a cause.
TRADE UNIONS
Trade unions developed out of trade guilds in the Middle Ages, but during the Industrial Revolution they began to grow in strength and to represent a wider range of the work force. They did not become legal in Britain until 1871, and so they were not a very powerful force before then as many workers were afraid to join. They were also rather elitist as they tended to represent craftsmen and not the unskilled. In continental Europe many trade union members were revolutionaries, but in Britain they were more moderate and worked alongside the Chartists in trying to get the vote.
Many modern-day Marxists are very disparaging about trade unions, believing they are part o
f the system, only negotiating for higher wages and not an instrument for change. Marx was not against unions, for he believed that a ‘combination’ of workers was the way forward; he hoped that if they became educated they would concentrate on changing the system, by demanding abolition of the wages system, and not just improving it.
The Communist League and class struggle
The Communist Manifesto was written by Marx and Engels in 1848 as a platform for the Communist League, a workingmen’s association. The Communist League had developed out of the League of the Just; originally it consisted of only German members. At first it contained numerous anarchists whose idea was to destroy the factory system by violent means and return to an agricultural and small-craft society. Marx and Engels took on the task of re-organizing the Communist League; there were numerous disagreements with the anarchists, who eventually formed their own societies. Marx believed it was important for the ideas of the League to be spread around the world and eventually The Communist Manifesto was translated into many languages.
The Communist Manifesto was an appeal to the workers and it is one of Marx’s most direct pieces of writing. The beginning describes the rise of the capitalist system and the class differences between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Marx then describes the future of the class struggle and its importance to the liberation of the worker.
He describes how dissatisfaction with working conditions and poor wages meant that workers clubbed together to form trade unions, to keep up the rates of wages and to plan revolts against capitalist domination. He notes that sometimes the revolts would turn into violent riots that, though successful locally, did not benefit the proletariat as a class. The benefit of these revolts was not in the result of the action taken but in the way in which the workers had grouped together to form unions.