Class Consciousness, Envy, And Conflict Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Throughout the twentieth century, class played a central role in the politics of the advanced capitalist democracies. The accommodation of an increasingly conscious working class was a major preoccupation of national politics, and the development of class compromises largely conditioned the development of the welfare state and industrial regulations. Industrial states sought to contain class conflict, which are ultimately distributive conflicts, in the political sphere to head off more revolutionary politics. Thus, the extent of working class mobilization and organization influences the development of welfare and regulative institutions.

Marx’s Class Conflict Theory

Considerable debate exists over what constitutes a class, what class interests are, and what causes class conflicts to occur. The most well-known theory to advance a central role for class consciousness and conflict in politics is that of Karl Marx. Marx defines classes in terms of the nature of their relations to the means of production, leading to a two-part class structure. The bourgeoisie is the class that owns and controls the means of production, making it the class of capitalists. On the other hand, there is the proletariat, which consists of those who don’t own capital and who are dependent on the sale of their labor for survival. The conflict between these two classes arises from the fact that the bourgeoisie depends on the exploitation of the proletariat for its income. Exploitation is understood here in the technical sense of extracting labor from the proletariat.

In the Marxist picture, class conflict will result from the proletariat’s development of class consciousness. This occurs when the proletariat becomes aware of the objective interest rooted in its material position due to a worsening of its condition. The objective interest of the proletariat is to end its exploitation, which is due to their no ownership of the means of production, and to therefore abolish private property. For Marx, the development of class consciousness is a necessary aspect of capitalist logic and development that compels the increasing immiseration of the proletariat. Class conflict does not concern the distribution of wealth—which Marx considers false consciousness—but concerns the nature of the property regime itself. Thus, envy plays a small motivational role in Marxist class theory because the disadvantaged class does not crave what the advantaged class has, but wants to end its exploitation and create an egalitarian system of ownership. Marxist class conflict cannot be contained in the democratic politics of the liberal state. It is, rather, revolutionary in nature, compelling the overthrow of the capitalist state and property regime.

However, Marxist class theory failed to predict many of the dynamics of class consciousness and conflict working against class revolution. The working class did not mobilize on the basis of an interest regarding its relationship to the means of production but rather on the basis of its distributive share and treatment. As such, it did not lead to revolutionary politics but to a distributive conflict contained in democratic politics. Moreover, capitalist development in the twentieth century did not lead to the steady immoderation of the proletariat but instead to the uneven improvement of its material condition. The narrow definition of a class is at the heart of Marxism’s problems in predicting and accounting for the nature of class consciousness or conflict. Its concept of class lacked a connection between class position and the actual life chances and experiences of its members. Defining class on the basis of relationships to the means of production cannot account for the interests of, for example, the salaried white-collar classes or for those of the industrial middle class.

Weberian Class Theory

The second major approach to class consciousness and conflict, that of Max Weber and neo-Weberians, attempts to make up for deficiencies in Marxist class theory. For Weber, ownership of capital—or lack of it—is one of a number of market capacities that deter mine individuals’ class position, which also includes skills and education. The possession of market capacities constitutes one’s market situation so that one’s class position is “determined by the amount and kind of power, or lack of such, to dispose of goods or skills for the sake of income in a given economic order.” For Weber, class positions are defined by an overlap of the objective features of individuals’ class situations, life chances or “the typical chance for a supply of goods, external living conditions, and personal life experiences.”

For Weber, class conflict arises on the basis of growing class consciousness. Class structure refers to objective positional categories based on the distribution of life chances—shared class situations. The class structure is the “raw material” of class interests rather than the conscious understanding of interests by a group of similarly situated people. Class formation refers to the processes in which subjective experience and awareness of the fatefulness of positions within the class structure come to be shared by its members. Class formation is, thus, the creation of a collective identity based on a mutually perceived interest in altering the class structure. Class conflict occurs through class formation and concerns the distribution of market capacities and life chances. Unlike Marx’s theory of class conflict, Weberian class conflict can be contained in the liberal democratic state given because it does not concern relationships to the means of production and the distribution of life chances generated by the market and the capitalist state.

Bibliography:

Esping-Andersen, Gosta. Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Giddens, Anthony. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson, 1973.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto, edited by E. Hobsbawm. New York: Verso, 1985.
Weber, Max. From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Wright, Erik Olin. Classes. London: Verso, 1985.