Class
Class in Marxist theory denotes groups of persons distinguished by their relation to the means of production, and — more fundamentally — by their position in the social division of labor.
Marx's conception
Class is not primarily a matter of income bracket or lifestyle (the sociological usage), but of relation to production:
- The bourgeoisie own the means of production and live from surplus value.
- The proletariat own nothing but their labor-power, which they must sell to live.
- Intermediate strata (petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) occupy unstable positions between the two fundamental classes.
Crucially, a class only becomes a political force — a class for itself — when it is organized and conscious of its historical mission, rather than merely a class in itself defined structurally.
Infrared's development
Haz Al-Din has criticized the reduction of class to economic category, arguing:
- Class is a political and spiritual position, not merely an economic one. A worker can be bourgeois in consciousness; a member of the old aristocracy can be proletarian in spirit.
- The concept must be distinguished from the sociological "middle class" discourse that fragments the people into consumption brackets.
- In the American context, the people — including the patriotic working class abandoned by both parties — is the subject of politics, which is the premise of MAGA Communism: consolidating the popular base away from false consciousness and toward communism.
See also
References
Infrared transcript catalog — see e.g. Communism, State and Class (2021-01-24).