Summer Situated in camp

At the camp, there will be lectures and discussion on philosophy, his. tory and other subjects which have featured in If you are Interested and would like to attend the Summer Camp, please complete form below: Complete form and send to: Summer Camp, 186a Clapham High St. SW4. Please send me details of Summer Camp.

Name Address

PAGE Class as an objective phenomenon IS OFTEN said and written that the class struggle is the core of Marx's theories. Marx himself pronounced on this idea:

•.. no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me the bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove:

that the existence of •classes is only bound up with particular historic phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; that this dictatorship itself only • constitutes. the transition, to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. ..!

(Marx letter to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852).

Thus the Marxist theory of class struggle can only be understood in connection with the basic tenets of historical materialism. This struggle is explained in terms of its historical origins, development, and limits, on the basis of definite and changing economic conditions.

This historical view was for Marx the decisive element, and Lenin later explained, on the basis of further experience, just what this meant concretely.

Limits

Lenin pointed out that Kautsky, perhaps the most authoritative writer on Marxist theory, when faced with the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, was unable to go beyond what Marx called the bourgeois limits of recognizing the class struggle, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the tranmodes of acteristic recruited groups'' duction; the politics and ideology of these classes, or of sections of them, are reflections of their historical economic interests, though of course the same warnings must be made for the form and mode of this reflection as Engels made for the ideological process in general.

Lenin has given what is the most general dennition 01 'class' in the Marxist sense:

'Classes are large groups of people which differ from each other by the place they occupy in a historically definite system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in laws) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of, labour, and consequently, by the dimensions and method of acquiring the share of social wealth that they obtain. Classes are groups of people one of which may appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in the definite system of social economy."

Gulf

There is an unbridgeable gulf between this Marxist view of the objective basis of social class and the notion of class in bourgeois sociology. Schumpeter, for example, expresses clearly what many others accept by implication. Complaining that classes are often assumed to exist on a socio - economic basis, he writes:

*... these classes are classes only in the sense that they result from the scholar's classification of economic subjects."

Dahrendorf has more recently endorsed this essentially idealist standpoint. For him, classes with only latent interests are 'quasi-groups', and exist only as theoretical constructions:

'Only by doubtful analogy can we talk about the "members" of such quasi-groups.' The mystery deepens when e learn in the next paragraph other hand, common behaviour are charof interest groups from larger quasiA remarkable type of recruitment, since only by doubtful analogy' do these EIGHT It is this which Lenin insists upon when he comments upon Marx's assertion that besides the class struggle, its origins and its outcome, the implications of acceptance of the theory must be worked out. Sociology's claim to 'valueis precisely its rejection of these implications.

Yet another dimension of Marxism, as opposed to 'sociology', must be interposed at this stage of the discussion. The working class-and of course the other classes in relationship with it—must be studied from the point of view of what it is becoming through struggle, and not simply from the standpoint of defining its role in the existing society.

consciousness The consciousness by the working class of this role is already an element in the process of abolishing itself as a class. The laws of the market particular society, or as building-blocks for 'models' which elucidate these functional interrelations, Marxism is always seeking the 'law of motion' of a given social order, the mode of development by which it both reproduces its characteristic features and at the same time generates the conditions of its negation.

Marx's aim, therefore, is not to look for a set of categories of class which will suitably classify, with the minimum number of anomalies, the individual members of the society. He is in fact interested in the actions and utterances of these individuals only in so far as they express with particular sharpness the course of development of classes or sections of classes.

All theories of class which are designed to "classify' the population can be excluded from discussion about Marx's theory.

other common July 11, derstanding may be cleared away at this preliminary stage by pursuing the latter point.

When Marx writes about class struggle he is talking about irreconcilable antagonistic interests rooted in basic relations of production. This clash of interests does not arise from adding together the individual conflicts undergone by individual members of the same class, but from the exploitation relationship and its Changes, together with the political steps taken to assure its continuation.

Conflict

All sorts of other conflicts occur in society and are related to class conflict in different ways, but the class conflict is decisive historically, because it is directly related to the development of the mode of production, its con-