Class is the division of people into groups based on their relationship to ownership and work. In capitalist society, the basic class division is between those who own productive resources — land, factories, businesses, capital — and those who do not and must work for wages to survive. The owners (sometimes called the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, or capitalists) profit from the work of others. The workers (sometimes called the working class or proletariat) produce value that exceeds their wages, and the difference goes to the owners. This is not a difference of income or lifestyle but of structural position: the relationship between owner and worker is one of authority and dependence.
Class is not the same as being rich or poor, though it correlates. A small business owner who works alongside their employees and earns a modest income still occupies a different structural position from those employees — they own the business, make the decisions, and can fire workers. A well-paid professional who earns more than many business owners is still a worker if their income depends on selling their labor to an employer. Class names the relationship, not the paycheck.
Anarchism and Marxism agree that class division is a fundamental feature of capitalism and that the interests of owners and workers are structurally opposed. They disagree about what to do about it. Marxism proposes that the working class should organize as a class, seize state power, and use it to reorganize the economy. Anarchism argues that this solution reproduces the problem: a workers’ party that takes over the state becomes a new ruling class — a new group of people with authority over everyone else. The anarchist position is that class domination and state domination are two faces of the same structure, and abolishing one requires abolishing both.
Class intersects with other forms of domination. Racial capitalism — as analyzed by Cedric Robinson — shows that class exploitation has always been organized through racial hierarchies: slavery, colonial extraction, and racialized labor markets are not incidental to capitalism but constitutive of it. Gender shapes class through unwaged domestic and reproductive labor — work that capitalism depends on but does not pay for. Colonialism shapes class by dispossessing entire peoples of their land and subsistence, forcing them into wage labor within an economy organized for the benefit of the colonizer. Anarchism insists that class cannot be analyzed in isolation from these other structures of hierarchy.
Related terms
- Capitalism — the economic system that produces class division
- Property — the ownership that creates the division between classes
- Exploitation — the extraction of value from workers by owners
- The state — the institution that enforces class arrangements
- Hierarchy — the broader structure of which class is one expression
- Domination — the condition class produces
- The general strike — the working class exercising collective power
- Self-organization — workers coordinating without owners or managers