An introductory explanation of what anarchists mean by the word

"class", and related terms such as "working class" and "class struggle".

Introduction
The first thing to say is that there are various ways of referring to class.
Often, when people talk about class, they talk in terms of cultural or
sociological labels. For example, middle-class people like focaccia
bread and investment news, working class people like football, upper-
class people like top hats and so on. This sociological way of looking at
class is not what we’re interested in.
Another way to talk about class, however, is a spectrum based on
economic positions. We talk about class like this because we see it as
essential for understanding how capitalist society works, and how
we can change it.
It is important to stress that our definition of class is not for classifying
individuals or putting them in boxes, but to understand the forces
which shape our world. Adding a class analysis to politics is about
understanding how capitalist social relationships shape us - why our
bosses, representatives and politicians act the way they do, what to be
wary of, and how we can effectively act to improve our conditions &
movements.

Class and capitalism

As mentioned earlier, the economic system which dominates the world
at present is called capitalism. Capitalism is essentially a system based
on the self-expansion of capital - basically commodities and money
making more commodities and more money.
This doesn’t happen by magic, but by human labour. For the work we
do, we're paid for only a fraction of what we produce. The difference
between the value we produce and the amount we're paid in wages is
the "surplus value" we've produced. This is kept by our boss as profit
and either reinvested to make more money or used to buy things.
 In order for this to happen,
a class of people must be
created who don't own
anything they can use to
make money i.e. offices,
factories, farmland or
other means of production.
This class must then sell
their ability to work in
order to purchase essential
goods and services in
order to survive. This
class is the working class.
So at one end of the
spectrum is this class, with
nothing to sell but their
ability to work. At the
other end are those who
do own capital to hire
workers to expand their
capital. Individuals in
society will fall at some
point between these two
poles, but what’s important from a political point of view is not the
positions of individuals but the social relationship between these
classes. When we talk about a landlord, a boss etc, we're not so much
referring to them as an individual, but how they act as a class.

The working class

The working class (or 'proletariat' in jargon) is the class which is forced
to work for wages (work being alienated labour), or claim benefits if we
cannot find work or are too sick or elderly to work, to survive. We sell
our time and energy to a boss for their benefit. Being ‘working class’ is
not an identity – it has nothing to do with how much you earn, or what
colour your collar is. It is naming a relationship to the means of
production which we are forced into under capitalism. It is a ‘we’ –
(‘the multitude’, ‘the people’ etc.) in the loosest sense - our shared
economic conditions.

Class should not be seen as an identity to be pitted off against others,

but rather an attempt to locate what we have in common. We all breathe
capitalist air, do capitalist work, drink capitalist water, use capitalist
energy. It is an attempt to construct greater affinity out of an incredible
heterogeneity. The centrality of class struggle is not to suggest that
organising against forms of oppression (eg: gender discrimination,
racism, sexism, transphobia etc) is somehow less important than say a
strike, or a struggle around purely economic demands. Both are vital,
linked and equally important parts of a whole. For example, you
cannot have queer liberation while apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism,
racism and other oppressions exist. You cannot have an effective class
movement when it is riddled and divided with racism, sexism, colonial
mentalities and other exclusionary or homogenising practices. Class is
about targeting the connections of these oppressive forces, as well as
the oppressive forces themselves. It is an open orientation towards
struggle.
Class struggle
It is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same
time always squeezing us to maximise profit, which makes it
vulnerable. When we are at work, our time and activity is not our own.
We have to obey the alarm clock, the time card, the managers, the
deadlines and the targets.
Work (alienating wage-labour) takes up the majority of our lives. We
may see our managers more than we see our friends and partners. Duty
to our boss often comes before our relationships of obligations to our
closest friends and others in the community. Even if we enjoy parts of
our job we experience it as something alien to us, over which we have
very little control. This is true whether we're talking about the nuts and
bolts of the actual work itself or the amount of hours, breaks, time off
 etc. More than any
other social order
capitalism has
made of work the
centre of human
activity, and more
than any other
social order
capitalism makes
of work something
that is absurd.
Work being forced
on us like this
compels us to
resist.
Employers and
bosses want to
get the maximum
amount of work
from us, from the
longest hours, for
the least pay. We,
on the other
hand, want to be
able to enjoy our
lives: we don't
want to be over-worked, and we want shorter hours and more pay (and
the end of work!).

If a household gets a washing machine, you never hear the family

members who used to do the laundry by hand complain that this “puts
them out of work.” But strangely enough, if a similar development
occurs on a broader social scale it is seen as a serious problem —
“unemployment” — which can only be solved by inventing more jobs
for people to do.
Proposals to spread the work around by implementing a slightly shorter
workweek seem at first sight to address the matter more rationally. But
such proposals do not face the fundamental irrationality of the whole
social system based on market relations. While reacting to one
manifestation of this irrationality (the fact that some people work long
hours while others are jobless), they tend at the same time to reinforce
the illusion that most present-day work is normal and necessary, as if
the only problem were that for some strange reason it is divided up
unequally. The absurdity of 90% of existing jobs is never mentioned.
A sane society, would abolish of all these absurd jobs & the planetary
work machine (not only those jobs that produce or market ridiculous
and unnecessary commodities, but the far larger number directly or
indirectly involved in promoting and protecting the whole commodity
system). We don’t want “full employment,” we want full lives!
Between these two sides, Capital & Labour, is a push and pull:
employers cut pay, increase hours, speed up the pace of work. But we
attempt to resist: either covertly and individually by taking it easy,
grabbing moments to take a break and chat to colleagues, calling in
sick, leaving early etc. Or we can resist overtly and collectively with
strikes, slow-downs, blockades, occupations etc. This tension is central
to capitalism & shapes/underlines all other forms of oppression.
By resisting market values & the imposition of work, we say that our
lives are more important than profits. This attacks the very nature of
capitalism, where profit is the most important reason for doing
anything, and points to the possibility of a world without classes and
privately-owned means of production.
It should be pointed out again that we use these class definitions in
order to understand social forces (at work, in the community etc), and
not to label individuals or determine how individuals will act in given
situations.
A union official, for example, may order striking workers to cease, or
accept a deal that wasn’t agreed upon. Although the union official may
be a worker - they would be acting on the side of capital, not on the side
of labour.
Similarly a police
officer may be
friendly in their
personal life but
that is not what
we’re interested
in. The police are
of the class, but
not for it.

Are they?
The police forces role as a class is to enforce, defend and uphold the
laws of privilege and private property. This is where an anarchist
understanding of class comes in handy; the nuts and bolts of organising
our struggles in such a way that avoids cross-class collaboration so that
our movements can’t be demobilised or sold out from above, or used as
trampolines for political careerists, NGO’s and those who seek to rule
over and above the people.
Beyond the workplace
A common
misconception is that
class struggle is all about
work. Class struggle
does not only take place
in the workplace. Class
conflict reveals itself in
all aspects of life.
For example, affordable
housing is something
that concerns all people.
However, affordable for
us means unprofitable
for them. In a capitalist
economy, it often makes
more sense to build
luxury apartment blocks,
even while tens of
thousands are homeless,
than to build housing
which we can afford to live in. So struggles to defend social housing,
occupying empty properties to live in, protecting our natural
environment from destruction or fighting a dodgy landlord are all part
of the class struggle.
Healthcare provision can be a site of class conflict. Governments or
companies attempt to reduce spending on healthcare by cutting budgets
and introducing charges for services to shift the burden of costs onto the
working class, whereas we want the best healthcare possible for as little
cost as possible.
Similarly, capitalism desires a certain type of body and mindset; one
that is useful for production & can adjust to the competitive rugged-
individualism that is the basis of capitalist society. The history of
colonial imperialism & patriarchy usually means this equates to white
and male. Bodily autonomy & decolonisation are all part of the class
struggle.
The effects of colonial-capitalism and the extension and imposition of
western rule have created economies that displace and compel people to
move, yet which at the same time denies culpability and accountability
for displaced migrants & refugees. The material structures which
‘secure the economy’ have killed, tortured, occupied, raped,
incarcerated, sterilised, robbed land from, pillaged, stolen children from,
introduced drugs into, sanctioned vigilante violence on, denied public
services to, and facilitated the hyper exploitation of broad sections of
the globe.

An analysis of oppression needs an analysis of exploitation and visa

versa. Capitalism is social war: It destroys certainties capable of giving
any measure of meaning to existence on this earth. It is the first truly
Total war; not a war on all fronts – a war with No front. Anything that
allows us to identify ourselves as existing independent of capital must
be destroyed, or reduced to the quantifiable exchangeability of the
world market. Cultures, languages, histories, memories, stories, songs,
ideas and dreams must all undergo this process; For the capitalist
market the ultimate goal is to make the entire world a desert of
indifference populated only by equally indifferent and exchangeable
consumers and producers…”

The "middle class"

While the
economic
interests of
capitalists are
directly
opposed to
those of
workers, a
minority of
the working
class will be
better off than
others, be
more
privileged, or
have some
level of power
over others.
When talking
about history
and social
change it can
be useful to
refer to this part of the proletariat as a middle class, despite the fact that
it is not a distinct economic class, in order to understand the behaviour
of different groups.
The middle class is a subjectivity within the working class; it is a
sociological label rather than an economic one. It is an ideology among
the working class – upholding bourgeois values, identifying with the
ruling elite, buying hook line and sinker myths like ‘anyone can make
it’, ‘the australian dream’ etc. Though they may have more money, for
example through shares, property subsidising a wage etc, their
relationship to production and wage labour is essentially no different.
Class struggle can sometimes be derailed by allowing the creation or
expansion of the middle class – Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister)
for example encouraged home ownership by cheaply selling off social
housing in the UK during the big struggles of the 1980s, knowing that
workers were less likely to strike if they had a mortgage, and allowing
some workers to become better off on an individual level, rather than as
a collective. There are all sorts of ways used by bosses to divide the
class – through racism, sexism, salary etc.

Conclusion
Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you
have but the basic conflict which defines capitalism. 'Class' is a
relationship inherent in all forms of oppression; it is not itself another
form of oppression. By figuring out how we can come together, through
working towards solidarity against all forms of oppression, fighting for
our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the
market, we lay the basis for a new type of society.

Thanks to:
www.libcom.org
An introductory explanation of what
anarchists mean by the word "class",
and related terms such as "working
class" and "class struggle".