In the US, the very idea of class is obnoxious

It might as well be forbidden by the constitution

Call a person working class and you're labeled a Marxist

Mention the word proletariat and you're

a heretic who should be barbecued in suburbia

Pathetic excuse for a sexy photo: Salma Hayek's got class

I spent a good part of an hour the other day listening to John McCain lecturing the annual gathering of the Associated Press on the problems of the American economy.

He must have spent an earnest 10 minutes talking about "middle-class tax cuts" before I caught his drift. He was talking about the proletariat.

In the United States, the very idea of class is obnoxious. It might as well be forbidden by the constitution.

Call a person working class and you call them poor. Mention the word proletariat and you'd probably be lynched.

America is class-ridden, but superstition says that if no one mentions the fact, there is no problem.

The Indiscreet Power of the Bourgeoisie

The ruling class refers to the segment or class in a capitalist society that has the most economic and, secondarily, political power.

Under capitalism, the ruling class - the capitalists or bourgeoisie - consists of those who own and control the means of production and thus are able to dominate and exploit the working class, getting them to labor enough to produce surplus-value, the basis for profits, interest, and the accumulation of wealth.

This wealth can then be used to accumulate more power, to extend class domination further.

The economic power of a class gives it extraordinary political power so that state or government policies almost always reflect the perceived interests of that class.

Society is divided sharply and horizontally between the powerful and powerless.

This creates a culture of alienation, the effects of social structure on the personality and the manipulation of people by the mass media.

Bourgeois Society (Capitalism)

Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread into every corner of life.

The family and the state still exist, but – the family is successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other.

The state retains its essential instruments of violence, but more and more comes under the sway of commerical interests, reduced to acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.

The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production as Private Property, despite the fact that the productive forces have become entirely socialised and operate on the scale of the world market.

The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a class of people who have nothing to sell but their capacity to work; since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, workers have no choice but to offer their labour-power for sale to the bourgeoisie.

This system of buying and selling labour-power is called wage-labour and is characteristic of bourgeois society, though it has been around since the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

The classic form of wage labour is payment for work by the hour or week. Nowadays many workers work on the basis of contracts and piece-work but these forms only disguise the underlying relationship, which remains that of wage-labour.

Money and all forms of credit reach their highest development in bourgeois society. As a result, life in bourgeois society “happens” to people in much the same way as the weather happens to people, with money flowing around apparently according to its own laws.

To put this another way, in bourgeois society there is a “fetishism” of commodities.

Just as tribal peoples believed that their lives were being determined by trees and animals and natural forces possessing human powers, in bourgeois society, people's lives are driven by money and other commodities, whose value is determined by extramundane forces.

Instead of ethics and morality being governed by traditional systems of belief and imagined spiritual forces, there is just the ethic of cash-payment.

NB: The German for “bourgeois society” is bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and this is usually translated into English as “Civil Society”.

See Engels' discussion of the translation of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Letter to Marx, 23rd September 1852.

This phrase was originally meant to refer to that “war of all against all” that grew up outside of both the state and family, governed only by money.

Nowadays, “civil society” is frequently used to denote that domain outside of the state and business – voluntary association of various kinds.

"Bourgeois Democracy"

A government that serves in the interests of the bourgeois class. The word Democratic is attached to such a government, because in it all people in such a society have certain freedoms: those who own the means of production, the bourgeoisie, are free to buy and sell labor-power and what is produced by it solely for their own benefit.

Those who own only their own ability to labor, the proletariat, are free to sell themselves to any bourgeois who will buy their labor power, for the benefit of maintaining their own survival, and giving greater strength and power to the bourgeoisie.

The state fundamentally represents the interests of one class over others. On this basis Lenin named bourgeois democracy "bourgeois dictatorship." On the same token, Lenin made no distinction that the socialist state, being a state that represents the working-class, is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

In no civilized capitalist country does "democracy in general" exist. All that exists is bourgeois democracy.

It isn't a question of "dictatorship in general", but dictatorship of the oppressed class, the proletariat, by its oppressors and exploiters, the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie "dictate in order to maintain their domination.

Class-Ridden America

THE STARK reality of a highly stratified society in the U.S. is often obscured by confusion about what social class actually means.

The media (and even the labor movement) typically depict the working class with an archetypal image of male, usually white, lunch-pail-toting factory workers--which, of course, misses the vast majority of U.S. workers.

Furthermore, class is often seen as a function of income--if somebody makes over a certain amount, that puts them in the “middle class”--or of certain social attitudes or lifestyles.

But for Marxists, class means something more specific. It isn’t reduced to kinds of work, wage levels or certain limited consumer options. Instead, class is a social relationship.

The working class--and the capitalist class above it--are defined by their relationship to production and to each other.

Thus, there is little in Mark Penn’s book about the millions of people in society who produce the goods and services that he waxes poetic about from the point of view of consuming them.

However, the central activity in any society is not the consumption of goods and services, but the work done to produce them.

The source of wealth for the capitalist class as a whole is the profits made through its ownership and control over the businesses, factories, offices, tools, computers and so on needed for production in society.

Workers, by contrast, have to work because they don’t control these “means of production,” to use Karl Marx’s term.

This relationship--whether or not individuals control the “means of production,” and therefore the conditions of their work--is the decisive factor about social class.

Thus, Marx argued that the working class was a “class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who only work so long as their labor increases capital.”

By this definition, the working class is much larger than the stereotype of blue-collar workers.

It does include workers in manufacturing, but also services, transportation, retail, health care and education; contrary to the stereotype, nurses, airplane pilots and teachers should be considered workers, by this definition.

Among the ranks of the working class are a disproportionate number of women, Blacks and immigrants.

According to government statistics, 82 percent of the U.S. workforce is made up of non-supervisory workers. If certain professional jobs are taken out, that still leaves 75 percent of the workforce.

Thus, the vast majority of people in the U.S. are working class--a class that doesn’t own or control productive property and is compelled to sell its ability to work for wages.

There is a middle class “in between” labor and capital--consisting, on the one hand, of small business people and professionals with control over smaller enterprises that are economically dwarfed by big corporations.

And on the other, of managers who exercise some autonomy at work because of their role in coordinating production, but don’t have a share in ownership or overall corporate control.

But this “in between” class is a small minority of the population--far smaller than the media depicts by judging social class based on lifestyle and income.