Class and Marxism: Some Points for Discussion

Leong Yew, Research Fellow, University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore

Although the term, class, has a much longer etymological heritage, it is today virtually inseparable from the embrace of Marxism. At its broadest sense, class refers to divisions or groupings of people that are usually in accordance with some form of ranking or hierarchy. Such a description is too general to mobilize consciousness about the widespread inequality or the social effects resulting from the relations between different classes, particularly after the onset of industrialization in Western societies. As a consequence, Marxist thought pegs class into two senses of historicity: a present phase constituted by an exploitative relationship between the capital-owning class and the proletariat; and a teleology represented by the movement from primitive forms of communalism, to various phases of capitalist modes of production, and on to the final stage of a classless communist society. Class, as Anthony Brewer asserts, is via Marxism more effectively understood as "opposing positions within a structure of social relations" rather than simply "groups of people" (11-12). These oppositions identify the elements at the heart of domination and exploitation, the emergence of interclass conflict when the working class becomes aware of the inequities between classes, and provide for liberation beyond capitalism.

For postcolonial studies, class as a category is important in the operations of colonial and imperial discourse as well as enables different strategies of postcolonial resistance:

• The inequality of classes and the exploitation of the proletariat within individual Western societies provide an economic model for both horizontal and vertical class divisions throughout the world. During the height of European imperialism, these class structures were reproduced at the colonial peripheries as the indigenous population came to be veritable extensions of the metropolitan working class, while the devolution of colonial authority led to the creation of smaller, educated indigenous elites forming the perfunctory localized capitalist class. While Marx never produced a theory on the development of class system within the imperial world, it is V.I. Lenin who developed this in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This exploitation of peripheral labour and repatriation of raw material persists until the present time and continues to be noted as a more enduring form of imperialism, sustained by American capitalism, and also through the uneven forces of globalization, underdevelopment, and dependency. Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank are notable scholars of contemporary dependency theory. Although the era of formal European imperialism has ended, the class structures imposed on its colonies remain ambiguously rigid. Independence in many new nation-states did lead to the expansion of an educated middle class, but class divisions remained as did the potential for class conflict. Moreover, the assumption of capitalism in its now globalized form meant the creation of a supra-national class system. Two types of economic processes dominate this system. First, the traditional economy based on the production physical commodities sustains the exploitation of Third World countries as sources of cheap raw material and labour. Second, the more advanced form of capitalism goes beyond physical commodities but emphasizes "intellectual" products like knowledge, computer software, cultural artefacts and so on. These later types of capitalism continue to reinforce class hierarchy by placing the developed countries firmly in control of the intellectual modes of production.



• The intractibility of class structures constructs different forms of consciousness and perceptions of truth or normality. The ideas of the capitalist class have often been noted as the dominant ideas of society (quote by Karl Marx). Hence the prevailing "narratives" about a society's history, norms, social roles and responsibilities, and expectations of interclass mobility are not objective truths but strategies used to enforce a stable class system. Similarly these ideas of the capitalist class are adapted in the colonized areas so as to make the indigenous population a docile and compliant labour force. For example, race can become intertwined with class in which "Whiteness" becomes synonymous with authority and the ruling class, while being coloured meant the acceptance of oneself as inferior, doomed to an unexplainable yet self-evident fate of hardship and acceptance of White capitalist overlordship.
  
  
• One of the major tropes in colonial discourse is "otherness," predicated largely through gender, racial, and cultural differences. Through this colonial discourse mobilizes a wide array of measures to separate the colonialist self as not simply "different" from the colonized other, but as superior to the varyingly feminine, exotic, mysterious, barbaric, and childlike ways of the native. Such measures legitimize colonialism in many ways: by representing the native as feminine, imperial power comes to be seen as the masculine hero to the rescue; by depicting the native as childlike, the colonial master is seen as a benevolent father. The notion of "class" offers colonial discourse analysis an additional element to consider as part of the many markers of difference. In this case indigenous populations become other through their participation in the mode of production and ownership of capital (or lack thereof) as masses of people subjected to domestication of imperial capital.
  
  
• The concept of "class," once accepted as materially real, becomes the collective site for resistance. Although class is as equally problematic and arbitrary as gender and race, its reification is a form of strategic essentialism that mobilizes different political activities. In the first few decades following the end of the second world war, class distinctions were vital in order for Marxist (or Marxist-inspired) anti-colonial revolutionaries to design a course of action against colonialism. Typically, the quest for independence took place at many levels: the indigenous working class in opposition to the now delegitimized "foreign" capitalists; the merging of nationalism with the proletariat and the conflation of capitalism with imperialism; and in many cases, the recognition that colonialism was as much a mental or psychological state as it was formal and physical (see Frantz Fanon). These sites of resistance did not just produce nationalism but also gave rise to exceedingly large cultural movements using different modes of aesthetic expressions.

Related Material

• Amin, Samir. Unequal Development. Hassocks: The Harvester Press and New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986.
• Barone, Charles A. Marxist Thought on Imperialism: Survey and Critique. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1985.
• Brewer, Anthony. Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
• Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Peking: The Foreign Language Press, 1975.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Last Modified: 22 April, 2002