The Marxist Concept: class as exploitation

The pivotal question that anchors the Marxist conceptualization of class is the question of human emancipation: “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic oppression and exploitation within capitalist societies?” The starting point for Marxist class analysis is a stark observation: The world in which we live involves a juxtaposition of extraordinary prosperity and enhanced potentials for human creativity and fulfilment along with continuing human misery and thwarted lives. The central task of the theory is to demonstrate first, that poverty in the midst of plenty is not somehow an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature, but the result of the specific design of our social institutions, and second, that these institutions can be transformed in such a way as to eliminate such socially unnecessary suffering. The concept of class, then, in the first instance is meant to help answer this normatively laden question.

The specific strategy in the Marxist tradition for answering the normative question leads directly to the question about historical variation. The normative question asks what needs transforming for human emancipation to occur. The theory of history in Marx – generally called “historical materialism” – lays out an account of the historical dynamics that make such transformations possible, and in the more deterministic version of the theory, inevitable. Again, the concept of class figures centrally in this theory of historical development.

The most distinctive feature of the concept of class elaborated within Marxism to contribute to the answer of these two questions is the idea of exploitation. Marx shares with Weber the central idea that classes should be defined in terms of the social relations that link people to the central resources that are economically relevant to production. And, as with Weber, Marx sees these relations as having a systematic impact on the material well-being of people -- both “exploitation” and “life chances” identify inequalities in material well-being that are generated by inequalities in access to resources of various sorts. Thus both of these concepts point to conflicts of interest over the distribution of the assets themselves. What exploitation adds to this is a claim that conflicts of interest between classes are generated not simply by what people have, but also by what people do with what they have. The concept of exploitation, therefore, points our attention to conflicts within production, not simply conflicts in the market.

Exploitation is a complex and challenging concept. In classical Marxism this concept was elaborated in terms of a specific conceptual framework for understanding capitalist economies, the “labour theory of value.” In terms of sociological theory and research, however, the labour theory of value has never figured very prominently, even among sociologists working in the Marxist tradition. And in any case, the concept of exploitation and its relevance for class analysis does not depend on the labour theory of value.

The concept of exploitation designates a particular form of interdependence of the material interests of people, namely a situation that satisfies three criteria:

1. The inverse interdependent welfare principle: the material welfare of exploiters causally depends upon the material deprivations of the exploited.
2. The exclusion principle: this inverse interdependence of welfares of exploiters and exploited depends upon the exclusion of the exploited from access to certain productive resources.
3. The appropriation principle: Exclusion generates material advantage to exploiters because it enables them to appropriate the labour effort of the exploited.