The importance and meaning of social classes

The United States, the leader of capitalist states and the armed force of global capitalism, has declared war on Turkey. In other words, capitalism is attacking the Republic of Turkey economically, culturally, and politically. Any political strategy devised without acknowledging this reality is futile. It is the United States that produces, nurtures, multiplies, trains, arms, and pays the salaries of the PKK—or, more accurately, keeps the PKK alive. As long as the United States stands behind the PKK, and unless certain actions are taken directly against the US, rhetoric such as "we killed this many PKK members" or "we bombed this many areas" is insufficient.

For instance, can we close the Incirlik Air Base?

Can we close the Kürecik Radar Station?

If you say no, then it is already over. It turns out we were dead and had no one to mourn us. Therefore, we must fight against America, which is fighting us. Otherwise, you may suffer great losses, dangers, and disasters that are impossible to compensate for. The United States protects the interests of the capitalist class worldwide. It oppresses the peoples of the world everywhere. The capitalist class is getting richer globally. The oppression and poverty of the world's peoples are steadily increasing. American tyranny has reached our borders and is at war with us. For this reason, we must first understand and internalize the concept of class and form a strong solidarity as the working classes.

The solidarity of labor. The internal front must derive its strength from here. So, what is class?

Let us understand this. Prof. İzzettin Önder says:

“The concept of class was introduced in Marxist literature in the context of exploitation and income distribution. In Marx's fundamental approach, the definition of classes is based on the ownership of the means of production at one end, and the ownership of only the labor power that can be sold to make a living at the other. As is known, the existence of these two classes is a prerequisite for the formation of the capitalist system. Although Marx's basic class definition is based on the exploitation that occurs in the production process and the resulting different income groups, class concepts and definitions differentiated according to different criteria have been used in economics and sociology literature over time.

Although different in all types of usage, the concept and definition of class, in its most common usage, has been made as two opposing classes/sides: the exploiters and the exploited. In our discussion today, within the scope of this article, I want to talk about the social and economic pathologies that formations/clusters based on the criterion of political affiliation/dependency can create, by addressing the concept of class differently from its use in economic and social contexts.

The reason I am extending the definition of the class concept to such a different dimension is to point to the relationships between politics and capital, politics and poverty, and politics and religious sects in societies like Turkey, which have not been able to fully capitalize and where poverty is becoming increasingly widespread.

(…)

Political classes increase the 'degeneration of politics in the contexts of bourgeois democracy, capital-sect-politics relations, and in this context, imperialist relations.' Eventually, these diseased organizational structures become supporters of imperialism and capitalism. Masses that are unconscious and do not know what they are doing.”

In conclusion, those who own the means of production also control the power of labor. The element that creates these two classes arises from the laws of the functioning of capitalism.

Arif Koşar says the following about class:

In socialist thought, the analysis of society on the basis of classes carries great importance. This priority and importance of classes is both the result and the starting point of the scientific analysis of society. Class is the key concept of all of Marx's works and has a central place in almost all of them. Classes have become a fundamental element not only for analyzing social 'stratification' but also for analyzing the economic, social, political, and ideological relations and appearances of society.

In this respect, Marx's class analysis maintains its explanatory quality and relevance as a method that has the ability to explain, interpret, and—when it meets the masses—change the entire complexity of today's world.

Marx says:

“1. The existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production.”

Unlike Feuerbach, while Marx grasps the human being within their action and activity, he states that this activity takes place on a specific and inherited limiting/conditioning historical ground. The determining element on this historical ground is the act of producing one's needs, which the human being is inevitably involved in, that is, the relations of production themselves.

The individual, who has to enter into a relation of production through labor, is produced by being conditioned according to historical conditions; at the same time, they produce themselves as a member of a class through the historical form of their own activity. Therefore, production is not a phenomenon outside of human action. It is a matter of the production process, which is realized through the collective action of people, conditioning and forming the individual; which also leads to the human being becoming a member of a class at the same time as the labor process.

In summary, the conditions for the emergence of the working class could not have been at any time. It could only have been under the necessary historical, economic, and political conditions. For the property-owning laborer in the bosom of feudal society to turn into a propertyless wage worker, two processes had to take place simultaneously or sequentially: First; the small peasant or artisan had to lose the means of production they possessed in some way so that they would have no chance to work for themselves and would have to go to someone else's door to apply for a job. Second; within the same logic, for this person to be able to work for a capitalist, they had to be freed from the feudal—and personal—slavery ties that bound them to the land:

With what is stated above, it can be seen that Marx defined classes on the basis of the practice of production and the relations entered into within this practice. While presenting the fact that the source of income is not the cause but the result in the formation of classes through a very useful example, Marx reveals that he does not ignore status and interest groups within classes. However, his approach, which is based on exploitation relations in the production process, brings about a class conception that transcends statuses and layers.

This means the following: the ground for the inequality between classes and the existence of classes as the source of this inequality is not distribution relations, but essentially production relations. Classes cannot be eliminated by some possible changes in distribution relations, which are a result, but only by radical changes in production relations. Without touching their foundations, inequality in distribution can be softened to a certain extent, but the problem cannot be solved in its essence. The elimination of classes can be solved by the abolition of capitalist private property over the means of production that characterize production relations. Because the basis of the class division of society is not in distribution but in production relations. This is the most fundamental determination in Marxism's class analysis.

A significant portion of political economists and thinkers who put various social problems on their agenda had accepted the existence of classes. For this reason, although Marx placed classes at the center of all his work, he did not see it as a necessity to define them at length. But in Marx's general approach, classes were clearly and distinctly defined.

When considered with these new phenomena, on what basis should the division of society into classes be handled? The intellectual intellectuals of society have been turned into wage workers who produce surplus value for capital. As Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto; “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Therefore, outside the industrial sector, especially with the dominance of capitalist market relations in these areas, a significant portion of laborers working in trade, finance, service, office, law, engineering, etc., have become proletarianized or are becoming so. Marx made a very foresighted assessment regarding workers employed in the field of trade:

As for these commercial tasks, “as the necessary training, commercial knowledge, foreign languages, etc., are more and more reproduced more rapidly, easily, generally and cheaply along with the development of science and public education,” the acquisition of these qualifications becomes easier and the number of those who can acquire these qualifications increases. Of course, an economic capacity must also be created for this, and as capitalist production develops, unproductive sectors that will ensure the realization of surplus value also develop gradually. This creates the “possibility of providing this employment from classes that could not enter these jobs before and were at a lower standard of living.” Thus, “even though the capacity of labor increases, the wages of these workers fall.”

Marx takes as a basis the mutual relations that develop on the basis of the ownership of the means of production within production relations. In this respect, in his study specific to England, he draws attention to three main classes: the working class, the capitalist class, and the landowning class. Although England had virtually eliminated the small commodity-producing peasantry with the enclosure movement, the “petty bourgeoisie,” which is a small commodity producer in the city and village—that is, producing with its own labor over its own small property without employing workers—still maintains its existence. Furthermore, since Marx analyzed capital accumulation, he ignored the small commodity-producing peasantry, which is not directly involved in capital accumulation, due to the scope of his analysis. However, when the class, politics, and power relations of the social formation are handled, rather than the general tendencies of capital accumulation, Marx always included the peasantry and other petty-bourgeois layers, as well as class fractions, in his study. And today, this petty-bourgeois class has a social volume that should not be underestimated, especially in dependent countries.

Again, although it is a subject of empirical and statistical studies, it can be said that in the two centuries that have passed, the industrialist has invested in land and rent areas, and landowners have engaged in capitalist investments both in the countryside and in the city, thus these two classes have integrated to some extent as the capitalist class.

As Marx pointed out, today's capitalism consists of three major classes, two of which are fundamental in terms of capital accumulation: the working class, the capitalist class, and the petty bourgeoisie, which is gradually fragmenting towards the two fundamental classes but constantly reproduces itself in some way. Of course, there are numerous layers/strata, status groups, and interest centers within these classes. As part of capitalist rent relations, urban and rural landowners, monopoly bourgeoisie, middle bourgeoisie, small capitalists, owners of mining fields, commercial capitalists, senior executives, and capital groups clustered in different sectors are different layers and groups within the capitalist class. Again, within the working class, one can speak of many more layers such as unskilled industrial workers, semi-skilled workers in the service sector, unskilled shop assistants scattered in small stores and workplaces, groups with high skill levels, some professional practitioners, the labor aristocracy receiving very high wages, etc.

Within the petty bourgeoisie, small landowning peasantry, artisans and tradesmen in cities, and professional groups such as lawyers, engineers, accountants, etc., who work for themselves, continue to exist as unique layers and interest groups.

Marx says:

“My inquiries led to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor forms of state could be grasped whether from themselves or from the so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary, they have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the thinkers of England and France in the 18th century, combines under the name of ‘civil society,’ and that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. I had begun the study of political economy in Paris and continued it in Brussels, where I had to emigrate as a result of an expulsion order issued by Mr. Guizot. The general result at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding thread of my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.” As Marx pointed out, it is not possible to understand law solely within the limits of law. Likewise, it would not be a correct method to evaluate philosophy, culture, the state, the family, social status groups, various technical levels and characteristics of work, etc., without ignoring the conditioning effect of the necessary processes and relations of social production practice.

The reality of class has further increased its quality of changing, developing, enriching, and guiding humanity as a result of human, nature, and society actions that also encompass the integrity of society, nature, and the human being. The events of past years have created a fear regarding the concept of class. Let us not talk about class, something might happen to us. Are we going to fix it? Anyway, most of Marx's views did not turn out to be true, there is no such thing as Marxism anymore. There are those of us who think that ideologies are dead. These thoughts are thoughts that rot a person.

They are thoughts that rot society. Because the concept of class existed before Marx, and its reality and validity have continued to increase after Marx. Today, there is no type of intellectual we can call an intellectual who denies the reality of class. The reality of class is a generally accepted concept. It is the name of a process. The reality of class was born from production relations; it is a very important concept. If we do not face them with a solid ideology in the struggle we will enter with America, we will suffer greatly. While America is struggling in swamps amidst cruelty and corruption, socialist thought and populism are thoughts that have a future. Laborers who protect the homeland, laborers who produce, laborers to whom we owe everything, the hope is in you. According to these conditions, we must organize without delay on the basis of patriotism and public-spiritedness.