At one level, class is for Marxists what it is for everyone else. It has something to do with the economy. Fundamentally, it’s an economic concept, and it’s connected to people’s incomes.

Everyone agrees that class has something to do with income. For most mainstream analysts, and commonsensically, people your income puts you into a specific class. If you’re making above a threshold, you’re middle class. If you’re making way more than that, you’re upper class.

For most commentators, it’s your income that determines your class position. For Marxists, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s your class position that puts limits on what kind of income you might be able to get.

That’s why class is important, because in capitalism, money is the key to most anything that you need in life. If the limits on your money are going to put limits on your contentment, on your well-being, on your health, then those factors that determine how much money you have are the factors that are going to determine the quality of your life. If class is such a factor, then it follows that class imposes the most important limits and the most important determinations on your income. So if you want to give people better chances in life, you’ve got to work on their class positions.

That’s why class ends up being what Marxists focus on politically as well as theoretically.

The class structure of capitalism in its essence, like every economic system, consists of two “fundamental” classes — a class of exploiters and a class of the exploited

What does it mean to be an exploiter or exploited? If you’re an exploiter, it basically means your livelihood, your income, your wealth is derived from the labor of another group of people. You get your income by extracting or commanding the labor of other people.

If you’re exploited, it means you are subject to the control, the authority, and the extraction of labor from another class of people: the capitalists. The capitalist class structure essentially consists of these two classes — workers, who are exploited, who do all the work, and capitalists, who are commanding the labor of workers.

Numerically, here’s what we can say. There’s a lot of studies of how many people fall into each class proportionately. In the United States, there are two kinds of capitalists. There are large ones, and there are small ones. Small capitalists are people who employ, depending on how you classify it, anywhere from, say, ten to thirty people. Large capitalists are the ones who employ more than that.

Because they perform different functions. Smaller capitalists are numerically greater than the big capitalists. But the big capitalists, even though they’re numerically smaller, command a lot more workers per establishment, and therefore have a lot more power.

By virtue of controlling people’s labor and the money, the investment capital that comes out of that labor, big capitalists also exercise enormous social power. So big capitalists have a degree of power that small capitalists don’t.

What kind of numbers are we talking about? If you combine those two groups of people, small capital and big capital, what we’re probably talking about is around 4 to 5 percent of the occupational labor force. Then there are also the CEOs. If you add them up, the total capitalist class is probably 6 percent of the total occupational labor force.

It’s tiny, but the large capitalists are even smaller. It’s about 1 to 2 percent at the most.

What about the workers? Again, it comes down to how you define the working class. There are two big groups within the working class, broadly speaking. One is the unskilled, blue-collar workers who have no control over other people. They’re not even supervisors or foremen. They just do the work. That is anywhere from 45 to 50 percent of the occupational labor force.

The second group is skilled laborers. So that will [include] electricians and technicians and people who do coding but also teachers, nurses, some parts of the lawyer profession, and even the medical profession.

Professionals are not a class. Professionals fall into different classes. Most professionals are not in the working class, but probably around 15 to 18 percent are. When you put these groups of people together — unskilled workers who have no authority, workers with lots of skills, and those workers who have some authority in the workplace like foremen and supervisors — we call this the extended working class. This extended working class is somewhere around 65 to 70 percent of the labor force.

So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.

First, let’s focus on these relationships. Suppose you’re just an owner-operator. To be an owner-operator means that you own your means of production and you operate them yourself. You don’t employ wage labor. You go to your farm every day, you have your own machinery, you deploy your own labor, or you run a shop where you and your family do the labor.

In all these cases, the key is that your income derives directly from your own labor. If you want to earn more money, you just work harder. If you want to have more leisure time, you just work less. The decision is largely dependent on you, and it doesn’t require coordinating your decision with anybody else.

The situation is very different when it comes to exploiter and exploited. Capitalists derive their wealth from the labor of their employees. Employees derive their income from the employment decisions of capital.

Employees’ income is what’s left over after the capitalist takes his profits. Why is that important? Because each group’s s income comes from their cooperation or their interrelations with the other.

This means that that class position being a worker or being a capitalist is embedded in a social relationship. A capitalist cannot think about his own income, his own profits, except through thinking about how he can get his workers to behave a certain way: work harder, work faster, work better. Workers cannot think about getting a higher wage, except through the whims and the decisions of the capitalist, their employer.

Therefore, neither party can avoid thinking about the other party’s actions when they’re trying to improve their own welfare, their own standard of living, their own income. This is a very different way of conceiving of class compared to when you just take it to be based on income levels. Because with income levels, all you know is that somebody’s making more and somebody is making less. You are not thinking that hard about how their making more or less is dependent on the actions of other people.

This brings up the next issue — why do Marxists conceive of class this way? There’s no law of nature that says you have to conceptualize class in this fashion.

There are some Weberians who do, but the vast majority of mainstream analysts don’t. The basic reason that Marxists do is that it is connected to their political aims and political experience. The labor movement has always tried to improve the wages and working conditions of the working class. That might have led them to an income-based definition of class. But they found, through their hard experience, that when they wanted to raise their wages, when they wanted to change the conditions at work, when they wanted better safety or pensions or something like that — every time they tried to get it they came up against the resistance or the reactions of another class of people, their employers. Similarly with employers, every time they tried to increase their profits, they came up against the resistance of their workers.

Socialists did not start out with a relational concept of class. They came to it through very hard experience. And Karl Marx was the one who, because of his brilliance, could see the insight that comes from having this conception of class. What this conception of class gets you to is that when people in a capitalist economy, the vast majority of the people, try to improve their situation in the economy, they come up against the reactions of another group of people, the ruling class. So they need to understand class in a way that helps explain why people line up in economic conflict the way that they do. They need to understand the connection between class position and class interests. A relational concept of class takes you directly to that.

Workers’ income is deeply embedded in a social relationship, the relationship with the other class. So if you are in a political project that is committed to improving the lives of the working class, you need a concept of class that will clarify, first, how your goals are going to elicit a reaction from your enemy, and then how you can most effectively build within your constituency around its interests to fight against that enemy.

No other concept of class so organically gets you to that. That’s why it’s a relational conception of class, which is a jargony way to put it. It’s basically saying class should be thought of as a set of interlocking ties between the rich and the poor, which binds them together in a way that income-based conceptions of class miss.

They can be. These are just words. Take this whole lexicon of “the 1 percent” and “the 99 percent.” If you use the word “elite” interchangeably with “the 1 percent,” we already know that the capitalist class is probably around 2 percent. So “the 1 percent” inevitably means you’re talking about capitalists.

“The 1 percent,” “elite,” “capitalist” — they all mean the same thing. But the question is, is that how the word “elite” is actually used in sociology or in everyday parlance? In typical sociological analysis or in everyday usage, the word is not used to map on to the ruling class. In sociology, the word really is associated with C. Wright Mills, because he wrote this book called The Power Elite.

When you look at what Mills means by “the power elite,” he means anybody who has high status. That, of course, includes capitalists, but it also includes politicians. It also includes professors. It also includes lawyers — anybody with any kind of power. Now, if your social theory tells you that all that matters in life for achieving things is status, then those with more status are going to be different from those with less status.

But if your social theory tells you that real power resides in the hands of the holders of investable surplus, investable wealth, then using the word “elite,” if you mean by it what Mills meant — college professors, doctors, lawyers, politicians — that’s going to lead you astray, because you’re going to think real power resides in tenured university positions.

Right. Within the narrow confines of a university, professors have power. But they have zero power outside of it. Real power, the actual power to control the direction of society, lies in the hands of the people who control its investable wealth. When Mills released his book, perhaps the greatest of American Marxists, Paul Sweezy, wrote a short but brilliant review of it pointing out these distinctions within the elite between actual power and the servants of that power. That’s very much worth checking out.

There is still around 25 percent of the labor force left over after you account for workers and capitalists and, by some measures, maybe even 30 percent. Who are these people?

They fall into one of two groups: either the salariat, people who earned their living through a salary, or owner-operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie. The encompassing term for both of these groups is “middle class.”

What makes them middle? Why do we use the word “middle” instead of “extra class” or “nonclass” or something like that? It’s supposed to convey that they fall in between the other two classes in a meaningful way, in a nonarbitrary way.

What is the petty bourgeoisie? It’s people who own their own means of production. Capitalists also own their own means of production. So why are petty bourgeois not just bourgeois? It’s because capitalists own their means of production, but they also do one other thing, which is command the labor of other people.

Petty bourgeois are people who own the means of production but do not command other people’s labor. They deploy their own or their family’s labor. From one standpoint, they share a characteristic with capital. They own the means of production. But if you look at it from the other standpoint, they’re workers, because they’re working for a wage. Where they differ from workers is workers don’t own the means of production. The petty bourgeois, shopkeepers, independent farmers, middle peasants — they do.

So they have a characteristic of each of the two fundamental classes. Like capitalists, they deploy assets. And like workers, they do their own work. But they lack what makes them fully members of either one of those two classes.

They have very little power. They are buffeted around by the forces and the eddies of capital accumulation. They have been very bad at collective action, because there’s just too many of them. They don’t see each other every day the way workers do. They have a hard time conceiving of a collective interest. So the way in which they are able to exercise any influence is through political parties.

And what parties get from the petty bourgeoisie, the reason they cater to them at all, is two things. Petty bourgeois have more savings than workers do, so they can help parties along financially. The other is the numbers. There’s a lot of them. They were talking about 20 to 25 percent of the population through much of the twentieth century. So parties do cater to them.

They were historically a kind of bulwark against labor movements. They’ve tended to skew toward the Right, not always but typically. So parties of the Right have catered to them quite a bit.

There’s a second group in that 25 percent: the professional classes and the managerial classes. These are also like the petty bourgeoisie in that they share characteristics of each of the two fundamental classes, but without fully belonging to either one.

Suppose you’re a mid-level manager. You’re employed. You work for a living, just like a worker. But you’re not just a worker, because what you have to do to earn your money is help your boss manage the labor of the working class. So your job is an outgrowth of what we call “the functions of capital.” Basically, bosses outsource some of the things they would be doing themselves.

What do they do? They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. As the modern corporation has grown in size, no one boss can manage all the workers in his workplace. So he hires managers whose specialization is overseeing other people. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor.

So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.

Similarly with a lot of professionals. Some professionals are just workers — teachers and nurses — but many professionals have a great deal of independence at work, the way the petty bourgeois do. Shopkeepers determine their own labor process, their own time at work, how fast they carry it out, how well they carry it out.

In many ways, that’s how many professors are. In my job as an NYU professor, nobody stands over me telling me how to teach, when to teach, what to put in my syllabus, what kind of accent I can use, and so on. I have a lot of autonomy. My work conditions skew toward the independent-owner-operator type. It’s very hard to call me a worker. Tenured professors at elite universities are very hard to describe as being plain and simple workers.

But this is why occupations shouldn’t be equated with class positions. If you’re a professor working at a community college, if you’re working in some of the other four-year colleges and public schooling systems, those professor positions start looking like very skilled proletarian work, because they have much less control over their own labor. Even the syllabi are sometimes set centrally. They sometimes have to punch in and punch out.

This means that there are sections of the professoriate and the professional strata that are genuinely in the middle between the two classes. That’s what we mean, therefore, by middle class. And there are some who are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes.

Overall, if you look at the petty bourgeoisie, which is owner-operator shopkeepers, and what is often called the new middle class, which is salaried people in the professions, and then the managers, they are in between the two fundamental classes.

There are two difficulties involved with the middle class. One is conceptual, and the other is theoretical. The conceptual one is, when you say that classes are exploiters and exploited, then how do you make sense of these guys who are neither?

First, in the early 1900s, both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and later in the agrarian countries . . . this is less well-appreciated in the West, but this was a central issue for communist parties in the Global South, about how to understand the agrarian question. Because peasants do not line up cleanly on one side of the exploiter-exploited divide. Most peasants have some land but also perform wage labor. So what are they? Exploiters or exploited?

Very big, but it was even bigger in the Chinese Revolution, as you can imagine. One of the essays that Mao Zedong is most famous for is his analysis of classes in the countryside. There was a conceptual problem of what to make these people in the middle.

This is what the New Left did the best work on. More than anyone else, it was Erik Olin Wright, my own teacher — but there were a lot of people in the 1970s who did really good work, and they came to mainly the same conclusion. Alan Cottrell, Guglielmo Carchedi, all these people worked on the conceptual problem and came to the same conclusion, that the middle class has elements of both classes in it.

Here they were really just coming back to what Lenin had said himself and what Mao had said. So there’s a history of, I think, fruitful engagement with the conceptual problems.

The theoretical problem was that everybody understood Marx to be saying, or rather making a theoretical prediction, that as capitalism went on over time, the petty bourgeoisie would disappear. It would disappear because shopkeepers would not be able to compete against the retail activities of large manufacturers. The manufacturers themselves would start selling their own goods. And then the artisanal classes, owner-operators like carpenters or plumbers or janitors, would also fall under the hammer blows of the greater efficiency of large corporations.

The expectation was that as you see capitalism developing over time, this middle class would become proletarianized. And it would fall into the working class until you only had two groups left standing — capitalists and workers. Now, that didn’t happen.

The fact that it didn’t happen is taken to be a theoretical problem for Marxist class theory. In my view, the whole thing is a nonproblem. Like a lot of the criticisms of Marx, it comes out of taking rhetorical statements that he made, in which he said that this or that is going to happen. And then it turns out it didn’t happen, and because of that, the facts are taken to disprove the theory. That’s one way to assess a theory — to compare facts with what some person said rhetorically at some point.

But the more prudent way to assess a theory is not by looking at the rhetorical statements of its leading practitioners or even its founders, but by looking at the developed body of work, the actual theoretical framework that they left behind and asking, does this framework predict that, say, this class, the petty bourgeoisie, should disappear? And that framework isn’t in The Communist Manifesto. It’s not in The Eighteenth Brumaire. It’s in Capital. If you take that as the theory, does the prediction of Marxist political economy suggest that this class should disappear?

The answer, obviously, is no. If you froze the occupational structure of today and said, “Just let this play out over the next twenty years,” a lot of the middle class occupations would disappear. But capitalism is always doing something on a different plane simultaneously, through what’s called technical change, which means new technology being brought into line, new forms of interaction that come with it, new demands for products that increasing incomes or decreasing incomes bring about.

Through that, even while capitalism is killing off old occupations, it’s constantly also throwing up new occupations and new products. So there are two things happening simultaneously. Existing occupations and lines are being driven to the wall but new ones are being created all the time as well.

For the prediction to hold that the middle class will disappear, it would have to be the case that the direction of capitalism would be one in which no new occupations would be thrown up that involve management or expertise or salaried work or artisanal work. No such new occupations are created, while the existing ones are being extinguished.

Is there anything in Marx’s political economy that makes such a prediction? Not at all. His theory predicts the opposite — that technical change will constantly create new positions that we call “middle class.” So there is zero reason to expect that capitalism has any properties in it that push it in this direction.

Yeah. There’s nothing in the theory that predicts the disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie.

I don’t think any formulation has done more damage to class analysis than this idea that it’s a process, not a structure. And really, nobody actually believes it. Even the people who say it don’t believe it.

The proof of that is, just look at the people who do the work. To be clear, Thompson himself didn’t use that exact expression. His followers made it famous. But because it’s famous, let’s take it up. What does it mean to say class is a process?

It’s fine to say that class structures are subject to a process of development, of decay, of dynamic growth. A structure can be subject to a process. But what does it mean to say it just is a process?

It’s actually not even grammatical. And whenever people come up with a formulation that is ungrammatical, you have to try to guess what they’re saying. That’s a disservice to the reader because you always want to try to be clear about what you mean.

But if you look at the context in which he said it, what he meant to be saying was class is something that’s dynamic. It’s not fixed. Class structures are fluid in that they change over time. But most important, he wanted to say, I think, that class shouldn’t just be thought of as a set of objective positions. We should also attend to its cultural, its political, and its ideological dimensions, and these develop in a dynamic interrelationship with the structure.

If that’s what they’re saying, of course, it’s absolutely true. But then there’s no debate because no Marxist has ever denied this. So what’s the issue then? Why the debate? Well, maybe they don’t mean that. Maybe they mean something else: that “class” is something qualitatively different from the structure.

If they do mean that it’s just a process and there’s nothing underneath it, no structure, then they’re in all kinds of trouble. Because first of all, it means you don’t know who to go and organize, since you don’t think that classes exist independently of their class consciousness.

Exactly. What do we mean by a class structure? It means people occupy certain positions vis-à-vis each other in their jobs; whether or not they have the consciousness of the class, whether or not they organize themselves politically, they occupy these positions.

We can actually locate them by looking at [the class structure]. We can point and say, “There’s the working class; there’s the bourgeoisie.” Then our job is to try to go to those people and develop a consciousness among them of their class situation, of their class enemies. And then we have to build the political organizations that don’t exist right now but that might serve them.

What the structural analysis gives us is the ability to locate them. Just like when you’re digging for gold, you say, “There’s the gold,” right? You locate them, then you work with them, and then you organize them. But if you literally mean that classes don’t exist except for the consciousness and the politics, you don’t even know where to go. You could walk into a C-suite and say, “Hey, man, it’s time for the revolution.” You’ll walk into professional settings like lawyers’ offices and say, “I’m here to organize you.”

Or worse yet, you’ll do what contemporary left does, which is you look at opinion surveys. And you’ll go, “Let’s look for progressives.” What are progressives? People with the right values. So you’re basically a will-o’-the-wisp. Your politics is looking at opinion polls every four years and saying what democratic consultants do. “Who can we bring to the voting booth today, at this moment?” So the working class will end up being whoever has the right values.

But no Marxist has ever actually believed this. So when they say that there are two approaches to class, they’re bullsh*tting. There’s only one approach to class, but then there’s these bullsh*t debates around it.

Even Thompson, when you read his actual book, when you read the book, it’s about a structure and how it evolves over time and then how it creates its cultural expressions. There’s really no mistaking it. When he does his work, he’s a materialist, whatever his theoretical pronouncements might be.

When you look at how people actually do their research, do their organizing — if they say that class is just a process, their own research, their own actions, their own organizing tends to undermine this view. It’s a good sign that it’s a weak theory when the people are forced to abandon it the moment they actually try to start using it.

The “class in itself” is just the class structure. The class in itself is just people who are doing their work in the social division of labor and may or may not have the consciousness that could be developed if they were made aware of its political implications.

As I said before, this is what class is. And if you abandon this, class becomes a meaningless concept.

“Class for itself” is when the people in their class locations start organizing around their interests in a conscious way, collectively. Interestingly, Marx used that term to refer to workers. It’s an interesting question as to whether you can make the same distinction with regard to capital as well. I think you can. It’s possible for capitalists to be unaware of their class location and just think of themselves as profit-maximizing entrepreneurs and not think of the relational conception of it.

The real power of capitalism is that capitalists can exercise all of their power even if they don’t have class consciousness, because the structures are working for them. As long as they show up and run their corporations individually without coordinating with others, as long as their employees show up to work every day, the system runs, they keep their power, and their interests are served.

With workers, it’s different. It’s not enough for them just to be in the class structure as a class in itself, for them to be able to press their interests. When they behave as individual economic actors, they always lose. When capitalists behave as individual economic actors, they typically win. That’s the big difference.

So workers have to organize themselves collectively if they want to be able to cut a better deal against their bosses. This much, basically, most everybody in the Left understands. When they organize themselves collectively, that’s called the formation of the class.

If you want to have meaningful theoretical advances, if you really want to do theory, and you want it to make progress over time, nothing is more important than clarity — nothing, not even research. Because if you don’t have clarity on what you’re trying to investigate, you don’t even know what to look for to confirm or to falsify your theory.

It’s also been subject to plenty of obscurantism. Most of the damage has been done by the professoriate, because in academia, there are very few genuine conceptual or theoretical advances in social science, but there’s constant pressure to say you’ve made an innovation.

So the best way to do it is to come up with new jargon every ten or fifteen or twenty years and repeat old arguments with new words so that it has the look of something that’s innovative. So when Marxism entered the academy, it became subject to an enormous amount of obscurantism. But even in the first generation of Marxists around the Second International, there was enough of that for it to be, I think, a problem.

Clarity is something we have to strive for. If you can’t say what you mean in clear language, it just means you haven’t figured out what you’re trying to say. So you need to go back home, try to figure it out, and come back and then try to engage other people.

Not always, but typically, yes. Let me give you examples of both. Right now in the United States, at this moment, things are so bad, and so much of the population is suffering, that if you come up with a lumpy distinction like the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, it can get you a lot.

Because all you’re trying to do is fight for really milquetoast basic social democratic demands. This thing that’s called “socialism” — Bernie Sanders is a socialist, Zohran Mamdani is a socialist — they’re fighting for things that right-wing Christian Democrats in the 1950s were supporting or Rockefeller Republicans were supporting. So if this is what socialism is — these demands like Medicare for All, better childcare — you can get about 80 percent of the population supporting it, and you don’t have to do a lot of hard thinking about their class situation, because a lot of people don’t have the money, because of the wage squeeze, to be able to afford these things.

So depending on where you or your country is in the political scene, what the class balance is, how desperate people are, you may or may not need a lot of precision. But in most situations on the Left, you do need to know better. So let’s again start with the most general level, this [claim] that “we are the 99 percent.”

The 99 percent in Marxist class analysis includes all the working class but also all of the managerial class and all of the professionals. Even on a lot of the basic labor demands that we’ve seen in the twentieth century, like workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions, there’s going to be a chunk of the 99 percent that diverges from what, say, the bottom 50 percent wants.

Then let’s look at actual organizing, say a teachers’ strike or a strike inside any plant. When you’re going on strike, the first thing you’ve got to ask is, who can we rely on for support, and who is going to be working with the bosses? If your analysis of your workplace is the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, it means there’s the top-level CEO or owner, and then there’s everyone else.

But we know for a fact that the middle stratum of managers inside that plant and, in the educational system, the equivalent of the managers cannot be relied upon in your organizing drive, because . . . This is the key. It’s not that they have the wrong values; it’s not that they have been socialized wrongly. It’s because their job, their income, depends on breaking your strike. Their income depends on making sure you work harder.

Both at the macro level, when you think of the 99 percent, and at the most micro level, which is the workplace, class analysis is the bread and butter. Because the whole essence of class analysis — there’s this famous saying, there’s two components to it. One is class consciousness, figuring out which class you belong to. Class analysis is figuring out who else is on your side.

You need to know whose job it is to break your coalition, to break your strike, and who might be sympathetic to it. In very small groups, you can rely on interpersonal relations. “I know this person, I know that person.” But actual politics, real politics, is making judgments about people you’ve never met, and you never will meet. So you have to rely on some objective criteria.

This is what class analysis enables you to do. In the last wave of political radicalization in the 1960s and ’70s, socialists made enormous theoretical advances along these lines. Unfortunately, after forty years of neoliberalism, there’s been a tremendous retreat, not only politically but also intellectually. So instead of picking up where the earlier generations of radicals left off, we’re having to defend some pretty obvious propositions once again. And one of them is the centrality of class analysis to the socialist project.