Class consciousness , for Marx and Engels , is the perception of one’s own role in the productive system, both as a producer of wealth and as an owner of the means of generating wealth. This perception is built over time through class struggle and involves recognizing one’s own economic condition, identifying other individuals in the same situation, developing a range of common interests and organizing politically to make this group’s demands feasible. For these authors, just as the bourgeoisie had dismantled and replaced feudal society , the proletariat , through class struggle, would dismantle and replace bourgeois society.
The social classes , according to Marxist theory, are characterized by the ownership and control of wealth production means or the exclusion of this ownership and control. The bourgeois class is made up of capitalists and large landowners. The proletarian class is made up of wage workers. These, although they are the producers of wealth, do not receive a suitable salary, moreover, they live in precarious conditions of housing and work, especially in the immediate context after the Industrial Revolution .
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Social classes
Marx and Engels observed in different periods of history and in different places in the world societies with a social order in which groups were gradually positioned. This arrangement can have multiple structures according to the scale of values of each people. In capitalist societies, these dynamics were crystallized into two specific groups: the bourgeoisie, made up of the owners of the means of production, and the proletariat, made up of workers who produce the wealth of this socioeconomic system, but are excluded from its distribution, which generates great inequality and tensions the social fabric, producing conflicts. Although distinctions and hierarchies between groups are common in different societies, Marx and Engelsthey admitted to the class a specific category of capitalist societies.
Soviet poster in honor of Marx and Engels (1970). The Russian Revolution was one of the historic attempts to implant Marxism. [1]
For Marx, the basis of class division in bourgeois society, which also underlies the social distinctions of pre-capitalist societies, is in the relationship between the owners of the means of production and the direct producers of wealth. Thus, there are three major classes : landowners, capitalists and wage workers. The first two belong to the group of owners, and the last, to the group of wealth producers.
Even recognizing that there were other groups, in analytical terms, these three were centrally linked to the production process, so they got more attention in Marxist theory. Marx stated that:
“Owners of simple labor power, owners of capital and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profits and land rent, that is, wage workers, capitalists and landowners, form the three great classes of modern society, based on the capitalist production regime ”. | 1 |
In his studies undertaken in the 19th century, Marx made a conceptual division into two classes, although he recognized that there were others. The class that operative nail production conditions is the ruling class , made up of a minority group which owned the assets for wealth production (industrial, land, commercial and financial) and to influence the state to protect their property and disseminate the ideology produced by this class to legitimize its domination over the dominated class.
Textile factory in 19th century England. England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The proletarian class , in turn, although composed of a majority group that sells its labor force in exchange for remuneration, did not have the same cohesion as its antagonist. Although there is a common situation of exploitation that generates common demands, there is no identity of interests that results in a link, an organization and an action in order to realize those interests. In addition, the very structure of wage labor and its opportunity to stimulate individual competition could weaken this connection, which would make class solidarity important, in addition to class consciousness .
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Don’t stop now … There’s more after the publicity;)
Class consciousness: what is it?
Marx made a distinction between class condition and class consciousness: class itself and class for itself. The class condition is an objective situation, that is, whether or not you have control over the means of production. However, class consciousness is a subjective issue , it requires knowing your own position in the production process and organizing yourself politically for a conscious defense of your class interests. In Marx’s own words:
“Economic conditions have turned, in the first place, the mass of the people into workers. The domination of capital over workers created the common situation and the common interests of that class. Thus, this mass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, of which we have indicated only a few phases, this mass unites and forms a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests ”. | 2 |
For Marx, the formation of class consciousness, both of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, developed in the political struggle. In the case of the bourgeoisie, in the confrontation with the feudal and aristocratic regime. In the case of the proletariat, this confrontation was initially limited to the work environment, in union struggles, then expanded, galvanizing demands that became class interests formally devoted to political parties.
Congress of the Socialist International in 1904. Marxist theory was fundamental to the political organization of the workers.
Class consciousness is umbilically linked to class organization and enables the understanding of participation in the production process and the definition of common objectives and ways of achieving it politically in the dynamics of class struggle, “through Parliament or convention”.
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Class struggle
Marx and Engels stated in their writings that ” every class struggle is a political struggle “. Within capitalist societies, this struggle is led by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between owners who do not produce and producers who do not own. The authors saw the proletariat as the most authentic product of the development of large industry, which spread throughout the world, thus allowing the formation of a proletariat without a national character and a catalyst for universal interests. Thus, even if initially the class struggle had to take place within each capitalist country, the proletarian revolution would be worldwide .
The mechanism for perpetuating the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie would be ideology , conceptualized as a false conscience and created by the exploiting class to lead the exploited class to passively accept its condition and not understand it correctly in order to organize itself to transform it. The ideology would be used to naturalize the condition of each class, so that everyone believes that it could not be modified, and to universalize the interests of a group (the bourgeoisie) as if they were the best for everyone. These illusory forms of knowledge, endorsed by the modern state and disseminated mainly by educational institutions and the press, would serve to mask conflicts and generate alienation in the proletariat, preventing the formation of their class consciousness.
In capitalist societies, class conflict is driven by exploitation and social inequality . The nineteenth century, experienced and studied by the founders of Marxism, was the scene of the hardest period of capitalism , when there was no regulation, labor laws, or claims and negotiation organizations, such as unions. the workersthey had exhaustive hours, from 14 to 18 hours a day, there was no security in the work environment, with fatal accidents, deaths from exhaustion, illnesses contracted by workers, child labor and very low wages being common. Women and children earned even less than men. Although there are other conflicting class relations, the one that takes shape between the holders of the means of production and the wage earners is the central conflict. Marx and Engels pointed out that | 3 | :
“Modern bourgeois society, which grew out of the ruins of feudal society, has not abolished class antagonisms. It established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones … Manufacturing was no longer enough. As a result, steam and machines have revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant modern industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by the millionaires of the industry, leaders of the entire industrial army, the modern bourgeois ”.
The whole apparatus of social relations (legal, political, scientific, religious) is based on the relations of production, the economic basis by which men seek survival. Each production model, such as the slave, the feudal and the capitalist, for example, has social relations marked by evident or camouflaged antagonisms .
The movement generated by the clash between opposing groups is responsible for the change from one mode of production to the other throughout history. The class struggle, for Marx and Engels, is the engine of history, and the proletariat is the agent of changes towards a classless and private property , anchored in a fair and egalitarian model. Throughout the 20th century, some countries implemented Marxist-inspired governments, but a socialist or communist government that faithfully corresponds to Marxist theory never occurred.
