ABSTRACT
The concept of class poses profound problems for theory and practice. This is true across the academic disciplines and in the confused incoherence around "class issues" when concepts of class surface in economic, political and cultural discourses. With two different concepts of class, class analyses could and did yield different understandings when applied to actual societies. The class structure of a community or society is, then, its distinct organization of the production and distribution of surplus. Karl Marx's Capital introduced the class-qua-surplus analysis and advocated using it to transform society. Marx's Capital explained that in capitalism, laborers in production—those whose brainsand muscles directly converted raw materials and means of production into finished products—thereby added value to the values embodied in the raw materials and means of production used up in production. Capitalist exploitation negates social movements toward egalitarianism. Across Capital, Marx elaborates his class analysis of capitalism.
