A Few Notes On Classes
In the contemporary left scene, there are still problems with defining a "class" precisely and explaining the class basis of an ideology or first of all the material basis of a class. Yet V. I. Lenin in his work "A Great Beginning Heroism Of The Workers In The Rear" (Lenin's Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 409-434) has already precisely defined the phenomenon of "class": Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a def...