ABSTRACT
ACCORDING to Marx, capitalist society is a class society. There is in this society a category of persons who possess effective private property, and another category of those who have no such property. The former is called capital or bourgeoisie, the latter wage labor or proletariat. The typical private property of capitalist society consists of the means of industrial production, i.e., factories, machines, and the like, or capital. The owners or capitalists directly control their means of production; the nonowners or wage laborers are dependent, by the labor contract, on the means of production and their owners. Property and power and the exclusion from both go together; they “correlate.” There is also a correlation between these factors on the one hand, and socioeconomic position on the other hand: the capitalists are wealthy, secure, and have high status; the wage laborers are lacking a subsistence minimum. This difference in position makes for conflicting interests and conflicting groupings—classes—which fight each other at first on the local level of the individual enterprise, eventually on the political level.
