[Part of Groundings in the Communist World Outlook. Click here for the table of contents.]

How did humanity get divided into classes?

• Humans, as a species, started off living in communal groups, what anthropologists call “hunter-gatherers,” that met their needs by getting them directly from nature, without engaging in production in any significant way.
• Early communal groups were egalitarian in nature, with no antagonistic social divisions within them.
• Once humans started engaging in production—for example, settled agriculture—they had to enter into relations of production, with different people having different roles in the production process—a division of labor.
• With production comes property—things produced that are owned by you or me or us. Property moved from communal to individual ownership—private property.
• Early private property and early production relations were defined by patriarchy, with the subordination of women to men, the first class division. Property raised the question of how ownership would be passed down from generation to generation, and patriarchy provided an answer (male inheritance).
• There’s nothing natural about patriarchy, property, or production relations. These are social creations, and for tens of thousands of years, humans lived without them.
• But over time, patriarchy, property, and production relations led to more complex class divisions, such as slave societies like Ancient Greece or feudalism like in Medieval Europe.
• Any given type of class division (master and slave, feudal lord and serf/peasant) is based on a specific set of relations of production that use specific means of production (the tools and materials used to produce, from basic farming implements to advanced machinery in modern factories).

How did capitalism emerge?

• The specific relations of production and set of class divisions that we call capitalism got its start through commodity production and exchange. Commodities are things that are produced to be sold on the market rather than for direct use.
• Traders were the precursors to the capitalist class, who we call the bourgeoisie. Traders would buy things in one place, transport them to another, and sell them for a profit, turning those things into commodities.
• By the 1400s, several merchant cities emerged in northern Italy where the emerging bourgeoisie, rather than feudal lords, were the dominant class. Those cities were centers of trade, and some of the trade profits were used to finance production, by paying wages to workers and by buying raw materials and means of production.
• Trade profits could also be used as finance—investing or loaning money in a business venture or to a government and getting a return on that investment or loan.
• The emerging bourgeoisie in northern Italian cities sought to dominate global trade routes. To do so, the Genoese bourgeoisie linked up with the Spanish empire to head across the Atlantic to create an oceanic trade route with Asia.
• Instead, they stumbled upon the Americas, and they plundered its wealth and exploited its people to extract its resources. They looted and then mined (with Indigenous labor) a lot of gold, which became the capital that fueled the rise of capitalism in Europe.

The rise of the bourgeoisie and the role of capital

• Capital basically means money put to use to turn a profit. It’s not personal wealth, it’s not money that’s just sitting there. It’s used to buy things (raw materials, machinery, land, transportation, labor power) to make things to sell to make a profit.
• The bourgeoisie is the class that commands capital—they possess it as their property, they decide how it gets used.
• The bourgeoisie is driven by the dictates of capital accumulation—to take their capital and turn it into more capital. To do that, they have to exploit labor and resources to produce things, or acquire things produced by others, and sell them as commodities on the market.
• On the market, the bourgeoisie is in competition with each other over who can sell for the best profit. That is why capital has to constantly expand, be able to sell more on the market, or it gets beaten in competition with other capitals. That’s the expand-or-die nature of capital accumulation. It’s not just about an individual member of the bourgeoisie getting rich, but about the necessity they all face in the constant competition their capital enters into.
• The expand-or-die nature of capital accumulation and the competition of commodity production and exchange explains why the conquest of the Americas was so vicious. Gold became capital, and the more of it that was plundered from the Incas and Aztecs, and the more viciously the Indigenous populations were exploited in the gold mines, the more capital the bourgeoisie could accumulate.
• That also explains why slavery was so brutal in the Americas. Plantations producing cash crops like cotton were producing commodities for exchange on the world market. They were serving the capital accumulation of the bourgeoisie in Europe. Slaves were treated as means of production, kidnapped from Africa and sold for a profit in the Americas, where their labor was used to generate more profit. A whole set of racist ideas was constructed to justify this.

How did the bourgeoisie become the dominant class?

• The early bourgeoisie was mainly traders and financiers. They collaborated with the feudal ruling classes of Europe in the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and in the slave trade. They made lots of profits from doing so.
• The relations of production they profited from were still mostly feudal in nature (examples: latifundias in Latin America and slave plantations).
• But in Europe, the bourgeoisie began to establish more directly capitalist relations of production, where they used capital to buy land and means of production and to pay workers wages to labor on that land and with those means of production. What was produced in the process became commodities for the bourgeoisie to sell on the market.
• The profit the bourgeoisie makes from selling commodities on the market is derived from the fact that under capitalism, when labor is used to make things—to produce—the people doing the labor are only paid what they need to survive. But they produce things, or an amount of things, that are worth more than what they’re paid. The difference is called surplus value—the value that the laborers produced in surplus of what they need to survive, what they’re paid. That surplus value becomes profit for the capitalist after the products are sold. (Here is a good place to briefly discuss examples participants are familiar with of instances where workers produce surplus value but are only paid what they need to survive.)
• Those capitalist relations of production were first consolidated in England. In the English countryside, peasants were thrown off their land, the land became the private property of landlords, and agricultural laborers were paid in wages to produce things on it (dairy, wool, crops, etc.).
• Those capitalist relations of production spread to the towns, where workshops turned into factories employing a mass of people in industrial production processes. In those factories, the means of production were large machines that relied on the collective labor of many.
• The result was the socialization of production. In individual units (like factories), large numbers of people are necessary in the production process (examples: steel mills, auto factories). On a global scale, raw materials from different parts of the world are turned into finished products in other places. For example, cotton from plantations in the US South was shipped to England, where textile factories transformed it into finished products.
• But appropriation of production remained private—the bourgeoisie owned what was produced because it provided the capital, not the labor, to produce it. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism is between private appropriation (by the bourgeoisie) and socialized production (by the proletariat and the masses of people).
• As capitalist relations of production spread and consolidated, they supplanted feudal relations of production and made the classes of feudalism obsolete. Aristocratic lords were replaced by agricultural capitalists. Peasants were transformed into agricultural wage workers, or flocked to the cities and became urban proletarians. Artisans and craftsmen became factory workers. Towns became cities, with the masses living in slums. (US example: with the Great Migration, Black sharecroppers in the South moved to cities in the North and elsewhere, lived in urban ghettos, and worked as proletarians in factories and other places.)
• These transformations happened with great struggle between classes—peasant revolts, aristocracies trying to hold onto their power, etc. But the bourgeoisie emerged victorious.
• A growing class emerged whose labor became the source of the bourgeoisie’s wealth and capital: the proletariat. The proletariat is made up of people who have been dispossessed (of their land, property, livelihoods, etc.), who must work for wages in order to survive, who can only find work if a capitalist needs their labor to produce surplus value, and who are exploited by the capitalists that employ them. Unlike previous exploited classes, the proletariat works in socialized production, working with means of production that require collective labor processes, both at the direct production level and on a global scale.

Industrial capital

• With the bourgeoisie becoming the dominant class in Europe came the consolidation of capitalist relations of production and the rise of industrial production.
• In industrial production, (industrial) capitalists purchase raw materials, pay wages to workers, and acquire the most technologically advanced means of production to produce a huge volume of industrial products.
• The human and environmental cost: people exploited in factories, getting sick from pollution and squalid living conditions, and environmental devastation (burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, etc.; deforestation; strip-mining).
• More advanced means of production throw people out of work because they require less people to produce the same amount (contemporary example: self-checkout). This creates surplus populations and reserve armies of labor, who are in competition with employed proletarians for jobs.
• Industrial capital has an insatiable appetite for more raw materials. That created an impetus for administrative colonialism. Much of Africa and parts of Asia were turned into European colonies. Raw materials like rubber and iron was shipped to European factories, and colonized populations were viciously exploited. (Example: rubber in the Belgian Congo.)
• Industrial capital gave the European bourgeoisie the material power to dominate colonies—it mass produced weaponry like the machine gun.
• But industrial capital produced a huge volume of products it needed to sell. Offloading them to colonies was one solution.
• Industrial capital scaled up its operations by merging with finance capital, creating huge monopolies that dominated entire industries.
• The result in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that a small number of imperialist countries were in command of finance capital, industrial production, and world trade. Britain was at the top, with other European countries, the US, and Japan also among the imperialists. The rest of the world was turned into colonies and oppressed nations, whose people and resources are exploited by the imperialist bourgeoisies.
• That division started with the Spanish conquest of the Americas, continued with the slave trade and British colonialism in India, and was consolidated with the period of high colonialism in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism became a system of global exploitation, with the exploited classes—proletarians and peasants—producing everything, the bourgeoisie in command of that global exploitation and getting the profits, and other classes, lesser in number, performing other tasks like scientific research or keeping the exploited in check (the police, for example).

But the bourgeoisie is not all powerful

• Where there is oppression, there is resistance, and the bourgeoisie has to constantly try and prevent revolt or suppress it when it happens. The exploited classes never just submitted to their oppression peacefully—there’s a long, heroic history of slave revolts, peasant uprisings, and proletarian struggles.
• Crisis is built into the functioning of the capitalist system. Capital has to keep expanding or lose in the game of competition. If capital is accumulated that can’t be set in motion in an accumulation process, it is devalued. If, at the end of a production process, the products can’t be sold, a profit can’t be made. These are crises of overaccumulation (of capital) and overproduction, and they’re endemic to capitalism.
• The anarchy of capitalist production: since production is done for sale on the market, no one can know in advance of production if there will be buyers on the market. Production under capitalism is not done in service of human need or following a social plan.
• The contradictions built into the capitalist system and the exploited classes it creates are the basis for its overthrow.

Discussion questions

How and why did property, patriarchy, and production relations emerge?

What are commodities? How is commodity production different than producing for direct use?

How did the early bourgeoisie emerge? Where did it get its wealth and capital from?

What’s capital and why must it expand or die?

How were capitalist relations of production established, and what made them different from other relations of production (such as slavery and feudalism)?

How is labor exploited by the bourgeoisie in capitalist relations of production?

What’s the fundamental contradiction between private appropriation and socialized production?

What are the defining features of the proletariat as a class?

What’s industrial production?

What’s finance capital, and how did it merge with industrial capital?

How did colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve capital accumulation in the imperialist countries?

Why, under capitalism, was the world divided into imperialist countries, on the one hand, and colonies and oppressed nations, on the other?

Why are crises inherent and endemic to capitalism?

Who are capitalism’s gravediggers?

Key terms

relations of production

division of labor

patriarchy

means of production

(private) property

feudalism (lord/aristocracy; serf/peasant)

capital accumulation

profit

trade, finance, and industrial capital

the bourgeoisie

commodity; commodity production; commodity exchange

competition; expand-or-die; anarchy of production; the market

capitalist relations of production; wage-labor (vs. slavery, for example)

surplus value

the proletariat

industrial production

raw materials

socialization of production (global and unit level)

private appropriation

colonialism; administrative colonialism; high colonialism

crisis of overaccumulation; crisis of overproduction