MARX AND WEBER ON CLASS
TWENTIETH-CENTURY THINKING ABOUT THE MIDDLE CLASS
POLITICS AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Class is perhaps the most crucial concept in the social sciences; class location affects everyone’s life, and class struggles are at the core of social dynamics in all societies. Class can be viewed as a dichotomous system in which each class presupposes the other (e.g., there can be no masters without slaves and vice versa) or as a gradational system with a continuous ordering or ranking of people, from low to high, on the basis of income, skill levels, occupation, education, and so on (Ossowski 1963). The middle class can be identified on a purely descriptive, ad hoc basis, using a gradational approach to divide the population into aggregates sharing similar characteristics. The “middle class” is, then, the population aggregate that falls in the middle of the income, educational, and occupational profiles of a research sample, a given community, a region, or a nation-state. This descriptive approach yields only a superficial picture of the middle class, however. Theoretical analysis is required to identify the basis for the location of the middle class in the social and economic structures that, in turn, affect its economic, social, and political behavior and ideological commitments. Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Max Weber (1864–1920) set the foundations for the analysis of class. A discussion of their main ideas must precede consideration of more recent theories about the middle class.
MARX AND WEBER ON CLASS
Marx identifies two main classes in capitalist societies: the bourgeoisie or capitalist class (owners of the means of production), and the proletariat or working class (owners only of labor power or the capacity to work). Prior to capitalism, there was a “manifold gradation of social rank” (e.g., feudal lords, apprentices, serfs, etc.), and within each of these ranks there were “subordinate gradations” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, p. 2). In reply to the question, “What makes wage-laborers, capitalists, and landlords constitute the great social classes?” Marx offers a preliminary answer: “the identity of revenues and sources of revenues.” He rejects this conclusion because it would lead to defining as a class any group whose income has the same origin. Marx gives the example of physicians and officials and ends by stating, “the same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of labor splits laborers as well as capitalists and landlords” (Marx [1894] 1967, pp. 885–886). For Marx, a social class is not an income group, but a necessary and unequal relationship between people, mediated or shaped by their relationship to the means of production. The relationship between capitalists and workers is necessary (they presuppose each other), it is exploitative (capitalists appropriate the surplus value produced by the workers), and it places the capitalist class in a position of power over the working class.
When examining capitalism theoretically, Marx uses a dichotomous concept of class. Empirically, he observed, classes do not appear in “pure form”; in England, for example, they were fragmented by the division of labor into “middle and intermediate strata” (Marx [1894] 1967, p. 885). The middle class, Marx’s writings suggest, is a descriptive concept that refers to an empirically variable, heterogeneous set of strata located in an intermediate position between workers and capitalists.
Weber’s concept of class is neither relational nor centered on exploitation. Weber’s focus is the effect of class situation on life chances, that is, on an individual’s economic and social opportunities. Classes are aggregates of individuals who, because they bring similar resources to the market (e.g., ownership of different kinds of property, different skills, etc.), they share similar life chances. “The term ‘class’ refers to any group of people that is found in the same class situation” (Gerth and Mills [1946] 1973, p. 181). In market exchanges, ownership of property gives power to owners over nonowners, that is, those who must sell their labor or goods made with their labor in order to survive. This is why “‘property’ and ‘lack of property’ are … the basic categories of all class situations” (Gerth and Mills [1946] 1973, pp. 181–182). These categories, however, are extremely differentiated according to the kinds and quantity of property and the type of skills individuals bring to the market. Weber provides an elaborate taxonomy of propertied, commercial, and social classes. The middle classes are located between the “positively” and “negatively” privileged propertied and commercial classes—for example, small property owners, craftsmen, self-employed farmers, public officials, professionals, and credentialed and highly skilled workers (Weber 1978, pp. 302–307).
Weber theorized about classes at the level of what Marx called “the Eden of the innate rights of man” (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 176), meaning the market, where capitalists and workers meet freely as buyers and sellers of commodities. Marx focused on the level of production, where capitalists exploit workers. Both levels of analysis are important for the study of class.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY THINKING ABOUT THE MIDDLE CLASS
As capitalism developed in western Europe and the United States, it brought not only an increase in the size of the working class, but, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, a relatively greater increase in the number of nonmanual waged and salaried employees. Some of these “white-collar” workers were highly educated, well paid, and in positions of authority; others were poorly paid and differed from manual “blue-collar” workers mainly in the kind of work they did. Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) referred to these workers as a “new” middle class, different in its dependent status and source of income (salaried work) from the economically self-reliant “old” middle class prevalent in the nineteenth century, composed of independent professionals, small farmers, small entrepreneurs, and property owners (Mills 1951). This new and growing intermediate strata or middle class, because of its heterogeneity in terms of occupation, education, income, and authority in the workplace, is difficult to categorize and identify.
Among Marxist analysts, the most important work has been done by Erik Olin Wright, who introduced complexity into the two-class schema by examining, in the context of concrete capitalist societies, variations in the extent to which the three dimensions of capitalist power—ownership and control over money capital, physical capital, and labor—coincide or not to form different kinds of class locations. There are, in light of this analysis, three “pure” classes: capitalists, the working class, and the petty bourgeoisie or owners of means of production who do not employ labor (Wright 2001, pp. 112–113). The middle classes are propertyless employees whose levels of skill and knowledge, and position in the authority structure, place them in “contradictory” class locations. As well-paid managers or experts, they are in a “privileged location within relations of exploitation” (Wright 1997, p. 22); they are exploited (as workers), while simultaneously sharing capitalist privileges that vary with their degree of authority and expertise.
A different criterion for separating the working class from the middle class is whether or not workers engage in productive labor, that is, whether they produce exchange values and, therefore, surplus value. Arguing that only productive workers are members of the working class, Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979) considers all other wage and salary earners, those who only contribute to the circulation and realization of surplus value (i.e., those employed in banking, commerce, research, advertising, services, etc.), as unproductive workers: the middle classes are composed of such workers (Poulantzas 1973, pp. 30–31).
Today’s neo-Weberian analysis of class has to focus on the relationship between class or market situation and life chances. Given the exceedingly large number of possible market situations, social scientists have to identify clusters of those positions that could be considered classes (Breen 2005, p. 35). Aage Sørensen, for example, defines classes as “sets of structural positions. Social relationships within markets, especially within labor markets, and within firms define these positions” (Sørensen 1991, p. 72; cited in Breen 2005, p. 35). The nature of those positions and the number of classes that can be constructed vary.
POLITICS AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
Class location objectively determines people’s economic and political interests and influences, not their subjectivity, political consciousness, beliefs, behavior, and so forth. But classes, as Weber observed, are not communities; they are not groups whose members share a sense of belonging and a set of objectives. Classes are aggregates of people in the same “class situation,” and they become mobilized and politicized only under certain circ*mstances, such as, for example, interclass confrontations or rapid economic and technological change that undermines their life chances. The middle classes, like all classes in “contradictory” class locations, can vary in their political allegiances. Simultaneously placed in relations of subordination, domination, and relative autonomy, they are more likely to be motivated by ideological political commitments, values, beliefs, religion, and so on than by “objective” interests.
The paradoxical behavior of American voters who, despite their economic vulnerability, vote for a party that protects the interests of the capitalist class, illustrates the weight of politics, culture, and religion in shaping the political behavior of the middle classes (see, for example, Frank 2004). As long as the ruling classes continue to control the media and the production and dissemination of ideologies in harmony with the value commitments of the middle strata, these sectors of the population will most likely be swayed towards conservatism unless a sudden economic crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, undermines their understanding of their real conditions of existence.
SEE ALSO Autonomy; Black Middle Class; Blue Collar and White Collar; Bourgeoisie, Petty; Class; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Jacobinism; Managerial Class; Marx, Karl; Middleman Minorities; Middlemen Minorities; Poulantzas, Nicos; Professionalization; Professionals; Stratification; Voting; Voting Patterns; Weber, Max; Working Class
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breen, Richard. 2005. Foundations of a Neo-Weberian Class Analysis. In Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Erik Olin Wright, 31–50. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Corey, Lewis. [1935] 1992. The Crisis of the Middle Class. New York: Columbia University Press.
Frank, Thomas. 2004. What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan.
Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans. [1946] 1973. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1967. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl. [1894] 1967. Capital. Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. [1845–1846] 1947. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 1998. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ossowski, Stanislaw. 1963. Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. Trans. Sheila Patterson. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973. On Social Classes. New Left Review 78: 27–54.
Sørensen, Aage B. 1991. On the Usefulness of Class Analysis in Research on Social Mobility and Socioeconomic Inequality. Acta Sociologica 34:2; cited in Breen, Richard. 2005. Foundations of a Neo-Weberian Class Analysis. In Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Erik Olin Wright. London: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, Erik Olin. 2001. Varieties of Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure. In Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, ed. David B. Grusky, 112–115. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Wright, Erik Olin, ed. 2005. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Martha Gimenez
