We often talk about classes: the working class, the capitalist class, the middle class. But what exactly is a class? A class is a social arrangement that allows one group in society to seize the labor of another group.
Under feudalism, the ruling noble class owned all the land and were able to appropriate part of the serfs’ work by taking a portion of their harvest. Under capitalism, the capitalist class owns almost all the assets in society, particularly the industrial assets, and appropriates part of the workers’ production work for themselves as profit. The worker isn’t paid for the full value that they produce.
How did the nobles and how do the capitalists pull this off? It depends on how society is organized at the time and what classes make up society. Throughout history, humans have used labor to change things found in nature into things that are more useful for them. Almost always, people work together to produce what they want. Even the family farmer who works by themselves uses tools produced by other people. Most artists use paint brushes created by other people.
To produce, we need factories, land, machinery, and raw materials. Things that we need to create goods from our labor are called the means of production. But these means of production are useless if there’s no one to use them. It’s necessary for humans to expend labor using these means of productions to make the goods and services we want and need.
Your class is a description of your relationship to these means of production. The main means of production in feudal times was land. If you owned land, you were a noble. If you didn’t own land, you had to ask the noble for permission to use part of their land. In return for the noble lending you part of their land, they required you to turn over a portion of your harvest to them. The noble was able to get food without having to actually work, all because the noble owned all the land.
Today, most of us don’t have the capacity to produce without working for someone else, the capitalist, who does have the means of production at their disposal. In return for them giving us means of production (tools, factories, computers, raw materials, etc.) we allow the capitalists to take part of the value we produce with those means of production. From my economist’s point of view, we should pay the capitalist for using their tools. But the problem is that we end up paying much more than the value of those tools just so that we can earn our wages and have money to live on.
One of the brilliant contributions of Karl Marx was to understand the laws of history. Marx demonstrated that economics is the basis for human history. Under different economic systems, there are different classes, again, different groups of people with different relationships to the means of production. Some of these groups have their labor exploited by other groups. We call the groups that have their labor exploited the oppressed and the people exploiting them the oppressors.
And what determines what type of economic system society will have? The level of technology in the means of production. In our times, production takes place principally in large factories and workplaces with complicated machines. Even our farmers use a variety of complicated tractors and other machines. Therefore, capitalism is the method used to organize society.
It’s the level of technology that determines what system will be used to organize production. Humans for thousands of years didn’t have slavery. The production technology we had was so primitive that with our available tools, it took each one of us nearly the whole day just to produce the amount of food and shelter we needed to barely eke out an existence. Under those circumstances, it made no logical sense to have a slave. The slave would take all day just to produce enough food for themselves.
However, once human technology developed enough for humans to produce a surplus of goods in one day’s work, it began to make economic sense to make slaves out of other humans captured in war. Gradually, production relations began to change as previously egalitarian societies began to divide themselves into the oppressed (the slaves) and the oppressors (the masters).
But it’s not only the technology itself that develops. Humans ourselves also begin to develop, learning how to use the new technology and apply it more efficiently in our everyday lives and work. And so, society changes both because technology changes and because we change and become more productive.
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