12.5 The inner contradiction in the concept of ‘class’

A ‘class’ is a set of entities with one identifiable thing in common. Thus there is a class of ‘bald eagles’ or of ‘geraniums’, and such a class can be widened or narrowed: e.g., the class of ‘geraniums growing in New Jersey’. A ‘social class’ is a class of human beings with one thing in common. The number of identifiable social classes is virtually infinite. Thus: there is the ‘class of people over 6 feet 4 inches in height’, the ‘class of people named Smith’, the ‘class of people weighing under 160 pounds’, etc. ad infinitum. Some of these classes will be useful for certain types of social analysis (e.g. the ‘class of people over 65 years of age with diabetes’), for medical or insurance or demographic purposes. But from our point of view, in a study of the Marxian theory of class, these classes are all worthless because there is no inherent conflict between them. In the market economy, in the international division of labour and exchange of products, there is no inherent conflict between short and tall people, people of various weights and names, etc. All classes live in harmony through the voluntary exchange of goods and services that mutually benefits them all. Furthermore, there is no reason for an individual in a free society, or in a market economy, to act on behalf of ‘the interests of his class’ rather than, or even as a surrogate for, his own individual interest. Will a person, when deciding at what job to work, or what investment to make, first and foremost consult his ‘class interest’ as the member of a ‘class over 6 feet tall’? The very idea is absurd.

Is there no time, then, when social classes are in inherent conflict? Yes, there are such times, but only when some classes are privileged by state coercion, while other classes are restricted or burdened by state coercion. Ludwig von Mises perceptively used the term ‘caste’ to identify groups either privileged or burdened by the state, as distinguished from ‘classes’, which are simply groups of people on the free market in no sense in inherent conflict. The caste system in India was a classic case. The privileged or ‘ruling’ castes acquired power, income, and status by state coercion; the submerged or ‘ruled’ castes, for example, were prevented by coercion from leaving the lowly occupations of their ancestors. Other ruling and ruled ‘castes’ or classes are not as rigid as the Indian caste system, but still they partake of the same coercively determined status. Thus, the Brahmin caste, privileged by the state, was in inherent conflict with the Untouchables, who were submerged as a class by the state. These castes then have conflicting class (or ‘caste’) interest: the Brahmins to maintain their privileges, the Untouchable or other submerged castes to break out of their burdens. The point is that, by the use of state power, each individual Brahmin has a common or ‘class’ interest in maintaining his privileges; while each Untouchable has a common class interest in freeing himself from oppression.

Thus, even in less rigid cases than in an absolute caste system, the class of short and tall people, or the class of people named Smith, normally living in peace and harmony, could become classes in inherent conflict. Suppose, for example, the state decrees a large subsidy for all people over 6 feet tall, or a special heavy tax on all those under 5 feet 5 inches. If special privileges were heaped on people named Smith, then this would be a privileged class at the expense of everyone else, and there would be an economic incentive to try to join the ‘ruling class’, people named Smith, as quickly as possible.

Even in such situations, as Marx in practice could not deny, there were and are individuals who, for various reasons of ideology or opportunism, fail to follow their own common class-interest. There were and are Brahmins who put the demands of justice (that is, ideas or principles) higher than their class interest, or Untouchables who, for personal interest, willingly submit to the existing order.

There is a grave inner contradiction at the heart of the Marxian system, in Marx's crucial concept of class. In the Marxian dialectic, two mighty social classes face each other in inherent conflict, the ruling and the ruled. In the first two of history's major conflicts: ‘oriental despotism’, and ‘feudalism’, the social classes are defined by Marx in what we have seen to be the libertarian, or Misesian, manner: as classes privileged or burdened by the state. Thus, in ‘oriental despotism’, or the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, the emperor and his technocratic bureaucracy run the state, and constitute its ‘ruling class’. This class acquires privileges from the state, and taxes and controls the ‘ruled’ classes, that is, everyone else, largely the peasantry but also craftsmen and merchants. Here Marx adopts the libertarian (as we have seen advanced by James Mill) definition of a two-class system, the ruling Few who have gained control of the state, who are governing and exploiting the ruled Many. Under feudalism, a similar concept applies. The landlord class has acquired territory through war and conquest, and has settled down to oppress the peasantry and the merchants and craftsmen via coerced rents, taxes, controls and serfdom. Once again, Marx's class categories are ‘caste’ categories: the ruling class is such by virtue of its having gained control of the state, the main social apparatus of coercion.

All well and good. But then, suddenly, when Marx gets to capitalism, the class categories change, without acknowledgement. Now the ruling class is not simply defined as the class that runs the state apparatus. Now, suddenly, the original act of rule or ‘exploitation’ is the voluntary market wage contract, the very act of a capitalist hiring a worker and a worker agreeing to be hired. This in itself, to Marx, establishes a common ‘class-interest’ among capitalists, exploiting a ‘common class’ of workers. It is true that Marx also believed that this ‘capitalist class’ runs the state, but only as ‘the executive committee of the ruling class’, that is, of a ruling class that previously existed on the free market, because of the wage system. So that what Marx, as analyst of oriental despotism or feudalism, would consider ruling-class exploitation still exists under capitalism, but only as an addendum to the preexisting capitalist exploitation of the workers through the wage system. Ruling-class exploitation under capitalism is unique in exercising a double exploitation: first, on the market as part of the wage contract, and second, the alleged exploitation by the state as executive committee of the ruling class.

It should be evident that Marx's analysis of class is by this point a mishmash, in total disarray; two contradictory definitions of class are jammed together, unfused and unacknowledged. Why should capitalism, of all systems, be able to levy a ‘double’ exploitation that no other ruling class in Marx's historical schema can ever enjoy?

But the crucial point is that Marx's definition of class and class conflict under capitalism is hopelessly muddled and totally wrong. How can ‘capitalists’, even in the same industry let alone in the entire social system, have any thing crucial in common? Brahmins and slaves, in a caste system, certainly enjoy a common class-interest, in conflict with other castes. But what is the common ‘class-interest’ of the ‘capitalist class’? On the contrary, capitalist firms are in continual competition and rivalry with each other. They compete for raw material, for labour, for sales and customers. They compete in price and quality, and in seeking new products and new ways to get ahead of their competitors. Marx, of course, did not deny the reality of this competition. So how can all capitalists, or even ‘the steel industry’, be considered a class with common interests? Again, in only one way: the steel industry only enjoys common interests if it can induce the state to create such interests through special privilege. State intervention to impose a steel tariff, or a steel cartel with restricted output and higher price, would indeed create a privileged ‘ruling class’ of steel industrialists. But no such class having common interests pre-exists on the market before such intervention comes about. Only the state can create a privileged class (or a subordinate and burdened class) by acts of intervention into the economy or society. There can be no ‘capitalist ruling class’ on the free market.

Similarly, there can be no ‘working class’ with common class-interests on the free market. Workers compete with each other, just as capitalists or entrepreneurs compete with each other. Once again, if groups of workers can use the state to exclude other groups, they can become a ruling class as against the excluded groups. Thus, if government immigration restrictions keep out new workers, the native workers can benefit (at least in the short run) at the expense of incomes of immigrants; or if white workers can keep black workers out of skilled jobs by state coercion (as was done in South Africa), the former becomes a privileged or ruling class at the expense of the latter.

An important point here is that any group that can manage to control, or gain privileges from, the state can take its place among the exploiters: this can be specific groups of workers, or businessmen, or Communist Party members, or whatever. There is no reason to assume that only ‘capitalists’ can acquire such privileges.

In his class analysis, Marx constantly had to struggle with the fact that neither capitalists nor workers act in practice as if they are each members of monolithic, conflicting classes. On the contrary, capitalists persist in competing with each other, and workers likewise. Even in their rousing Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had to admit that ‘The organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition among the workers themselves’. Indeed.

But there are more grave problems. For Marx had his two-class analysis; the essence of each titanic struggle in history is between two great social classes: the ruling vs the ruled, the rising class in tune with the new material productive forces, the declining one out of tune. But it is one thing to employ a two-class ruler vs ruled analysis according to libertarian or Millian definitions; since there are indeed common caste interests and conflicts, this concept is here a simplification, but an important and workable one. But what are we to do in the complex, multi-class world of the capitalist market economy? How can we employ a two-class model there, either for market or political action?

And there is no question that Marx is committed to the two-class model: capitalists vs proletarians. All other classes fade away, so that the mighty, exploited immizerated class can and will rise up as a monolith to overthrow ‘the capitalist class’. As Marx and Engels say in the Communist Manifesto: ‘Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, 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’.¹³

But in practice, in analysing recent history or current events, Marx and Engels were forced to talk about many classes and groups, and their interactions – thereby implicitly but definitely betraying their own absurd two-class model. And so we have the problem that Marx's two classes are far from monoliths, that their members compete with each other constantly and collaborate very rarely, and also that in capitalist society in particular it is impossible to analyse historical action by squeezing all human actors into two classes.

In practice, however, Marx and other Marxists happily use a multi-class model in analysing historical events: ‘steel capital’, ‘textile capital’, ‘armament capital’, ‘finance capital’, etc. But they do not seem to realize that while they are being far more realistic than when prating about ‘capitalists’ vs ‘workers’ as two-class monoliths, they are totally betraying the Marxian dialectic itself. No inevitable revolution, for example, will ever follow from multi-class squabbling – certainly not Marx's cherished proletarian one.

Marx himself, and Marxists generally, have devoted many millions of words to the concept and use of the term ‘class’. Yet in all his writings, Marx never once defined it. For if he had attempted a definition, the stark inner contradiction in the concept, the slippage between state creation and mere market action, would have become starkly clear, and something would have had to give.

Thus, in Marx's theoretical magnum opus, Capital, there is no attempt at a definition of class. Only an incomplete Volume I was published in Marx's lifetime (1867), at which point he had substantially finished working on the book. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels worked up, edited and published the remaining manuscript in two further volumes (1885, 1894).¹⁴ Only in the famous very last chapter of the third volume does Marx finally arrive at an attempt to define what he and Engels had been talking and writing about for four decades. It is an unfinished chapter of startling brevity – five short paragraphs. In this chapter, ‘Classes’, Marx begins with the classical Ricardian triad: that the sources of income in the market economy are wages, profits and rents, and that the receivers of such income constitute the ‘three big classes of modern society’ – labourers, capitalists and landlords.¹⁵ So far, so good. But then Marx adds that even England, ‘the most highly and classically developed’ capitalist country, contains ‘middle and intermediate strata [which] even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere’. But, he quickly hastens to assure his readers that this problem is irrelevant, since the concentration and polarization of classes is proceeding apace.

Marx then begins the third paragraph of this seemingly climactic chapter. ‘The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class?’ Indeed. He then adds that the reply to this question ‘follows naturally’ from the reply to a second, related question: ‘What makes wage-labourers, capitalists, and landlords constitute the three great social classes?’ We are now primed for the answer, first to the latter Ricardian question and then to the first, critical query, ‘What constitutes a class?’

On the second question, Marx states that ‘at first glance’ the identity of incomes with their sources constitutes the answer. After all, workers earn wages from their labour, capitalists make profits from their capital, and landlords obtain rent from their land. But Marx quickly warns us that this simple answer will not do. For:

However, from that standpoint, physicians and officials, e.g., would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenues from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords – the latter, e.g. into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries.

Precisely. Marx has said it very well; his cherished two-class monolith model (or three-class, if we throw in the allegedly declining ‘feudal remnant’ – the landlord class) lies totally in ruins.¹⁶

Thus Marxian class theory, and therefore Marxism, lay destroyed by its creator's own hand. But if it is always darkest before the dawn, if the suffering of the oppressed class is greatest just before the apocalyptic revolutionary moment, we would expect Karl Marx to step in and triumphantly save the day. How does he do it? How does the drama unfold? In one of the great anti-climactic moments in the history of social thought, the manuscript ends with the lines we have just quoted. There is just a cryptic footnote from Engels: ‘Here the manuscript breaks off.

The way Engels puts it implies that the Master was struck down just as his pen was ready to wield the Answer that would rescue the crumbling Marxian theory of class and place it on solid foundations. But we know this was not true, for the ‘breaking off’ occurred 16 years before Marx's death. Marx had ample time for his dramatic and conclusive answer. Why didn't he pursue it? We can only conclude that he couldn't, that he was stopped, that he realized that there was no answer, and that Marxism would henceforth have to rely on repetition and bluster to carry it through.