Books

Theories of Social Class

CLASS, STATUS AND POWER: A READER IN SOCIAL STRATIFICATION. Edited by Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Lipset. The Free Press. Glencoe, Illinois. 725 pp. $6.

Though designed as a college text, this book is so excellently done that it will interest many people outside the academy. Under three major headings (theories of social stratification; studies of the problem in America; research on the problem in other countries) the editors present selections from about sixty authors, ranging from Aristotle to Lloyd Warner. Since it is neither possible nor desirable to deal with each, or many, of the essays in a review, I want to devote most of my space to an article especially prepared for this volume by Bendix and Lipset. Pointing out that the views of Marx and Engels on social class are nowhere succinctly developed by them, the editors offer their own synthesis in an essay entitled “Karl Marx’ Theory of Social Classes.” It is a splendid effort, but it does not remove one’s wish that those final entries in Volume III of “Capital” had been expanded into a full-scale discussion of class.

In common with most critics of Marx’ analysis of class, the authors of this essay have elided the crucial distinction which Marx makes between class an sich and class für sich, a distinction which Marx clearly drew between the objective class, i.e., the societal group whose situation is automatically defined by its relationship to the instruments of production, and the class so delimited which has become conscious of its identity and its role in the struggle either to preserve the existing social order or to change it. Classes, Marx observed, exist before or in the absence of class consciousness.

The existence of classes as concrete entities is determined by their members’ position in the productive scheme of a given society. Class consciousness of the proletariat is a crucial prerequisite to the kind of action which Marx envisaged as necessary to the transformation of most capitalist societies into socialist. But the class an sich does not depend for its existence upon the birth of this collective consciousness. It already is.

It would have been an outright contradiction of Marx’ basic philosophic position to have said, in effect, that it is the consciousness of class which calls it into existence. Nevertheless it is usually made to appear as if this is exactly what he did say or imply. And despite the general lucidity of their presentation and the depth of their understanding, Bendix and Lipset have—because they, too, fail todistinguish clearly between the class in itself and the class for itself— committed the same errors of analysis. Discussing Marx’ treatment of the emergence of common beliefs and actions within a class, and how these developments are facilitated by a number of var...