Class as a Structural Relation, Not an Identity

Ask a sample of undergraduates what class is, and the answers will cluster around income bands, lifestyle, taste, accent, and education. These are not unreasonable intuitions; they pick out real features of how class is experienced. But they are not what Marx meant by class, and the slippage between the everyday concept and Marx's is the source of much confusion in the subsequent literature. Marx's concept is structural. A class, for Marx, is defined by its position in the relations of production: whether one owns productive property and hires labor, or sells one's labor power for a wage. On this definition, class is not a matter of where one stands in an income distribution, what one consumes, how one speaks, or how one identifies. It is a matter of what one does within the economic system that produces goods and services (Marx 1867, pp. 270-280).

The point is analytical, not moral. Two workers earning very different wages — a Silicon Valley software engineer and a warehouse picker — share, on Marx's definition, a structural position: both sell labor power to a firm they do not own, and the surplus generated by their labor accrues to owners of the firm. Their lifestyles differ sharply; their relation to the means of production does not. Conversely, a small business owner earning less than the software engineer occupies a different structural position — a petty bourgeois position, in Marx's vocabulary — because she owns the productive capital, however modest, and hires others (Marx and Engels 1848, pp. 14-16).

This structural framing contrasts with three widely used alternatives. The Weberian tradition treats class as one dimension among several (class, status, party), with class itself defined by market position rather than production relations (Weber 1922). Bourdieu's framework defines class by distributions of economic, cultural, and social capital, with classes becoming recognizable through habitus and taste (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 169-175). Popular discourse mixes all of these — income, job, education, accent, neighborhood — into a loose gestalt called 'class.' Each of these alternatives captures something real. None is quite what Marx was doing.

Why the distinction matters: Marx's claim is that the structural relation generates tendential interests regardless of whether individuals perceive them. A wage laborer has an objective interest in the terms of the wage bargain, the conditions of work, and the disposition of surplus — an interest that follows from her position, not from her consciousness of it. This allows Marx to speak about the interests of a class that has not yet recognized itself as a class. Hence the distinction between Klasse an sich — the class in itself, a group sharing an objective structural position — and Klasse für sich — the class for itself, which has developed consciousness of that position and the capacity to act collectively on it (Marx 1847, pp. 211-213).

The an sich/für sich distinction is not merely terminological. It tells us that class analysis cannot be reduced to opinion polling or self-identification. A population may occupy a shared structural position — say, platform delivery workers in a major city — while being dispersed, individualized, and lacking any collective consciousness. By the standard of class-identification surveys, they are not a class. By the Marxian standard, they are a class in itself that has not yet become a class for itself. This is not a semantic quibble; it is the reason the framework can predict patterns of collective action rather than merely describe attitudes (Therborn 1983, pp. 39-44).

The analytical move carries a cost. By defining class structurally, Marx sets aside dimensions of inequality that are not reducible to production relations — status hierarchies, ethnoracial orderings, gendered divisions of labor. Subsequent sociology has argued at length about whether these can be folded into class analysis, treated as autonomous structures, or understood through an intersection of logics. Module 4 will return to Weber's multidimensional framework as the principal classical alternative. For now the point is that Marx's concept is doing one specific thing: identifying the structurally generative relation within the capitalist mode of production. Whether that is the whole of inequality or only one axis of it is a question about the concept's scope, not its coherence.