What is social class?
The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on “class”. It collects data on income levels, household wealth and income by industry, all of which shines a useful light on the realities of working-class life. But class cannot be properly captured by statistics. That is because class is a relationship—between people and the productive process they depend on to survive. A shared relationship to production defines a social class.
In capitalist society, a very small minority own and control the means of production. That is, whatever physical products—equipment, tools and technology—are required for any industry to operate. This minority is the ruling class, and includes those who own or control major corporations, senior bureaucrats, banking executives and media moguls, among others. The ruling class gets to choose what is made, the cost of products or services, who is employed and under what conditions. These economic decisions form the building blocks of society, and shape the conditions under which we all live.
The working class, who are the vast majority of the global population, don’t own or control the productive apparatus. They don’t make the important decisions about what is produced or under what conditions. Instead, workers sell their ability to work—their labour power—to a boss, in exchange for a wage or salary.
Workers can be white or blue collar, work primarily with their hands or their minds. They can be early childhood educators, IT assistants, train drivers, nurses, call centre operators or miners. What defines the working class is that they are denied control and decision-making power over the labour process, and they are exploited by their boss.
Workers are the lifeblood of the economy. They produce every commodity you can think of and carry out myriad services—like maintaining roads and infrastructure, educating the population and caring for the sick—without which the economy could not operate.
But workers perform all this indispensable labour not as free individuals but under rules and conditions imposed by bosses. You can’t show up to work whenever you please even under the most “flexible” arrangements. Construction workers employed to build a casino can’t decide to build a hospital instead. Workers are reduced to objects in the labour process, mere components of production with little or no agency or democratic right to make decisions about the work they do.
Importantly for the bosses, workers are not only denied control over how they work, but also over the products of their labour. The value of what most workers produce in a day is far in excess of what they take home in the form of a wage or salary. The bosses keep the rest, a significant part of which ends up as profit. The expression “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime” encapsulates this relationship, and the theft that is at the heart of it.
Workers and bosses, then, are in an antagonistic relationship with each other. What’s good for one is bad for the other. The first page of any business textbook will tell you that minimising operating costs will bring in more revenue. Paying workers low wages, denying “benefits” like sick leave and skimping on workplace conditions including safety regulations can mean more in the bank for a company.
For workers, high pay, job security, greater access to leave and safer working conditions mean a better life. And because workers are human beings, not actually cogs in a machine, they can organise to fight for these things. So the exploitative and antagonistic relationship between bosses and workers gives rise to a constant struggle, taking different forms at different times, but which shapes the capitalist economy.
Not everyone is a capitalist or a worker. The middle classes form a substantial minority of society, comprising small business owners, general practitioners, senior academics, many freelance artists and writers, sole-trader solicitors and barristers, or mid-level managers and supervisors, for example. The middle classes may own and control sections of production—like a small shop—without being titans of industry. They may have significant control over their labour—the head of human resources doesn’t need to log their bathroom breaks—or might be responsible for exploiting a few workers themselves, despite also having a boss. The middle classes don’t have the economic influence of either workers or bosses, and tend to be pulled in the direction of one or the other politically.
Capitalism pivots around the exploitation of workers by bosses, and the interests of a group— what is good or bad for them—and their ideas and attitudes, are shaped by their class position.
The ruling class are driven by endless competition for profit. They benefit from the monetisation of everything, and collective rights for workers and the oppressed being trampled if they stand in the way of profit-making. Members of the ruling class are used to being in control, and treating other people as a means to an end, or a competitor for market share and profit. They can unite around limited demands, but ultimately they are pitted against each other, loyal only to their bottom lines.
Working-class life, on the other hand, is characterised much of the time by alienation and powerlessness. Workers are taught that there are serious consequences for defying authority. Breaking the rules at work could cost you a job and an income, even if the rules are unsafe like working in hot weather, or humiliating like being expected to carry out errands for superiors. Workers are made to feel like a cog in a machine they have no control over, and face chronic insecurity in the competition for jobs, housing, and the fight to stay afloat as prices rise.
But at the same time, working-class life is fundamentally collective. Workers have to cooperate with each other for production to function effectively and for the economy to keep ticking over. The injustices of exploitation that can make workers feel the most alone are shared by millions of others. Sharing grievances together, and being exploited by a boss together, time and again push workers to fight back as a class.
Only through standing together as a group can workers exercise power, by collectively stopping production and the flow of profits to the bosses. Working-class resistance can push back against individualism and the powerlessness engendered by capitalism. It can bring to the fore a sense of solidarity and the collective good, ideas we are told by our superiors are contrary to human nature because they are contrary to the ethos of capitalism. By forcing billions together in exploited labour, capitalism plants the seeds of working-class rebellion that show the hope for a better world.
