The Guardian 7 June, 2006
Class struggle today —
Class antagonisms and competing interests
Joel Wendland
While the basic truth of the general concept of class remains, other factors make the lived experience of class unique to each society or sections of a society. For example, in a predominantly African American city like Detroit with an unemployment rate of 15 percent and a poverty rate of 28 percent, class experiences are infused with institutional racism.
Things like racist "criminal justice", uneven access to health care, environmental racism, limited political power and unequal distribution of public resources make the experience of class dramatically different from those of people who live in the predominantly white working-class communities that border that city.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Lenin echoed Engels and Marx in his 1919 pamphlet titled A Great Beginning. "Classes are groups of people", he argued, "one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy." But more than simply groups of people, Lenin argued two years later in Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, class is a "division according to status in the social system of production."
Note that status is an effect of class, which itself is a "division".
Lenin builds on his view of class as a "division" in his 1919 speech The State. Class is "a division into groups of people" he remarks", some of whom are permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, when some people exploit others." More than being simply a division, class is a device for exploitation, or a relationship of power and dominance that permits one group to exploit another.
Lenin amplifies this concept in his 1921 speech on The Tasks of the Youth League: "Classes are that which permits one section of society to appropriate the labour of another section." Here again, class is not simply equated with a "group" or "section" or "division." In fact, Lenin regarded class as a power relation that propels capitalist production forward. Class, in other words, is the engine of the whole system.
Lenin viewed classes in their dialectical relation to the different sides of production. "Classes are large groups of people," he argued in A Great Beginning, "differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production by their relation ... to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it."
In other words, Lenin defined class within a complex of relationships involving all sides of production. It is a process that includes performance of labour, as well as the methods of appropriation and the distribution of products.
To sum up, Marx, Engels and Lenin defined class from three sides. It is an economic community affected by non-class factors, the defining relationship(s) at the heart of any mode of production (other than communism), and a process that makes up and conditions the process of the production and reproduction of capital.
Is it still worth viewing class this way, as opposed to how it was undertaken by the New York Times journalists? Yes.(See part 1, Guardian 31-05-06.) If class is viewed only as the effect of a glitch in capitalism that decreases opportunities for some people and creates poverty and unemployment; a race to the bottom in wages, benefits and worker protections; the lack of access to education, health care and political power, then the solution is to increase opportunities or create programs that ease social ills.
Tweak the system
This approach is worthy; indeed, working people should fight for social programs that improve their lives, strengthen their collective hand for long-term battles and unite them in common struggle. But this approach doesn’t eliminate a few sticky questions: why do sections of the capitalist class oppose those types of reforms? Are they just mean, or is there another motive? If glitches in capitalism can be solved with reforms, why haven’t they? Why haven’t reforms worked? Is it just bad management?
A Marxist view of class addresses the issue better because it allows us to see capitalism as a system that always reproduces these "glitches". Class antagonism — competing interests, not on an individual, but a social scale — is inherent to the system and disproportionate political power ensures that the interests of the minority override the interests of the majority. Profits are put before people’s needs. Wars are waged for oil, based on lies. Environmental catastrophe looms. People die of treatable illnesses.
Class understanding shows us that the power and wealth of the minority, in fact, depends on increasing the exploitation of the majority. All of the reforms we fight for that alleviate exploitation will not be permanent until the class that makes up and unites the majority successfully implements democracy and controls the system it has created by its labour and transforms it into something new and just.
Political Affairs, Communist Party USA