Class Consciousness and Conflict

In addition to material position in society, Marx also included an important psychological component in his notion of class. To be considered a real class, peo­ple must be similarly placed in society and share com­parable prospects, but they must also be aware of their circumstances, their mutual interests, and their com­mon class enemy. Marx called this awareness class consciousness. Much of his theory about the coming of the communist revolution concerns how the prole­tariat will achieve class consciousness, at which point their superior numbers will ensure their success. Marx also worried about the tendency for workers to be­lieve they had common interests with die ruling class and called this false consciousness.

By incorporating assumptions about class con­sciousness into his definition of social class, Marx in­serted portions of his theory of revolution into his con­cept of class. This made key portions of his theory true by definition and thus untestable.

By Marx's definition, if people with a common economic position in society do not recognize their common interests and organize to pursue them, they are not a class. Indeed, Marx asserted that classes could not exist without class struggle. He wrote, "Individu­als form a class only in so far as they are engaged in a common struggle with another class," Hence, when Marx' said class struggle is inevitable, he had already made that statement necessarily true by his definition of the word class. To say that classes will be self-con­scious and organized, then, is to predict nothing about the course of history; it simply states a definition.

The Economic Dimension of Class

The most important feature of Marx's definition of class is that it is determined only by the economic di­mension. Property ownership is the sole factor for ranking people, and then they are divided into only two groups: those who own the means of production and those who do not.

When he distinguished between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat based entirely on this single crite­rion, Marx necessarily implied that all other differences in position among people in society are wholly the re­sult of property ownership. Thus, if some people are more powerful than others, or if some people are more admired or respected than others, it is due solely to the underlying economic differences between them. For, Marx claimed, the relationship to the means of production is "the final secret, the hidden basis for the whole construction of society." The rest of a society's culture results from the underlying eco­nomic arrangements. Indeed, for Marx culture was a ' "superstructure of various and peculiarly formed sentiments illusions, modes of drought and conceptions of life that arises from economic relations.

Marx nowhere gave empirical evidence that eco­nomic differences were the sole basis of other social differences such as power and respect (Dahrendorf, 1959)- His claim, however, was an empirical one that' other social scientists could test. If power or prestige: can be shown to vary independently of property, then Marx's statement is ac least excessive and at worst false. Indeed, the likelihood that the economic dimension of property does not govern all aspects of stratification made many sociologists who came after Marx very uneasy with his single-factor conception of class. Among them was Max Weber.