Class

Johanna Brenner

Referring to a social division, “class” first appeared in English in the early eighteenth century; however, until the early nineteenth century, it competed with other notions of social stratification such as “rank” and “order.” According to Raymond Williams (1976), “middle classes” and “working classes” had become common terms by the 1840s, although—as today—they had confusing referents. “Middle” implied insertion between higher and lower, whereas, at its origin, “working classes” referred to those engaged in productive or useful activity. By the late nineteenth century, however, “working-class” had come to refer more clearly to the economic relationship between wage earners and their capitalist employers.

When Occupy activists defined themselves as the 99 percent, they evoked a populist language in which “the people” are arrayed against “the trusts.” Yet, rather than reflecting the largely agrarian movement that fueled nineteenth-century American populism, the movement’s efforts to recast the ruling class as “the 1 percent” reflected an almost complete exclusion of Marxist notions of class. Indeed, the idea of a “ruling class”—or of capitalist class relations constituting a revolutionary subject (e.g., the proletariat with a common interest in overthrowing capitalism)—seems completely foreign to contemporary political discourses. It is therefore not surprising that Occupy found a different concept to convey the idea of common interest against the ruling few.

Although the concept of class has not dropped from use, its contemporary meaning has become restricted to describing social stratification. Even in this sense, in which “class” denotes a ­hier­archy of “differences” (e.g., of income, education, culture), there is no agreed-upon meaning of class categories. In dominant usages, the class system comprises a “middle class” defined by its difference from the poor or lower class on the one hand and the rich or upper class on the other. When surveyed about their place in the class system, most Americans choose to place themselves somewhere in the middle class, though the proportion naming themselves “lower middle class” is growing due to ongoing assaults on working ­people’s lives (Morin and Motel 2012). This “middle class” has long dominated the rhetoric of the labor movement. A 2015 AFL-CIO report on “10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class for Hard Working Americans,” for instance, argues that “the middle class . . . exists because people worked hard to win at the legislative level and in the workplace.” Mainstream political discourse is similar; through 2015 Obama used the term “middle class” twenty-eight times in his State of the Union addresses and the term “working class” only once (Cherlin 2015).

Another spin on “class” emerged in the 1970s from social movement and academic invocations of “classism.” In 1976, Dykes for an American Revolution declared their “full power to levy war against sexism, racism, classism, and all other oppressions.” The decline of radical movements led “class”—originally linked to critiques of imperialism and capitalism—to be understood as a social category homologous to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other forms of identity shaped by power and privilege. Class Action, a Massachusetts nonprofit founded in 2004 and dedicated to “building bridges across the class divide,” defines “class” as “relative social rank in terms of income, wealth, education, status and/or power” and hosts popular education workshops to “create safe spaces for people across the class spectrum to explore class and begin to dismantle classism” (2015). The dividing line of class privilege is typically drawn between the poor and working class on the one hand, and the middle and owning class on the other. No matter how boundaries are drawn, however, the concept of “classism” aligns class with other dimensions of power and privilege that have been the focus of many contemporary social movements.

“Classism” would be unthinkable without the recognition that white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are foundational aspects of US society. In a 1977 statement, the Combahee River Collective asserted: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Feminists subsequently incorporated these challenges through the concept of “intersectionality,” which gained prominence in the 1980s and is commonly attributed to Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Most intersectional analysis focuses on social, cultural, economic, and political relations of relative power and privilege. Consequently, the meaning of “class” is restricted to defining a place within capitalist social relations rather than describing—as it did for Marx—the foundational premise of the social whole.

Yet, even with Marx, the term had a double meaning. On the one hand, “class” refers to the social relations of production through which an owning class appropriates the social surplus. Not all societies are class societies, however, and Marx envisioned communism as a classless society. In his view, class relations did more than create social categories (classes), they also transformed every feature of society. Indeed, “in all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it” (1857, 106–7).

Under capitalism, labor is carried out by a class of wage laborers who are “free” to enter into contracts with employers and “free” from ownership of the means of production. Since they cannot produce for themselves, they are compelled to sell their labor power to survive. This “freedom” distinguishes the proletariat from the capitalist class. In this sense, “class” denotes a group of indivi­duals sharing a similar position within the social relations of production. However, Marx additionally argued that the proletariat was not simply a social category but a historical subject, that it was the agent of revolutionary transformation. In the Communist Manifesto (1976b), he argued that—by creating the proletariat—“what the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”

Another important dimension of class is therefore the shared experience of a common situation. As E.P. Thompson (1963) recounts:

class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. . . . Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way. (9)

With respect to the distinction between “class in itself” and “class for itself,” Marx understood that there was nothing automatic about class-consciousness. Indeed, “separate individuals form a class only insofar as they . . . carry on a common battle against another class,” he wrote. “Otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors” (Marx and Engels 1978, 82).

During the twentieth century, the conditions of work and life for the working class became less homogeneous due to factors like de-skilling, the destruction of old industries and the rise of new occupations, and the expansion of the managerial strata. If, in the nineteenth century, it was possible to speak of “class consciousness” as an expression of workers recognizing their common interests, the rise of white-collar workers (administrators, managers, and new salaried professionals) in the early twentieth century already complicated the picture. Not only did the proletariat become more diverse, it also became riven by serious divisions in working conditions, life chances, experiences, and culture. In response to these changes, the idea of a “new middle class” emerged (“new” because it included employees in contrast to the older middle class, which was composed of small business owners). Increasingly, “the working class” became defined by manual work. As a result, social democratic theorists and politicians began to argue that, rather than overcoming divisions within the proletariat, socialist politics demanded a cross-class alliance between the middle and working classes (Speier 1939).

By mid-century, Marxist ideas about class had been further marginalized by the Cold War and the Fordist regime of accumulation, which offered economic security and expanded consumption to male blue- and white-collar workers. In a society where so many could access previously unavailable lifestyles through consumer power, “proletariat” and “working class” became anachronistic terms. Published in 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America shocked readers because it described conditions that many thought had been left behind. Harrington focused on the 25 percent of Americans mired in isolated rural communities and slums—the “poor” whose lives were culturally, socially, and economically distinct from those of the affluent society around them.

Rank-and-file rebellions during the 1960s and early 1970s opened new terrain for thinking about class (Brick and Phelps 2015). But while radicals during this period argued about how to draw the boundary between the middle and working classes, few expressed concern with differences in social status, income levels, nature of payment (salary versus wage), and cultural distinction—all of which were then at the center of mainstream social science debates about class (Meiksins 1986). Instead, New Left theorists focused on corporate capitalism’s power relations and on the role of professionals and managers in surplus value extraction. In this context, Barbara and John Ehrenreich developed the concept of the “professional/managerial class” (PMC), a class “between labor and capital” defined by its functions in controlling labor within the production process and exercising social control over the working class in society as a whole. Critics of the idea that professionals and managers constituted a distinct class argued that the Ehrenreichs had reified a temporary situation. And, as the Ehrenreichs (2013) have acknowledged, de-­skilling, offshoring, defunding, and other developments are rapidly changing this group’s levels of autonomy and security.

For their part, contemporary Marxists tend not to view the middle class and the owning class as equal bearers of “class privilege.” Based on the degrees of power and authority they exercise at work, Zweig argues, professionals are in the working class or the middle class (2012, 23). Similarly, labor relations scholar Bob Carter (2014) attributes the contradictory class position of managers to their functions in the production process. Professionals and managers find themselves between a working class defined by its lack of control over working conditions and a capitalist class that directs production and investment decisions. And since workplace power relations change over time, so too can an occupation’s class position. For example, public school teachers now share conditions that are more similar to those of skilled manual or service workers than to those of research scientists or tenured university professors. Concurrently, upper managers have become owners through stock holdings while some professionals (e.g., corporate lawyers and accountants) enjoy close ­relationships with the capitalist class (Zweig 2012).

Almost from the moment that Occupy proclaimed itself to be “the 99 percent,” the idea of a common condition was vigorously contested. While acknowledging that “we” have a common enemy, women and activists of color protested that such a “we” can’t simply be proclaimed. As a result, the #OWS POC Working Group (2011) organized to “unite the diverse voices of all communities . . . and to demand that a movement to end economic injustice must have at its core an honest struggle to end racism.” Similarly, the authors of a feminist flyer asked: “What do Equal Pay, Reproductive Rights and Sexual Assault Have to do with the Occupy Movement?” In response, they answered: “EVERYTHING! We cannot successfully Occupy Wall St unless we also OCCUPY PATRIARCHY” (Occupy Patriarchy 2011). These statements reflect the theoretical and political gains won through four decades of struggle. However, the strategy they reflect risks being enveloped in a liberal discourse that focuses on individual transformation (e.g., “recognizing one’s privilege”) while advancing moral imperatives (e.g., achieving more equal relations among people). Meanwhile, the connection between capitalism’s particular class features and the reproduction of oppressive relations is at risk of being lost.

Developing an alternative to liberal identity politics is a burning issue for the radical left. This requires reintroducing a conception of class as “class relations of production” to encourage people to discover their common interest in overturning capitalism. Starting from the dynamics of the capitalist system, this strategy fosters demands that directly address existing divisions within the proletariat. Today’s new social justice unionism represents one important expression of these politics (Peterson 2014/2015). When Chicago school teachers join Latino mothers and children in civil disobedience to stop a school closing, when they demand an end to “stop and frisk” policing of students, and when they fight for a contract that demands $15 an hour for all school employees, they fuse identity struggles with class politics.

See also: Commons; Experience; Gender; Ideology; Labor; Liberal; Materialism; Oppression; Populism; Privilege; Reproduction; Violence