The left, both historically and now, has used the terms “Class” and “Class Conflict” to mean something very specific, but most people can’t accurately describe what those terms mean in a simple, concise way. “Class” as an idea has been defined by almost every political and economic school, but oftentimes it is used in widely different ways between them. Simply speaking, when Marx refers to “Classes”, he means the people who either own the way they make a living, whether that be through a business, a farm, or rents from a property they lease out, or the people who don’t. The “people who don’t” class is people who work for their paychecks, but don’t own their workplace in any way, like a person who works in a factory, or a farm laborer. There are more nuanced classes, such as the lumpenproletariat, or reserve army of labor, but those classes aren’t the focus of the majority of Marx’s work. Many marxist theorists from many different leftist schools of thought have discussed these groups in length, and they will be covered, but today we’re going to try to keep “class” to a simple term and expand on it later.
The “Class that owns”, or, as you may have heard them called, the bourgeoisie, is pretty self explanatory. This class is made up of the business owners and stock holders of the world, whether they own a small mom and pop shop or a massive bank. There are differences between the two, obviously. The big banker would definitely survive an economic crisis much more successfully than the small business owner, but they both still own their businesses, and, in that, something called the “means of production”. The “means of production” refers to land, machinery, and other industrial inputs that are owned by the business owner, or their business as a proxy for them. These resources, from the wheat that grows to the flour mill, are owned by someone, and that someone oftentimes is a single person or a small group of shareholders, not the people reaping the grain or milling the flour. The class that doesn’t own the means of production, the working class, is very self explanatory. This class works for their wages, and doesn’t own anything to make money off of besides their own work.
The owning class will have more money to control in our current system, which means a few things. Firstly, they will be able to control the working class, since the working class needs someone to pay them to survive. They don’t own farms or factories to make their own living, they have to rely on the owning class for jobs. This puts the owning class into a position of power over the working class, since without a paycheck, the worker will die from starvation, homelessness, or some other fatal challenge of poverty. Secondly, the worker is taken advantage of economically, since the owning class controls every aspect of the working class’s work, including the sale of the product the worker makes. This leads to the situation where the profit from sale is also controlled by the owning class, as the product’s exchange is separated from the worker’s input, since they have no control.
This is where “Class conflict” comes in. Class Conflict is the butting of heads between classes, and history is made up almost entirely of these. Whether it be a country’s royalty and nobility battling against one another, or a peasant’s revolt where a king is replaced by a republic, history is filled with class conflict. In our current day, class conflict is oftentimes directed by the owning class, who has divided the working class into sections. Identities are used to make the working class fight amongst themselves in cultural warfare as opposed to class warfare, which is a form of organized class conflict that’s main goal is to upend the current ruling class in favor of another.
You might be asking after all of this, what about the middle class? Obviously that’s somewhere in this example, right? Well, when we take a look at the two classes we’ve talked about, there is no “middle” between them, it’s a have or have not system. The middle class was created to blend the working class people who make a decent living with the owning class to make them think their interests align with the owning class. This was done by creating something called a labor aristocracy, but that’s something to explore later. The “Shrinking middle class” is shrinking due to the fall of the wealthier working class, which is sending them right back to the same point as the lower class they try to differentiate themselves from. In the end, however, there are only the haves and have nots, and the have nots must unite to take back the means of production from those who control it.