A social class is, broadly speaking, a group of individuals who share material interests based on their relation to the means of production as well as the judicial and economic relations of their society.
“Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.”
Three large social classes makeup the predominate groups under the capitalist mode of production:
- the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production and who do not support themselves through labor;
- the petit-bourgeoisie, who own the means of production and who support themselves at least partially through their own labor;
- and the proletariat, who do not own the means of production, and who support themselves through labor.
However, these are far from the only social classes. Most societies contain the remnants of undigested social classes that arose during prior modes of production. These include:
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- the smallholders, who are agriculturalists owning their own farms, land, and equipment. These are a petit-bourgeois strata (class or class-fraction). Some own all of their means of production (the land, the machinery, and so forth), while some are semi-owners and others are impoverished. Smallholding has played a very important part in the U.S. settler-empire, from its roots as a settler-republic, serving as the foot soldiers of capital in the breakup of the Indigenous peoples.
- the artisans, who make a living with archaic hand tools and small scale production. Although this class has been all but eliminated by the advent of industrial capitalism (most of the old handicrafts have been absorbed into the petit-bourgeoisie or proletarianized into wage workers), but there are those who continue to make a living through handicrafts.
- slaves, who work in the slave-relation – they are treated as property and purchased outright. Employers do not extract surplus value from slaves, but rather appropriate everything slaves produce. The particular form of slavery in the U.S. was racialized chattel slavery, developed after the genocide of the Taino poeple in Hispaniola by the importation of enslaved Afrikan workers.
- Police, who, although they are employed and sell their labor-power, produce White Terror as a commodity. Unlike members of the armed forces, the police do not have or return to “civilian life” unless they quit their jobs or leave their positions. Members of the U.S. intelligence services should be considered part of this special class.
- State ideological workers are those workers who produce state ideology for the domination of the ruled by the ruling classes. These include petit-bourgeois and semi-proletarian positions; for instance, the petit-bourgeois professors at major universities or the semi-proletarian adjuncts and primary school teachers.
- The subproletariat, commonly (and improperly) referred to as the lumpenproletariat, which includes all those forced out of the normal productive process for whatever reason, but who would otherwise be forced to sell their labor-power.
- The precariat, who are those proletarians that are subject to various legal relations that make them even easier to fire or remove – for instance, “illegal” (undocumented) immigrant workers who can be deported en masse if they threaten to unionize.
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