Understanding class

There are two classes in society - the one possessing wealth and owning the means of its production, the other making the wealth by using those tools and technology but only with the permission and only for the benefit of the possessors. These two classes are necessarily in opposition to one another. We have before us today, in capitalist society, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited but to put it more bluntly, robbers and the robbed. Two economic forces whose interests ceaselessly clash, are pitted against each other. These two classes can never be reconciled and it is this that we call the class struggle. Workers, be they “white” or “blue” collar, skilled or unskilled, because they are workers, cannot survive except by selling their labouring power. Yet were it not for the working class, the whole social fabric would collapse in an instant. It is they who do the useful work. It is they who produce the wealth.

Producing for profit is the essential basis of the capitalist system. The way in which it works is as follows. The manufacturer produces to sell at a profit to the wholesaler or merchant, who again sells for a profit to the retailer, who must make his profit out of the general public, (aided by various degrees of fraud and adulteration) . The profit-system is maintained by competition, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the manufacturers, the financiers and the land-lords for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers. Moreover, the whole method of distribution under this system is full of waste; for it employs whole armies of clerks, salespeople, advertisers, and what not, merely for the sake of shifting money from one person's pocket to another's; and this waste in production and waste in distribution, added to the maintenance of the useless lives of the possessing and non-producing class, must all be paid for out of the products of the workers, and is a ceaseless burden on their lives.

The capitalist who does no useful work but has the economic power to take from the working class all they produce, over and above what is required to keep them in working and producing order. He lives in a mansion. He sails the high seas in his private yacht. He is the reputed “captain of industry”, has great economic power, and commands the political power of the nation to protect his economic interests. He pays the politician with party funds with which the politics of the nation are corrupted and debauched. Politics is simply the expression of the economic interests of certain groups or classes. The exploiters realise this fact and they are in politics, not in non-partisan politics, but in politics. The capitalist tries to obscure it in every way possible and not have the workers realise. Who is it that votes the pro-capitalist parties into power? It is the working class. The capitalist doesn’t vote for a workers’ party , but the working class will vote for the capitalist one and that is why the capitalists are in power and the workers in subjugation.

He is the economic master and the political ruler. He is the master of your work; he controls the employment upon which your lives depend; he has it in his power to decide whether you shall work or not; that is to say, whether you shall live or die. And the man who has the power of life and death over you, though he may not wear a crown or be hailed a king, is as completely your master and your ruler as if you were his chattels and subject to his commands under the laws of the state.

The phrase class-consciousness is often seen as something very philosophic and mysterious and the words class war thought of something as extreme and brutal. As a matter of fact, the two phrases are simply general expressions for every-day facts. At a certain stage in the life every individual acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity and becomes aware of their unique distinctiveness, both physically and mentally. This sense of individuality ( “consciousness”), is the result of the development of the requisite brain-organ (the mind). When an individual has become “conscious”—he/she perceives both the relation between themselves and the rest of the world —and acquired a power of reacting upon environment; a power (limited but real) of “self-determination.”

Workers fulfil the function of production but the propertied class own the means of production and appropriate the products. The owning class can and does dictate terms to the men or women of the non-possessing class. “You shall sell your labour to me. I will pay you only a fraction of its value in wage. The difference between that value and what I pay for your labour, I pocket and I am richer than before, not by labour of my own, but by your unpaid labour.”

The working-class sooner or later become conscious of this hindrance to their development and come to the realisation that they are the only useful class. When conditions are ripe the working class acquire the recognition of their place in society and of what constrains their power of “self-determination.” To achieve this individuals must see beyond the apparent diversity of interests as clerks, mill workers, factory or farm workers, “skilled” and “unskilled” and see their community of interest as a class, recognising their shared subjection to the labour market and their common exploitation, and their common interest to emancipation as a class. Class-consciousness on the part of any one worker entails the recognition of their place in a class, presently ruled and enslaved and the recognition that the interests of either the ruling or ruled are antagonistic, and produces a class-struggle for the possession of political power as a necessary pre-condition for emancipation.

The economic power is always and everywhere the political ruling class. How else are we going to wrest this power from the hands of the merchant princes and industrial autocracy, who are in the minority, unless we organise, the majority, educate and organise ourselves to build the political power that will take from them the power they have to oppress and exploit. As long as we permit the few to own or control the sources and means of wealth, they will be in power while we will be in servitude. The class now in power cannot rule honestly. They must rule corruptly. They are in the minority. They have not the votes of their own to put them in power, but they corrupt the courts and to buy the politicians. They have the power to do this because they have the money and they have the money because they own the means of production and distribution.

In this system no person can boast of having the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We only work on conditions that the capitalist who owns the factory and machinery grants the permission to work, and the worker who works by permission lives by permission, and is in no sense free. The power that the employers have over people never can be abolished while they are in possession of the productive machinery that give them that power.

Some workers are opening their eyes at last and beginning to realise that they have brains as well as brawn, that they can think as well as work, that they are fit for something better than slavery. They are beginning to stand up for themselves and beginning to understand that what is done must be done by themselves. And so they are developing their self-determination and making the appeal to their own class solidarity.

The socialist believes that the means of production and distribution should be the common possession of the community. This is the teaching of socialism. The socialist’s job is to work with and on this consciousness, to deepen it, make it more inclusive; to make working-class action challenge the system more directly and unambiguously. The built-in conflicts within capitalism are the seedbed of working-class consciousness. They are an inescapable struggle that claims real solutions, solutions that cannot but contradict the system.