Conceptions of social class

People have used many different schemes to identify social classes, or divisions of rank and wealth, within societies. Some schemes have used broad distinctions while others have used narrow ones in deciding which people occupy similar positions in a stratification sys­tem. Are classes large and few in number, or are they small and numerous?

Plato saw only two classes in ancient Greek society, the rich and the poor, and he believed them to be locked in eternal conflict. Aristotle divided Greek so­ciety into three broad classes: a rapacious upper class, a servile lower class, and a worthy middle class that, hav­ing all virtues and all failings in moderation, could be trusted to see after the common good of all. The word class comes to us from the Romans, who used the term classis to divide the population into a num­ber of groups for the purpose of taxation. At the top were the assidui (from which the word assiduous comes), who were the richest Romans. On the bottom were the proletarii, who possessed nothing but children.

However, not until the mid-nineteenth century was the concept of class given significant meaning for modern social theorists. The person who first did this was Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Marx's concept of class

Marx aimed to explain social change and produce a theory of history: Why and how do societies change, and what will they be like in the future? He believed that the answer lay in conflicts among social classes. The whole of human history, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, has been "the history of class struggles." These struggles are the engines that pull societies into new forms; the history of human societies is a history of one ruling class being overthrown by a new one.

Marx saw that there is no single answer to the ques­tion of how many classes to identify in societies. In­stead, the answer depends on which society and when. Thus, he identified four classes in ancient Rome-patricians, knights, plebeians, and slaves – and a large number in Europe during the Middle Ages. But Marx expected modern capitalist societies to consist only two classes.

The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat

A capitalist society, according to Marx, is one having a free-market economy based on private own­ership of property Chapter 17 develops a fuller defin­ition of capitalism. In this chapter Marx's definition suffices. By the middle of the nineteenth century when Marx wrote his major works, all of the nations of Western Europe, as well as the United States ant) Canada fit his definition of capitalism. Therefore, he predicted that each of them soon would undergo a great simplification of their stratification systems into two fundamental classes. As he wrote in The Commu­nist Manifesto, "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeois and Proletariat." Marx defined these two classes in terms of their different relationship to the means of production: everything besides human labor that goes into produc­ing wealth. Chief among these are land (on which crops grow, cattle feed, and buildings stand), machines and cools, and investment capital. One class, the bour­geoisie, owns these means of production. The other class, according to Marx, contains everyone who does not own such means and therefore must sell his or her labor to the bourgeoisie. Marx called this class-the proletariat, employing the name the Romans used to identify the poor. These terms essentially refer to owners (or employers) and workers (or employees).

Marx realized that all capitalist societies in his time had many people who did not fit into his two-class scheme, but he believed that these groups would not significantly affect history. One such group was the middle class, which included small merchants and self-employed professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Marx believed that as the capitalist system evolved, the middle class would be crushed and forced into the proletariat.

Marx also dismissed many people who were mar­ginal to the economy – vagrants, migrant workers, beggars, criminals, gypsies, and the like. He classified such persons as lumpenproletariat (literally, the "raga­muffin proletariat"). Such people had so little social purpose and self-respect, Marx believed that they would have no effect on the impending revolutionary, struggle.

Finally, Marx excluded farmers and peasants from his conception of class because he believed that the drama of historical change would occur in the urban industrial sector of capitalist societies; rural people would play little or no part in shaping social change. He wrote that the "peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one an­other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another...and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union, and no political organization; [therefore,] they do not form a class."

Ironically, the great communist revolutions Marx predicted never did occur in the urban, industrialized, capitalist nations. However, revolutions claiming to be Marxist have occurred in a number of less developed nations have found their primary support among peasants. This suggests that, were he alive today, Marx would rethink his concepts to include rural populations.