ABSTRACT
Class , from whatever point of view it is regarded, is a very complicated concept. It eludes definition, unless it is somehow qualified, by such words as ‘economic’, or ‘social’, or ‘income’; and even when the qualification has been made the elusiveness remains, to the extent that no two enumerators, working independently, could be expected to arrive at even approximate agreement about the number of individuals, or households, in a given society to be assigned to the various classes, even if they had agreed in advance on the names of the class-groups they were setting out to quantify—which might itself prove to be no easy matter. There are, indeed, so many different approaches to the whole problem that the very names to be given to the various classes are a matter of unending dispute. The Marxist thinks primarily in terms of the great contrast between ‘capitalists’ and ‘proletarians’, or, when he is dealing with the past, of other ruling classes, such as the ‘feudal’; and he fits in other groups which he finds it necessary to recognize by giving them qualifying adjectives—for example, petit bourgeois or lumpenproletariat. The Marxist is at any rate attempting to base his classification on a clearly formulated principle, by defining classes in terms of their relation to the ‘powers of production’. But when he turns from his general theory to any attempt at statistical measurement the difficulties begin; for a great many individuals and a great many families cannot be assigned with certainty to any one class in terms of this defining principle. He may argue that this does not matter, because the classes he speaks of exist whether they can be precisely enumerated or not; and it can be argued that a lack of precision is of minor importance if we can feel assured that the main groups have been rightly marked out. But there remains the question whether the method of definition in terms of each class’s relation to the ‘powers of production’ is the best, or the only valuable, way of approaching the problem. It certainly does not yield, when it is used for measuring the number of persons belonging to each class, any result which coincides either with income differences or with differences of prestige or esteem in any particular society to which it is applied. Nor is it at all easy to relate the Marxist categories with any approach to precision to the information made available in such sources as the Population Census or other returns dealing with ‘man-power’ in a particular country. This, it may be said, is because the statisticians responsible for collecting the data have not asked the right questions. But what are the right questions?
