ABSTRACT
Considering the crucial importance of the concept of class in Marxian theory, it is surprising that Marx and Engels nowhere clearly defined what they meant by this term. At times, they considered a social class constituted by the function of its members in the process of production — by the sharing of economic conditions. Landowners, for example, on occasion are thus regarded as a class. At other times, Marx and Engels stressed the subjective awareness of common interests. The French peasants, Marx observed, lived under similar economic conditions “which separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter,” and, in this sense, “they form a class.” But inasmuch as “the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class.” 1 The peasants, in the terminology of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, were a class marked off from other classes, but they were not yet a class for itself. In other words, according to this second usage, a class becomes a social class in the full meaning of the term only when its members are linked by the tie of class consciousness, by sharing an awareness of their common political interests. 2
