Class

[percept¡on]

Sort of inspired by the "American Working Class" thread...

Is class an objective characteristic created by material conditions, or a subjective characteristic created by conscious association with a social group (based or not based on common relations to the means of production?

Like to hear some thoughts.

[spartafc]

Class is an objective factor with implications for a huge range of factors - education, health, death and etc. The implications of class are widely documented statistically.

Class consciousness (the self-awareness of a social class, its capacity to act in its own rational interests, or the extent to which an individual is conscious of the historical tasks their class sets for them) varies greatly.
[See Gramsci for more on this topic].

[monkeydust]

I think that class, in the usual understanding, actually involves both factors.

On the one hand, class has to be in some way a subjective phenomenon insofar as it has no significance in itself without being collectively perceived as such by a number of persons. There's nothing literally about someone that makes them intrinsically one or other class without them subjectively being grouped as such.

But what gives rise to this subjective collective perception - or consciousness, if you prefer - is objective material conditions. In this sense, and for most extents and purposes, it would be fair to call class "objective" - although pedantically speaking it has to involve a subjective side as well.

[Pawn Power]

The concept of class is objective, while the views of a class is subjective towards its particular members. Each class is influenced by factors created by its class and thus has a subjective outlook on various issues. Class as a notion or acuality is objective because of its correlated entirety in society. Class has a rational that is globally encompassing and cannot be skewed.

[percept¡on]

If class is based on objective conditions, but is meaningless without the subjective creation of class consciousness, then this implies that classes can be 'formed' in ways that only loosely correlate to their material or objective basis.

If all of this is accurate then is it more important to study the material conditions of a society and the mode of production or the subjective class identities created by the members of that society?

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by percept¡[email protected] 12 2005, 01:54 PM
If all of this is accurate then is it more important to study the material conditions of a society and the mode of production or the subjective class identities created by the members of that society?
The Marxian definition of class is based on the relation people have with the means of production. In order to understand history and the world around us, Marx used a material basis; what is more material than what we create to survive. Marx argued that what we are became because of our needs to survive. Therefore existence takes on a material form that determines us.

In order for any revolutionary change to happen these relations must be identified in some way. In answer to our question, I would say that it is more important to "study" the objective reasoning for class because as an understanding this will lead you to conclude it's illogicality and the belief in change rises out of that.

[Vanguard1917]

The class structure of capitalist society is an objective reality. Working class, communist consciousness, i think, comes about 'subjectively' - the working class does attain revolutionary communist consciousness as a result of objective conditions alone. Workers have to be won over to communist ideas. The objective conditions of capitalist society set the framework for a communist ideology that is scientific, non-utopian. Workers may be won over to such an ideology - or they be won over to a bourgeois, liberal ideology. The decisive element here is subjective - i.e. the strength of communist political forces over bourgeois political forces. "Every class struggles is a political struggle", as Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto.