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Introduction to Marxism

I. The Marxist concept of economic class

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848) begins with the declaration, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In other words Marx envisages society as being in conflict between two social groups. He calls these two groups the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and defines them, and their relations to each other, in economic terms. These terms are explained by a footnote written by Engels.
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
In other words, if you have to go to work in order to live, you are a member of the proletariat. If you do not have to work for a living, but live from rent paid by others, or from dividends paid on shares or equivalent, then you are a member of the bourgeoisie.
Membership of a class confers status on an individual. A member of the bourgeoisie has higher social status than a member of the proletariat. Being a member of the bourgeoisie is just another way of saying that one is more powerful than another individual. You have the power to employ laborers to work for you. If you are a Marxist you believe that social status is derived solely from economic class, and that any other form of social status is bogus.
However, it is possible to define economic class in three different ways.
1 By wealth
2 By income
3 By occupation
Of these three, a Marxist would argue that only the first defines economic class in the true sense. The existence of differences in occupation, and difference in income may serve to conceal the true nature of social class. Let us explain this.
The highest occupational groups are those of doctor, lawyer, and nowadays accountant. These professionals also tend to earn more money than other occupational groupings, though not always. They also tend to have higher standards of living, meaning that they spend more money than other groups. Further down the occupational ladder come semi-skilled and non-skilled manual labour. The unemployed occupy the lowest level.
However, is a man who derives an income solely from investments, and hence a gentleman of leisure, or, in other words, unemployed, a member of the lowest social class? Clearly not! He derives his income from the labour of other people through interest payments on investments in businesses (or other), and hence, is a member of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, from a Marxist point of view, the concepts of occupational and income class merely serve to conceal and confuse the true economic relationships between people, which are based on wealth, that is, ownership of the means of production.

II. How many classes are there?

Another issue is — are there three classes or two? According to Marxism, there are only two classes — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, this cuts across the familiar division of society into three classes — the lower class (also called labour or the working class), the middle class, and the upper class. This apparent contradiction is resolved by Marxists as follows: the lower and middle classes are really just members of the same class — the proletariat. There is some differentiation within the proletariat. Some members of the proletariat have higher occupational status than others, and also higher incomes. For example, there has always been a distinction between foremen and shop floor factory workers, yet the foreman has a higher status in the company, more power and a larger income. A further point concerns whether there is a distinction between white collar and blue collar workers. Blue-collar workers are people who wear overalls, and tend to do some form of manual labour; white-collar workers wear suits and tend to do clerical work. In modern times there has been a great expansion of white-collar workers as a proportion of all workers, and the number of blue-collar workers as a proportion of the labour force has declined. Does this mean that the class system has come to an end, and there no longer is a division of people into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?
According to Marxists, the answer to this question is no! If you have to go to work on Monday morning (or equivalent — some people work at the weekend, or all night) then you are a member of the proletariat, whether you wear a blue collar or not.
Similarly, does being a member of a profession make you into a member of the bourgeoisie? Once again, the answer to this is that if you have to go to work in order to earn a living, then even if you earn a lot of money and have a high occupational status (for example, as a lawyer) then you are a member of the proletariat. Thus, within the proletariat there is a vast amount of differentiation, and in the modern world particularly, this differentiation serves to conceal the true nature of class.
Furthermore, does owing your own house make you a member of the bourgeoisie? The answer is again, from the Marxist viewpoint, no! Ownership of your house is just another way in which one member of the proletariat is differentiated from another, but a house is not a factory or business, nor is it a part share of a factory (i.e. a share in a company).
You also derive your economic class from your father or from the head of the house. In other words, if you are an apprentice carpenter, but your father is the owner of a $100m dollar company, then you are a member of the bourgeoisie. Your carpentry is not a form of occupation undertaken to derive an income, but a way of occupying your time, and possibly a form of training for future control of capital. All younger members of a class require education, and the purpose of education in this sense is to perpetuate class.
Having a title does not confer on one the economic status that goes with being a member of the bourgeoisie. Membership of the bourgeoisie is a purely economic category. So if you are a lord, but have no rents, then you are a member of the proletariat.
In the C19th, which was a period of considerable class conflict, it was not so easy to be confused about the nature of class. The income differential between the two classes was much starker, and the two classes wore different clothes. Male members of the bourgeoisie wore top hats, or dressed as dandies; male members of the manual working class wore cloth caps. There was the same confusion over the status of clerical workers, who wore bowler hats, but as there were fewer clerical workers than nowadays the social distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was not so obscured by it. In any case, if you wore a bowler hat then you could hardly persuade yourself that you wore a top hat, and hence were a member of a social class to which you did not really belong.
So in modern times the increase in the differentiation within the proletariat, and also the increased proportion of people who do clerical work, has confused the issue of class, and, for the Marxist, obscured its real economic basis — that is, the ownership of the means of production.

III. Social mobility

Is it possible to move from one class to another? This question has two meanings
1 Is it possible for an individual in his lifetime who is born as a member of the proletariat to end up as a member of the bourgeoisie? This is the rags to riches story.
2 Is it possible for the son or daughter of a member of the proletariat to end up as a member of the bourgeoisie?
The questions can also be put in reverse — can a member of the bourgeoisie descend into the proletariat, either in his own lifetime, or across generations?
This is the topic of social mobility. Referring to the first question above, this is called intra-generational mobility; to the second question, inter-generational mobility. Movement up the social ladder (proletariat to bourgeoisie) is called upward mobility; movement down the social ladder (bourgeoisie to proletariat) is called downward mobility.
Clearly, people can descend the social ladder — a bad investment resulting in a catastrophic collapse of the family fortunes, a revolution, or profligacy are some of the many possible causes of social descent that come to mind. Likewise, clearly people can and do ascend the social ladder. However, the question is, how easy is it to ascend, and is this ascent through merit or otherwise?
Marxists believe that social mobility is severely restricted, and that in fact, people do not ascend the social ladder very often Furthermore, the ways in which a member of the proletariat can ascend are severely restricted, and some of the routes are branded as criminal — such as, actual violent crime or fraud or prostitution. Some routes based on exceptional luck (winning on the lottery) or talent (scoring a goal for England against Brazil) are also provided.
The main route up the social ladder is through entry into a social grouping known as the service class. This group occupies a small space between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; it is the upper end of the clerical working class. These are people who have either manipulated their way into a position of power within a company — that is, a directorship, or have such exceptional skills, that their services are indispensable to the bourgeoisie, and hence they must be rewarded more highly. The rewards to this group are so great that they can save sufficiently to amass enough wealth to enter the bourgeoisie. So this is a genuine transition group. However, the degree of mobility created by this route must be questioned, since very often members of the service group are occupied by genuine members of the bourgeoisie themselves. In other words, it is people who already have wealth and already own the means of production that tend to occupy the leading positions within the service class. Although such individuals choose to work, they have the option not to. They work in order to safeguard their class interests, and so much of the service class is just an offshoot of the bourgeoisie.
Marxists believe that social mobility is very limited, and although some routes up the social ladder are available, these are more restricted than may appear to be the case.

IV. Marxist interpretation of history

Marx writes:
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
He also adds:
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possess, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
What this means is that whilst Marx believes that throughout history there has always been class conflict, this class conflict has taken a new form in modern times. There is a potted history of the world contained in these few lines — one that is disputed by non-Marxists as being too simple and too gross. For Marx there is a division between the modern and the pre-modern world. In the pre-modern world economic relations were determined by the feudal system based on control of the land. In the modern world, economic relations are dominated by commerce and industry. The modern world has seen an accumulation of capital that has lead to the formation of large industries. It is in the control of these that the power of the modern bourgeoisie lays.
What this means is that a modern bourgeoisie cannot exist in a country that has not passed through all the stages of economic development — in other words, industrialisation. This point was an embarrassment to the leaders of the Russian Revolution in October 1917, since Russia was not sufficiently industrialised for it to have a modern class system; hence, as we shall see below, theoretically, it ought not to have undergone a revolution. Lenin did a great deal of theoretical work in order to justify the Russian Revolution as a manifestation of Marxist theory at work, which results in a doctrine known as Marxist-Leninism.
Marxism is thus a theory of historical development and a morality. Marx interpreted world history in terms of four epochs. The first of these was primitive communism, which he claims existed in prehistory, and was a form of classless society. The economy of primitive society was based on hunting and gathering, and the land was communally owned. After primitive communism comes ancient society, in which people were now divided into two classes of masters and slaves. This is possible because the basis of society is agriculture and this enables some people to be freed from the immediate need of hunting, and hence makes specialisation and division of labour possible. Hence surplus wealth and private property develop, which makes the formation of classes possible. Ancient society is followed by feudal society in which the class division is between lords and serfs. In the last epoch, capitalist society, the division is between capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and labourers (the proletariat).
From the ethical point of view, Marx condemns the development of the modern bourgeoisie, writing:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
So this justifies the proletariat in rising up against their bourgeois oppressors and bringing about a revolution. The charge of exploitation is laid against the modern bourgeoisie.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
The workers are exploited in the sense that they lose the full value of the productive labour, which is stolen by the bourgeoisie. The value of the wages paid to the workers is not equal to the value of the commodities they produce, so there is a surplus value that is appropriated (taken) by the capitalists. Workers are also enslaved to the machine.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
The increasingly mechanical and boring nature of work is a state of alienation.
The moral force behind the revolution is the fact that the division of society into two classes results in exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the proletariat. Yet, furthermore, Marxism is also a prediction of the outcome of this conflict based on a theory of material dialectic or determinism.
The ruling classes seek to perpetuate their power, and to do so they control the superstructure of society, that is, the major institutions, values and systems of beliefs held by society. They perpetuate a ruling-class ideology by means of which they seek to justify their power. This is a false ideology and creates a false description of reality. It also produces a false class-consciousness, which means that members of both classes hold illusions about their relationship. Both classes come to believe that there is a greater common interest between them than really is the case. The concealment of the real nature of the exploitation of the masses brings about a degree of social stability, though this is in constant danger of breaking down in the face of reality and the development of awareness on the part of the proletariat that they are exploited.
In Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [1844] Marx writes
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Marx denies any objective content to religion. In other words, he is an atheist and affirms that God does not objectively exist. Hence, for him, religion is a mechanism whereby the proletariat are oppressed; it is an opiate that makes them forget or obscures from them their real class situation, being that of an oppressed class, exploited by the bourgeoisie.
Karl Marx believes in material determinism — that is the theory that all cultural and social movements and ideas are brought about by changes in economic and other material conditions. It is a consequence of this theory is that there is no objective content to the concept of God — that is, God does not exist. If this is true it follows that all religious ideas and practices are strictly illusory. They arise because of social forces but anyone with a true grasp of reality would not believe in God, nor would he observe any code of religious practice. The forces that drive historical change are material in nature. This is why his doctrine is called material determinism. These forces are also dialectical, a term that he borrows from the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel pictures history as the workings of opposed principles. At any one time there are two opposed historical forces, one a thesis the other an antithesis. These two forces battle it out, until there is a resolution of the conflict in the formation of a synthesis. However, for Hegel the process is perpetual, for the synthesis becomes just another thesis, and a new antithesis arises to contend with it.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
Marx interprets this historical dialectic in terms of the conflict of economic classes and also departs from Hegel in postulating the existence of a final resolution to all historical conflict. The prelude to this final resolution, which is a classless society, is the advent of the modern division of the classes brought on by industrialisation.
Thesis: the bourgeoisie
Antithesis: the proletariat
Synthesis: a classless society
Conflict in society will accelerate as the proletariat become more and more conscious of their position as the exploited class. Firstly, the division between the classes becomes starker and starker:
The lower strata of the middle class — the small trades-people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
Inevitably, this increasingly stark divide between the two classes results in the development of a revolutionary consciousness — a state of mind shared by all members of the proletariat that they are the oppressed class, that the state of oppression is morally evil, and that they have the power to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crisis, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvements of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
The bourgeoisie in fact accelerate this process by involving their nations in war with each other. In other words, the bourgeoisie of one nation enter into wars of acquisition with the bourgeoisie of other nations. In this manner Marx anticipated global conflict like that of the First World War (1914 — 18), and that in order to fight these wars the bourgeoisie would have to call on their own proletariat to serve as soldiers and hence arm them.
The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
The power of the bourgeoisie will exhaust itself from within.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. ... A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
In conclusion material and historical forces make it inevitable that a classless society will evolve.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
In this way History tends to occupy the same position in the thinking of Marxists as Providence (the action of god on earth) may occupy in a Christian's mind. They see the inevitable hand of history in the development of society. They regard anyone who opposes the inevitable revolution as a renegade whose actions are futile because contrary to History.