When people in Canada talk about class, they’re usually thinking about groups of people of a certain level of wealth. So the rich are the “upper class,” most people are “middle class,” and the poor are the “lower class.”

Poverty is a terrible reality. A few households are unbelievably wealthy. But confusing wealth with class doesn’t help people who want to change the world because it hides the tremendously important relationship that exists between the capitalist class – those who own or control workplaces and employ workers – and the majority who must work for them, the working class.

The working class – high-paid and low-paid – creates the enormous wealth of society, all its goods and services. To quote the labour song “Solidarity Forever,” “Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn.” Part of the wealth we create is returned to us in the form of wages/salaries and benefits (the state takes some of it away through taxes). The rest goes to the capitalist class, who invest it in new technology, purchase the assets of other companies, buy huge houses for themselves, etc. This relationship between those who produce wealth and those who appropriate it is what Marxists refer to as CLASS EXPLOITATION.

What’s a Class?

A social class is a group of people identified by their position in the whole system of production of goods and services, defined above all by their relationship to workplaces, labour and other classes. This helps us to see how exploitation organizes people in social classes. Does someone own or control factories, offices, stores or other workplaces? That puts her in the tiny capitalist class. Small business owners, farmers and independent professionals, like lawyers and doctors, make up the middle class; some of them are rich, others struggle to get by.

People who work for wages/salaries and don’t have real management power belong to the working class. In Canada, this is by far the largest class, and it includes people in many different kinds of jobs. Of course, just because people belong to the working class in this sense doesn’t mean they think of themselves as workers or see their interests as different from those of the capitalist class (though many partially understand this).

At this point it’s worth pointing out one common mistake sometimes made when thinking about the working class. We have often forgotten about people – mostly women – who aren’t working for wages but instead are spending all their time doing housework, caring for children or looking after older relatives. These people must generally rely on the wages of other members of their households – usually men – or on welfare from the state. They need to be recognized as part of the working class, too.

Unavoidable Conflict

Conflicts between workers and employers and between workers and the state (governments, courts, the police, etc.) won’t go away. To understand why, we need to recognize that the working class has all sorts of needs (and throughout our history, humans, unlike other animals, have created new needs). Under capitalism, we usually have to buy goods or services to meet our needs. We sometimes also have access to free public services.

Competition between capitalists forces them to try to increase their profits at the expense of workers. They hold down wages, make us work longer and/or harder, and do whatever else they think they can get away with to boost profits. They demand cuts to health care, education, welfare, EI and other services provided by the state. This puts new or stronger barriers in the way of working-class people meeting our needs.

Because these barriers exist, CLASS STRUGGLE will always flare up. It happens even when workers desperately want to avoid conflict and don’t see themselves as workers. It happens in the places where we work for pay, but also in the communities we live in. The most widely-experienced form of class struggle in Canada is the strike. Occupations, street protests, uprisings and other kinds of actions are also class struggle.

Not the Only Struggle

Class struggle is not the only struggle in capitalist society. Working-class people are never only workers. Some are women, and experience sexism (which existed long before capitalism). Some face racism. Lesbians, gays and bisexuals are oppressed by heterosexism. Many people experience more than one kind of oppression at the same time. The fact that these various kinds of OPPRESSION exist, distinct from CLASS EXPLOITATION, is very important. Oppression shapes the way class happens (and vice versa). For example, working-class women of colour are slotted into particular kinds of jobs, often the worst-paid and least secure.

Every form of oppression hurts those it affects, ravaging lives. Working-class people who belong to groups in society that are dominant (not oppressed) – such as white men – often act in ways that sustain oppression. In doing so, they reinforce divisions in the working class and undermine our ability to fight for our needs against employers and state power.

For this reason, oppressed people have to organize themselves to fight for equality and liberation. Such movements are crucial for fighting oppression. They are also needed to build unity in the working class, challenging other workers to fight oppression.

Workers’ Power

Divisions and inequality caused by oppression are one reason why the working class in Canada (and many other places) is so divided and badly organized. There are many other reasons why the enormous potential power of the working class doesn’t often become a reality. Laws restrict the right to strike and split up unionized workers into narrow “bargaining units.” The job of union officials is to negotiate the terms on which workers will be exploited, so they usually don’t help workers mobilize. Parties that serve capitalist interests dominate political life. The NDP, the party of the bureaucratic leaders of unions and community groups in English Canada, rejects the idea that class struggle is unavoidable and has to be fought. The fact that there are few activists with a coherent analysis of capitalism and class struggle weakens the workers’ movement.

But struggles against exploitation and oppression will go on as long as capitalism exists. In these struggles there is the potential for people to organize themselves and unleash the power of the working class to transform society (the task of socialists like the ones who publish this magazine is to help this happen). The source of workers’ power is not just our numbers, but our LABOUR. It’s the life-blood of society. When millions of us withdraw our labour in mass strikes organized democratically by workers ourselves, we pose truly revolutionary questions: which class will run society? How should society be run?

Sebastian Lamb is an editor of NEW SOCIALIST