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To cite this article: Keith Graham (1989) Class a simple view, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 32:4,
419-436, DOI: 10.1080/00201748908602203
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201748908602203
University of Bristol
The aim is to defend the starting-point of Marx's theory of class, which is located in
a definition of the working class in the Communist Manifesto. It is a definition
solely in terms of separation from productive resources and a need to sell one's
labour power, and it is closely connected with Marx's thesis that the population in
capitalism has a tendency to polarize. That thesis conflicts with the widely-held
belief in the growth of a large middle class, unaccounted for by Marx. Moreover,
recent critics such as Elster, Roemer, and Cohen have argued that this definition
fails even in its own terms. The definition is refurbished so as to withstand these
objections. But is there any point in using it? Does it serve to pick out the
exploited producers as Marx intended? It does, once due attention is given to the
idea of the collective worker, which is central in the volume of Capital which Marx
himself published. That idea makes plain that it is an irreducibly corporate entity
which is productive and subject to exploitation. The structural conditions for
membership of that entity remove Marx's view from any simple identification of
working-class membership with manual or lowly labour.
I
The aim of this paper is not to defend the whole of Marx's theory of class
(whatever that is) but rather its starting-point, against a set of arguments
which purport to show that it is thoroughly misconceived. The startingpoint in question involves a conception of class resting on a definition in
terms of one's relation to the means of production, and an associated thesis
about the polarized class composition of contemporary society.
The Communist Manifesto opens with the declaration that the history of
all hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggles. It
proceeds with a characterization of the struggle in the capitalist era, between
the proletariat, the workers, and the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means
of social production and employers of wage labour. Their relation is seen
as the latest, and last, of a series of oppressive and exploitative relations
between classes. Many of the features of this particular relation are special
and specially complex, and one of the central tasks of the magnum opus,
Capital will be to lay bare their nature.
The antagonistic relation between bourgeoisie and proletariat is destined
to become more acute, and this is summarized in what one might call the
polarization thesis: 'Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into
II
Implicit in Marx's writings there is a conception of the working class; a
series of substantive theses about it; and also a set of prognoses about its
future. Among the substantive theses is the claim that the working class is
alone responsible for the production of surplus value. Among the prognoses
are the claims that working-class consciousness will grow and that political
action based upon that consciousness will occur. Roughly, what I want to
argue is that even if the prognoses have been mistaken, this does not
threaten the conception of the working class itself or its importance. On
the other hand, the falsity of the substantive theses would have that effect,
but it is much less obvious that their falsity has been established.
There is one explicit definition of the working class to be found in Marx's
writings (though it was put there by Engels). It occurs in a footnote in the
Communist Manifesto:
By proletariat [is meant] the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced
to selling their labour power in order to
live. (Marx and Engels [1848, p. 67])4
This definition of the proletariat is buried deep, and to insist on its importance is to incur something of the same social odium as a grave-robber.
Both sympathetic and unsympathetic critics engage in lengthy discussion
of the question how to construe Marx's idea of the working class, and offer
their own amended definitions, without any explicit reference to it.5 My
intention, nevertheless, is to rush in where other theorists resolutely refuse
to tread, and to defend Marx's starting-point. This obviously implies acceptance of a very wide definition of the working class, which will embrace
many individuals normally regarded as middle class.
There is, moreover, one form of objection to Marx's view which should
be challenged at the outset: what one might call the appeal to pre-existing
belief or linguistic habit. This is the sort of objection which implicitly takes
the form 'The wide definition yields the consequence that A"s are members
of the working class. But we don't ordinarily believe (or say) that A"s are
members of the working class. Therefore the wide definition is false'. That
form of argument relies on the suppressed premise that what we ordinarily
believe or say is true, adequate or otherwise satisfactory. It seems illadvised to rest a philosophical argument on such a contentious assumption,
even if there are recent historical precedents in the subject for doing so (cf.
Graham [1977, ch. 2]).
Explicit or implicit reliance on some assumption like this does occur.
Thus, Wright criticized his own earlier attempt to construct a theory of
class because it yielded results 'which did not correspond to an intuitive
idea of the working class': a range of technical and professional jobs were
left in that category whereas they 'are usually viewed as "middle class"'
(Wright [1985, p. 45]). Against these comments may be set Marx's affirmations of the need to challenge current social perceptions; the lament of
the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie 'has converted the physician,
the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage
labourers' (Marx and Engels [1848, p. 70]); the description of supervisors
Roemer objects to the idea that workers are coerced on the grounds that,
on Marx's premises, workers sell their labour power at its value. 'Coercive
exchange would, on the contrary, involve one side being forced to exchange
its service for less than its value' (Roemer [1982, p. 82]), and this leads him
to reject the idea that the labour process is at the centre of the Marxian
analysis of exploitation and class (ibid., p. 93).
These arguments, I suggest, force clarification of the original definition,
rather than abandonment of it. Let us reformulate it with more nuances,
but in a way which I hope retains the central drift:
By proletariat is meant the modern class of wage- or salary-earning people
whose lack of ownership of sufficiently significant means of production of
their own results in their being forced, for a significant period of their lives,
to offer their labour power for sale, during a significant proportion of that
period, if they are to live at an average, reasonable standard of living in the
prevailing historical circumstances without engaging in specifiably outlandish
or dangerous alternative activities, as well as people who are, in specifiable
ways, directly dependent for their own livelihood on members of the proletariat as defined.
This refurbished definition clarifies a number of points. It makes plainer
that reference to non-ownership of means of production in the original
definition is linked to reference to sale of labour power: the first is causally
responsible for the second. Hence Marx's theory does not fall foul of
Roemer's admonition that '[i]t is a mistake to elevate the struggle between
worker and capitalist in the process of production to a more privileged
position . . . than the differential ownership of productive assets' (Roemer
[1982, p. 93]). On the contrary, even conceding Roemer's general demonstration that exploitation can occur in the complete absence of a labour
market, Marx's chief preoccupation happens to be with a system of society
where there is such a market and where it results precisely from differential
ownership of productive assets.
Nor does the fact that there can be infinite degrees of ownership result
in an infinite number of class fragmentations, as Elster claims. Rather,
there is a non-arbitrary quantitative cut-off point. Without specifying a
figure, we can say that there is a point at which someone owns the means
of production in such large measure that it is no longer necessary for them
to enter into a wage-relation if they do not choose to. At that point
they cease to be members of the working class. Because a quantitative
consideration is built into the definition there will necessarily be borderline
cases, but this is consistent with the great bulk of cases falling on one side
or the other.
It also becomes clear that the claim about being forced to sell one's
labour power is an elliptical one. It is not a matter of being forced in an
Ill
Consider now an obvious objection. Even if we can sustain my refurbished
definition of the proletariat, there is no point in doing so. A concept must
do some work, it must play some role in increasing our understanding of
some phenomenon or other. But the concept of the proletariat defined
here does not. It no longer serves to pick out the homogeneous group of
wretched, impoverished, exploited beings which Marx had in mind. It will
include many who live in comfortable conditions and are themselves the
beneficiaries of the productive efforts of others, and it will certainly therefore be of no use in any attempt to reinstate the polarization thesis.
We should begin by noticing, as many commentators fail to, exactly how
impoverishment is a relative notion for Marx. He offers the analogy of a
house, which shrinks if a palace springs up beside it: in the same way,
the enjoyments of a worker may rise, but their social satisfaction, their
satisfaction relative to what a capitalist can enjoy, may fall if there is a
rapid growth in productive capital (Marx [1849, pp. 93-94]). He reinforces
this in Capital, insisting that 'in proportion as capital accumulates, the
situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse'
(Marx [1867, p. 799], italics added). Later, he insists that the nature of the
capital/wage relation ensures that the wage system is 'a system of slavery,
increasing in severity commensurately with the development of the social
productive forces of labour, irrespective of whether the worker is then better
or worse paid' (Marx [1875, p. 352], italics added). This suggests that Marx
does not believe that workers must remain at the level of wretchedness
which he witnessed in nineteenth-century Britain, or that they cannot
increase their material well-being as compared with some earlier time. It
further suggests that his reasons for collecting workers under the concept
of a class are more closely connected with their entrapment in a set of social
relations in the course of wealth production.
The distinction between productive and unproductive labour has been a
subject of lengthy debate amongst commentators, and I touch on it here
only to the extent necessary for making sense of Marx's theory of class.
His comments on the subject are anything but clear-cut, occurring mainly
in works which he did not himself see through the press (principally
Theories of Surplus Value and Capital vols. i and ii). Two cases apposite
to the present discussion are those of commercial distribution and super-
IV
Some of the difficulties in the ideas of productiveness and exploitation
discussed in section HI arise from an expository device employed by Marx
in Capital vol. i and reflected elsewhere. He begins from the idea of
individual human beings working on material so as to produce an object
which they can then exchange for some other object. Concentration on
that basic activity of a capitalist economy may lead to an equation of
productiveness with the process of manual transformation of natural matter.
Some commentators have arrived at a view very close to that, intending
explicitly to exclude from the realm of productive activity the production,
for example, of non-material goods (e.g. Mandel [1978, p. 43]).
But Marx begins from this basic case precisely in order to show that its
simplicity is deceptive: a network of complicated social relations necessarily
grows up around it, giving rise to new realities and the need for new
concepts and categories to understand them. Certainly the production
specifically of a material object comes to be no longer necessary for
The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the
capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital.
(Marx [1867, p. 644]; cf. Marx [1905-10: i. 156-7])
And he gives as an example of such production of surplus value, the case
of a schoolteacher who works himself into the ground to enrich the owner
of the school (Marx [1867, p. 644]; cf. Marx [1905-10: i. 292]).6
Six interesting points emerge from these observations. First, in the
measure that the image of a lone individual, working on a portion of raw
material and transforming it, is inapposite as an image of modern, largescale production, it becomes not merely difficult in practice but misconceived in principle to attempt to calculate whether an individual is a net
producer of surplus value. Abstract models, as in Roemer's arguments,
notwithstanding, there is no criterion we could adopt which would enable
us to decide in a concrete case whether an individual was a net exploiter
or exploitee. Marx makes the point that what distinguishes the division of
labour in manufacture is '[t]he fact that the specialized worker produces
no commodities. It is only the common product of all the specialized
workers that becomes a commodity' (Marx [1867, p. 475]), and he quotes
Thomas Hodgskin with approval: 'There is no longer anything which we
can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces
only some part of a whole, and each part, having no value or utility in
itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: It is my
product, this I will keep to myself (ibid., p. 475, n. 34).7
Second, in so far as we can ascribe the epithet 'productive' to a number
of individuals, it is not in virtue of some specific common characteristic
which they possess or some specific common activity which they carry out.
Rather, it is their combination into a unit which can itself be described as
productive that allows derivative ascription of that epithet to them. The
collective worker constitutes a collective in the sense which I have articulated elsewhere: certain powers are attributable to it which could not be
attributed to its constituent parts, and the significance of those constituents
in the context of the collective can be brought out only by an ineliminable
reference to it.8 A worker's productiveness consists in their contributing
positively to the collective's production of surplus value.
Third, the grounds on which to make such derivative attributions to
individuals are clearly and explicitly removed from any crude idea of manual
labour. It is one's position in a system, the fact of making a contribution
to it, of performing any of the subordinate tasks of the collective, which
qualify one for the epithet.9 Elsewhere Marx associates himself with the
NOTES
1 But what about the passage in Theories of Surplus Value where Marx criticizes Ricardo
for ignoring 'the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between
the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other' and 'maintain
themselves to an ever increasing extent directly out of revenue' (Marx [1905-10: ii. 573])?
That passage seems to me simply inconsistent with Marx's dominant view, especially in
the light of the conception of productive labour elaborated below in sections III and IV.
2 'All previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interest of
minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority' (Marx and Engels [1848, p.
78]). Hence the first step in the revolution is to 'win the battle of democracy' (ibid., p.
86). Compare Marx's support for the aims of the Chartists, and his linking this to the
possibility of emancipation and non-violent revolution (Graham [1986a, pp. 181-4]).
3 See esp. Graham (1986a, pp. 221-30).
4 This passage was added by Engels to the 1888 English edition. So far as I am aware Marx
himself nowhere offers as explicit a definition as this, but the definition is consistent with
the rest of the jointly-authored text of the Manifesto and, I should argue, consistent
with quasi-definitional statements made by Marx elsewhere, e.g. '"Proletarian" must be
understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than "wage-labourer", the man
who produces and valorizes "capital", and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes
superfluous to the need for valorization possessed by "Monsieur Capital" . . . " (Marx
[1867, p. 764, n. 1]). He also stresses the importance of being compelled to sell one's
labour power (ibid., p. 272).
5 This is true, for example, of both Miliband (1977) and Parkin (1979). Przeworski is an
exception. He calls attention to Engels's definition and Kautsky's subsequent echoing of
it, though only in order to point out that many who would normally be regarded and would
regard themselves as middle class fall under it (Przeworski [1985, p. 57]).
6 In opposing the idea that schoolteachers are productive Mandel argues that it is a basic
thesis of Capital that 'there can be no production without (concrete) labour, no concrete
labour without appropriation and transformation of material objects' (Mandel [1978, p.
43]), and he asks 'What is the "immaterial good" produced by a wage-earning teacher
. . .?' (ibid., p. 43, n. 48). However, what Marx says towards the end of the passage to
which Mandel refers is that the labour process, considered in abstraction from particular
social circumstances and forms 'is purposeful activity aimed at the production of usevalues' (Marx [1867, p. 290], italics added). It might be thought that this supports Mandel's
reading, since Marx introduces a commodity as 'an external object, a thing . . .' and says
it is the usefulness of a thing which makes it a use-value (ibid., pp. 125-6). But it is precisely
my point that these formulations, introduced right at the beginning of Capital, are
subsequently modified. This must be true, since what turns out later for Marx to be the
most important commodity, labour power, is not a thing. And the teacher produces surplus
value precisely by producing that commodity: labour power in various more developed or
specialized forms. That is the immaterial (though embodied) good which teachers produce.
7 Once again, there are tensions in Marx's own comments. He certainly allows identification
in principle of an individual's contribution, at least to the extent of speaking of total surplus
value being equal to the surplus value provided by one worker multiplied by the number
of workers employed (Marx [1867, pp. 417-18]). On the other hand, he suggests that 'the
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