caste and class

[Yuppie Grinder]

What are the differences between class and caste other than caste being formalized? Does the word caste just refer to class in feudalist society?

[Belleraphone]

I believe classes have political equality on the ground (obviously not in the government). The owner of a big business can't walk into a mechanics shop and point at the mechanic and have him thrown in jail (theoretically anyway.) A proletariat can also rise to the rank of bourgeois and climb the class ladder, although it is unlikely.

None of this is true with castes.

[Yuppie Grinder]

You didn't explain how they were fundementally different things. Through class struggle power on a societal scale tends to decentralize. In more modern times the parasitic classes do not hold the same sort of unfettered power they once held over us, thank god. That doesn't mean that the caste has a different nature than class or anything. Were feudalist and slave socities not divided into classes by private ownership of the means of economic production? Someone with an understanding of class dynamics in pre-capitalist society, help!

[Tim Finnegan]

Castes are an exclusive social group defined in cultural and legal terms, while classes are an economic category defined by relationship to the means of production. Castes are typically characterised by the exclusive attribution of a particular social function, similar to orders, but are generally more restricted in vertical terms, generally (although not necessarily) coinciding with a particular economic class. In Marxist terms, class exists in the economic base of a society, while caste exists in the superstructure, although there is naturally an interaction between the two categories.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Thank you.

[Franz Fanonipants]

interesting side note - in Colonial Latin America, esp. New Spain (Mexico) a system of castas denoted racial variance among people. castas tended to be pretty arbitrarily applied and oftentimes people would go through several casta designations within their lifetimes, but they did have a very real correlation to class position.

[Grigori]

Las castas de los paises hispanohablantes and the caste system of india are very VERY different in nature