: 'Social Class is a function of ones relationship to the means of production'- or, the same thing a different way 'Ones social class is a function of one's position in the relations/system of production.'Class can be understood as a function of one's relation to the system of exchange -- and Marx did so, so it might be worthwhile to review what it was that he did. Marx explained how social class is an empirically-specifiable relation of persons to actual phenomena of economic exchange.
CAUTIONARY NOTE: NONE of this is to imply that 1) I am a Marxist, 2) I am not a Marxist, or 3) Marx did real social science. All I am arguing is that Marx created empirical categories for the practice of real social science, and for that reason he is duly considered a canonical figure of classical sociology (along with Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Mead, according to Wallace and Wolf's CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY (3rd ed.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991)).
First of all, within capitalism, there are two basic relations of value to (empirically-existing) things:
1) Use-value -- this is when a human being relates to a material object in a way that pertains to his relation to the natural world. One might use a hammer to pound nails, to make artistic works, to recycle its contents, as a weapon etc., and these uses are what defines the use-values of a hammer. The use-value of a hammer is the relation of the hammer (etc., for example) to the human using it.
2) Exchange-value -- This is a concept that Marx uses as very close to "price," although he uses the word "exchange-value" to indicate that all exchange-values need not be indicated in relation to money, that for instance even in barter we have exchange values (that so many baseball cards are worth a toy car that two children might trade with each other, for instance). At any rate, if one goes into your local convenience store, one will find that everything has a price, and that that price of each particular thing defines the present-moment exchange-value of that thing, as it is listed on the attached price-tag. Exchange-values, furthermore, define things as COMMODITIES, a word which will be very useful to theory, as we shall see.
Exchange value is the human relation to an object pertaining NOT GENERALLY to the natural world encompassing the human being and the object, but MORE SPECIFICALLY exchange value is the human relation to an object pertaining MERELY to the distribution of objects amongst human beings. One might buy or sell or trade hammers, all activities implicating the exchange-value of a hammer.
Exchange value also implies a certain set of relations between the exchanging human beings. Most important among these relations is PROPERTY -- according to the relation of property, the world of nature is carved up into individual material things which individual people then own -- and ownership is defined as the absolute dominion of a person over a thing. You can't exchange a thing unless it is owned. A secondary relation between human beings as implied by exchange is the acceptance of MONEY as a GENERAL SIGNIFIER OF WEALTH -- if monetary exchanges are to become the primary mode of distributing objects, then people must accept money as having more than a "natural" use value. I might, for instance, weave a sweater out of dollar bills to keep myself warm in the winter (they are, after all, made of cloth!), but this use of money would not express the relation between people implicit in the common public use of dollar bills. One needs the concept of the conventional signifier of wealth to explain economic social rituals involving money, therefore.
3) there are two different social ritual of exchange, different in their physical manifestations as phenomena, that characterize capitalist exchange, and this is all related by Marx in CAPITAL:
3a) There is the exchange-ritual Marx called C-M-C, commodity-money-commodity, which is the ritual of the working classes, who sell their commodity, labor, for money, which they then spend upon another commodity, the expropriated produce of other workers, as a means of subsistence. The material indicators of C-M-C are that the first C in C-M-C is always LABOR-POWER (the physical energy coming out of the laborer himself), and that the last C is the use of commodities not for further trade, but rather for the relationship of the consumer to the natural world. I might trade a popsicle, but within the model of 3a) I buy a popsicle in order to eat it. C-M-C is an expression of the production and consumption of use-values by the working class.
3b) There is also the exchange-ritual that Marx calls M-C-M, money-commodity-money, the ritual of the capitalist classes, who use money to buy two commodities called "labor-power" and "capital" (as defined below), which are then used to produce a line of commodities, which then are used to fetch money from the buying public. In this ritual it is important to remember that the middle C always includes an element of capital, defined as the system of physical entities (factories, work teams, raw materials, stores, markets) needed by capitalists in order to make monetary profits. All of which PHYSICALLY EXISTS as something one can POINT TO. The expression "M-C-M" expresses a use of material things so that capitalists can make monetary profits off of the exchange values of things as they are understood within the capitalist money-system.
4) The two basic social classes, expressed in abbreviated form as "labor" and "capital," exist EMPIRICALLY insofar as one can point to the OBSERVABLE PERFORMANCE of the above rituals, respectively, 3a) and 3b). In most capitalist societies, one class of people is responsible for enacting C-M-C, and another class of people is responsible for enacting M-C-M, although this second class may also enact C-M-C.
In short, one can be a member both of the working class and the owning class, although one can also point to two basic classes merely in relation to M-C-M, the performance of the use of capital and the employment of labor to make profits. Either one performs M-C-M, either one employs workers and uses assets to make a profit, or one doesn't. The fact that one can be both worker and capitalist does not make the worker-capitalist distinction any less derived from real, observable, rituals of exchange.
To sum it up: the "working class" and the "owning class" are empirical extrapolations from the PERFORMED relations of human beings to each other and to the NATURAL WORLD. They exist in the same sense that the nose on your face is there.
My question: RD, does this do anything for you? If you define social class as pertaining to the "relationship to the means of production," isn't that a different paradigm than the one I've explained? After all, one can manage the means of production and be part of a "managerial class," or one can be excluded from the means of production and be part of the "unemployed class," or one can be a money-grub and belong to the "lumpenproletariat," but that's different from saying that there are two basic classes, capital and labor, and that they are related to the rituals of exchange, not the rituals of production. Isn't it? Or are the "relations of production" the same as the "relations of exchange"?
