What is Class?

             During the 1850s Karl Marx became the first to study society in a scientific way.  For Marx, 'scientific' retained its normal meaning of discovering the hidden laws which govern and explaining observable facts of our material world. He wished to answer the question "Why do human societies behave the way they do? "
The answer to this question, Marx decided, after an exhaustive analysis of the observable facts, lay in the concept of class. Seeking for the real, not the immediately apparent, laws which govern society, the Marx found that the division of society into economic classes was of more explanatory value than any other. His method of analysis based upon class explained a great deal that was previously obscure about all previous human societies, in other words, about history.
            There are of course many other social divisions which have important consequences. We are all well aware of race, sex, nation, religion, for example. But none of these are economic categories, and therefore tell us less about society, since the basis of any society is material. Without food we starve, without clothing we shiver, without shelter we die of exposure.
            If class is such a key explanatory concept, it seems strange that we never hear it used in Australia, except in the term 'middle class', a vague term, never defined, that can shed no light on the patterns of our existence. We hear plenty about race, sex, nation and religion, but nothing about class. This neglect is not by chance!
            Marx did not define class, because he did not need to; he used the word according to its ordinary meaning as used in common language. But he made the definition more precise, as any good philosopher should. The concept of class Marx used was clear, simple, and precise. It referred to the relationship every individual has to the means of production, distribution, and exchange. The most fundamental distinction in human society was here. Certain classes in any society control (usually by private ownership) the material economic basis for its existence, and certain classes do not.
            A class is defined by its relationship to the means of production. Land is part of the means of production; the ownership of which defines the class of the aristocracy, who live on the rent due to them as owners of the land. Similarly, the ownership of capital defines the bourgeoisie, who live on profits due to them as owners of capital ( factories, businesses, ships, mines etc). The fact that they do not derive their material subsistence from the ownership of any of the means of production, defines the proletariat.
            These are the three most important classes, and it is in fact the struggle between them which has always been the true cause of the most important patterns of human history. Other, intermediate, classes are possible. The petty bourgeois owns some of the means of production, but not sufficient to live on without having to work. So he is compelled to work with his own capital, striving to increase his capital until he owns enough to be able forgo work altogether, and live entirely off profits. At that point he would have in fact have changed classes, joined the bourgeoisie proper. Note that our successful petty bourgeois may choose to continue working, for pleasure. But the necessity to work is no longer there, so he has changed class. Conversely a fallen aristocrat or a bourgeois who has lost the ownership of sufficient means of production  (for whatever reason) has also changed class, though he may pretend otherwise.
                        One's class has nothing to do with one's consciousness. Just as we do not judge someone according to their own opinion of themselves, so an individual's class is not determined by his own opinion. Such opinion is subjective; an analysis of society must be objective, based on all the material evidence, before it can be scientific. The essential distinction here is between what seems, and what is. In search of the truth about our lives, we must rely on the empirical evidence of our five senses, and reject empty opinion which does not accord with this evidence.
                        Once armed with this simple concept of class, a clear light shines on many causes and effects in our society. The causes of poverty immediately become crystal clear. We can also perceive the struggle between the classes, and its consequences, everywhere. From seemingly petty antagonisms at work to military clashes between vast nations, the decisive explanatory importance of class becomes apparent.
                        Deprived as we are of objective knowledge about our own society, we turn to the societies of our predecessors, where we may dispassionately search all the extant material remains for the historical truth. Everywhere one looks in history, as far back as you wish to go, the picture is in one respect the same. From the time that ancient Sumerians improved their agriculture to the point where it always produced a large surplus over their material needs, a privileged class has existed that did not have to work. From that date (before 3000 BC), it was the struggle between the classes which held most objective importance for the Sumerians, whatever were the forms of thought they experienced their existence in.
                        From that place and time proceeds the endless antagonism of material interest between classes. The great Egyptian pyramids may be material remains of the class struggle in Ancient Egypt. If the Nile did not rise high enough, a famine was certain to follow. In the early part of the Third Millenium BC it is possible that the power of the peasant class, the fellahin, was then able to compel the non-working priestly class to spend a large amount of their surplus on gigantic public works. The entire history of Classical Greece turned on the struggle between the class which owned land, and the (free) class which did not. (the slave class did not independently participate in that struggle). The Greeks, who were on the whole a pretty smart and level-headed people, became quite conscious of their class and its political interests. The landowning aristocracy wanted society to be organised by their class, in an oligarchy, the rule of the few. The landless class, lacking the means of production, preferred a democracy, the rule of the whole people, and often died fighting for that idea. These are only random examples of the central importance of class in all human history. Many whole books of such illuminations of the historical truth have been written, great works demonstrating the real material causes of events. Nobody could understand why "the crowd" in the French Revolution became politically active (riots, barricades etc) on some occasions and not others, until one Marxist historian in 1959 drew a graph of the variations in the daily price of bread, and found it exactly matched the variations in revolutionary fervour of the urban mob. Vital class interests were at stake here for the Paris proletariat, making further compromise impossible. Hungry, they were willing to risk death fighting for their class. For these people the struggle between the classes had become conscious, like it once had for the Greeks before them.
                        The closer we approach our own day, the more difficult it is to see clearly these hidden laws, and how they work. The seductive bourgeois disinformation dressed up as "News" makes it very hard for anyone to understand anything at all about any current society. So we must rely on the already proven (as far as anything can be proven by history) relevance of the concept of class. As it happens, the antagonism between economic class turns out to be by far the most important factor in shaping the knowable facts about contemporary society, just as it always has been in the past.
                        Class influences everybody, although they may not know it. Everybody has some conception of the world around them; this set of ideas is called an ideology. Although everyone has one, their ideology may be coherent or incoherent, depending on how much serious social reflection one has done.
Although there may seem to be an infinite number of ideologies held by individuals, many of which are internally consistent, only one can be dominant. Without this dominant, or ruling, ideology, orderly human society is impossible. There can be only one set of conventional ideas by which we agree to live together; if there were two, two different, separate societies would exist.
                        So where does this dominant ideology come from? Ideas do not come out of thin air. Our ideas are the product of the material experiences of our life. It is important to realise that our ideas are not fundamental to our existence, however dearly we may be attached to them. Our life is not determined by our consciousness, but our consciousness by our life (Marx).
                        If we can now accept that all history has been one of antagonism and struggle between classes over the all-important questions of their material existence, then we can for the first time see our lives and our ideas in their true context. They are produced and constantly conditioned by that same, unceasing, age-old struggle between the classes.
                        The class that has a monopoly of the ownership of the means of production always has, of course, its own ideology. This ideology may contain many wonderful things, but above all it contains a legitimisation and a justification of their class rule. Their ideology is necessarily the dominant, or leading ideology, called the hegemony from the Greek word 'hegemon' (pronounced hedge-er-mon) meaning leader. This hegemony is the dominant set of ideas controlling our society, and its power holds each of us in its grip. Everybody likes to believe themselves independent of the hegemony, that they think for themselves. and make their own free choices. This individualist ideology is a vain illusion, itself a part of the bourgeois hegemony 
                        It is often said that in our society that people are unaware of class, or put another way, that class consciousness is extremely low. This cannot however be said of the members of the ruling class, whose awareness of their class interests never flags. And of course they are in a good position to consolidate their hegemony. Remember that the class which has the means of production controls at the same time all the means if mental production (schools, books, media etc.) The ruling class rule in the whole range, as Marx was the first to make clear. The ruling class also rule as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are always rule us.
                        So when for example Mr Steve Bracks, premier of the State, announces that spending millions on the 2006 Commonwealth Games will " unite us as a nation ", we may be quite certain that this idea must originate from the ruling class, and that it must serve their class interests.
                        To consolidate their hegemony, the modern ruling class has at its disposal the resources of the State, which includes a large ideological apparatus, in one section of which, the schools, we are all condemned to spend at least our entire childhood being educated in the hegemony.  It should therefore cause us little surprise to find that our proletariat has so little consciousness of its own interests as a class.
                        Other classes have their ideologies, but these can never become dominant, unless there is a revolution which physically overthrows the previous ruling class. No ruling class can ever willingly abandon their ruling position; their ideas, based as they are on their privileged material position ( their class interests), cannot allow them to.
                        Proletarian ideology, then, may be defined as the ideology that expresses the interests of the class of non-owners, the proletariat. A proletarian may own a house or a car or a mobile phone, but does not own the means of production, and spend his life working for those who do. Even if employed by the State, a worker finds that there they are treated according to the same principles used by private owners. There can be only one hegemony.
                        The proletariat is always by far the most numerous class. In our society it is known that at least 80 per cent of people are compelled to work for a living, by selling their labour-power as a commodity to an owner of private capital, a bourgeois. United and class conscious, the proletariat have the numbers to easily overwhelm all other classes, and replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of their own class. Such a possibility is not only theoretical, and the history of the Twentieth Century included several such revolutions. A united, disciplined, class conscious proletariat first overthrew a ruling class, smashed their State, and established their own hegemony in 1917. The long, heroic defence of proletarian class rule in the USSR has proved for ever, even after its eventual defeat, that such a fundamental change is possible. Similar victorious revolutions, carried out by the proletarian class fighting and establishing class rule in its own name, occurred in many parts of the world during the years immediately after 1945.
                        Such revolutions are of course the ultimate nightmare for any ruling class since they may cause their destruction as a class, which actually occurred in the USSR. So the history of the Twentieth Century was one of ruling classes everywhere combining in an all-out attempt to defeat the said proletarian revolutions or if that failed, to subvert their ideology. For the people living within the revolutionary societies, this counter-revolution took the form of  foreign economic, diplomatic (i.e. spies) and of course military interference in their societies. Also there was an ideological assault, an attempt to detach the citizens of the new societies from their revolutionary ideology. This assault ultimately succeeded in the USSR where the heirs of the leaders of the proletarian revolution abandoned their former ideology, perhaps because the material basis for that ideology, the proletariat, no longer existed as a class. For in the Soviet Union there was no private ownership of the means of production at all, after the collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s. All property (in the economic sense) was thenceforth held in common. When that happened there were no more classes, and for the first time the struggle between them ceased to be the driving force of events inside the country. But externally, the united foreign capitalist classes never gave up their imperialist assault on the dictatorship the proletariat had established in the Soviet Union. The leaders of the great proletarian revolutions of the Twentieth Century found themselves in uncharted theoretical waters as soon as the proletariat had ceased to exist as a class. The pre-revolutionary class categories of proletariat and bourgeoisie were no longer relevant  in a society where nobody owned the means of production. Torn from its material class roots, the old proletarian ideology slowly declined. A new, socialist ideology had to be found to take its place. This was successfully done in the USSR, a socialist humanism that was an achievement of genius. But ultimately this new socialist hegemony was subverted from within, betrayed by the very guardians of that ideology in the greatest of all betrayals, and class society restored.
                        Societies far away from the revolutionary states in Europe and Asia were nevertheless profoundly influenced by them, because of the relentless Cold War continued against them for 50 years by the combined world capitalist class, united for the first time by its fear. In each class society the dominant class was able, as always, to use its State machine to consolidate its hegemony and disorganise its enemy, the proletariat. Marx regarded this as the most basic function of the State.
                        In achieving its class aims of its bourgeois masters, the State contains both a physical (police, courts, jails, army) and an ideological (schools, media, the official political system, churches, sport) apparatus. The former is only resorted to when the latter has failed. This occurs most noticeably during strikes and along picket lines, where physical force must be used to break the resistance of proletarians who are for once unwilling to submit to the hegemony. But mostly the ideological state apparatus does its job thoroughly and well.
                        The proletariat cannot be allowed to become conscious of its true class position - and thus its potential power - for such a realisation would be revolutionary, and therefore dangerous. The ideological state apparatus was therefore charged with the task of proving right was wrong, of denying to the proletariat that anything of value was being achieved in the societies which had experienced proletarian revolutions. This apparently awkward task was achieved with ease in Australia. For the last 50 years at least, every Australian child has received a thorough education into why communism -the ideology of the proletarian class- cannot work. The actual existence of real, living, communist societies might seem to contradict that claim, so they had to be written off as a total disaster. Death camps, starvation, tyranny, terror: this is all that Australian proletarians were to be allowed to know about the distant USSR. All of it was quite deliberate, calculated lies (* see below).
The class of people who are compelled to work for a living includes at least four people out of five, and so covers a wide range of incomes and living standards. This inequality within the proletariat militates against class consciousness. Selling your unskilled labour-power to a factory owner for $25000 per year cannot feel much like a computer expert in a comfortable chair selling his labour-power in favourable conditions for ten times that income. Yet they belong to the one great economic class of non-owning producers, and so have much in common, although they are unlikely to realise it. The computer expert is probably trying to become so rich that he doesn't have to work, and so follow in the footsteps of previous millionaire whiz-kids who have been able to acquire enough capital to live on, and so change class. But he will find that doesn't happen easily, and in the meantime must remain a mere proletarian, albeit one with a reassuring bank balance.
                        All the same this relatively privileged strata within the proletariat warrants special attention. Not for its superior quality, as most of its members would assume, but for its political importance. The very high incomes enjoyed in economically advanced societies by the privileged upper stratum of the proletariat, the labour aristocracy, have their origin in the above-normal superprofits returned from capital exported abroad to very poor societies by the ruling class. There the rate of surplus-value exploited  from labour-power is much greater than here, and so brings unparallelled returns. Their economic dependence upon imperialism results in the opportunist political outlook of the labour aristocrat. The leader of the Russian proletariat, V.I. Lenin, discovered in 1916 that part of these superprofits can be set aside to finance a privileged material position for the labour aristocracy of the capital-exporting society. This connection immediately explains the rule that the labour aristocracy always support imperialist ventures abroad (in Australia through their political representatives the ALP), since their material position depends upon imperialist success.
                        So who are the labour aristocracy, this fifth column within the proletariat who are disqualified by their privilege from seeing the interests of their proletarian class as their own? Politicians, judges, upper-level managers everywhere, diplomats, police, doctors (although many of these are petty bourgeois), army officers, trade union leaders, journalists, the list goes on. The labour aristocracy in Australia also includes most teachers, lawyers, nurses and social workers; all those proletarians (perhaps 15 per cent of the whole) whose pay and conditions are so far superior to the great mass of the proletariat that they cannot consider themselves part of it. This sub-class functions as the 'principal social prop of the bourgeoisie' (Lenin), consolidating and enriching the hegemony. It occupies all of the plum positions within the ideological state apparatus, and contains many articulate intellectuals who have no trouble getting their bourgeois views about society heard. They are prepared to talk about poverty providing class is never mentioned. Furthermore, there are many highly-placed state employees whose labour-power produces no surplus value at all, and so cannot be regarded as exploited like other proletarians. Yet their relative privilege is paid from taxes , i.e. paid for, primarily by the proletariat. Although labour aristocrats are, due to their inevitable opportunism, the worst possible leaders the proletariat could have, yet that is what they have always been saddled with in Australia.   
                        In conclusion, it seems that many individuals in our society are not the slightest bit interested in understanding why the society around them takes its form. Such people never ask the question "Why?", and will certainly be repelled by documents like this one. But there are also many people who are blessed with (or cursed by?) a surely natural curiosity to comprehend their social surroundings. Such genuine, relentless seekers for the truth will find the concept of class indispensable. This will in turn require the learning of several foreign words such as  proletariat, bourgeoisie, and hegemony . This is somewhat unfortunate, since such outlandish words can put people off. But the lack of equivalent English words reminds us that no English-speaking country has ever yet seen a successful proletarian rising against the owners of the means of production.

* Martens, L: Another View of Stalin , EPO, 1995. Full text available at:
http://www.plp.org/books/Stalin/book.html
Sousa, Mario: Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union, 1999. Available at
http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/lies.html
Coplon, Jeff. "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the
Right." Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1988. Available at
http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html
Puntis, John: The Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Myth., 2002. Available at
http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/ukrainian.html
Challenge-Desafio:­ The Hoax of the Man-made Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33. PLP, 1987 – the first of six related articles on the subject available at:
http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html
Furr, G. Uncritical Reading and the discourse of Anti-Communism, 2003. Available at
http://www.mail-archive.com/marxist-leninist-list@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg05548.
Parenti, Michael: Blackshirts and Reds, City Lights, 1997, Chapter 5.