Page 43 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CLASS

usage, class articulates social to economic positions. People are sorted
into groups on the basis of economic factors (income or wealth), but
the groups or classes are then made to explain matters external to
economics, including social values, politics, beliefs and culture.
Pre-modern (feudal) societies sorted people by rank in a society
based on birth and land tenure. This conception was overturned by
the Industrial Revolution and its sweeping social reforms. ‘Classes’
came to refer to the groups produced by the relation of people to the
industrial mode of production.
It was this particular formation that was of great interest to Karl
Marx, who is regarded as the instigator of class analysis. Marx
identified two new and fundamental classes: those who owned the
means of production (the bourgeoisie); and those without ownership,
who had to sell their capacity to work (the proletariat). He argued that
while both groups were bound by their ideologies, it was the ruling
(owning) class who were also the intellectual force (Milner, 1999: 26).
This structure of power was supplemented by surplus production that
resulted in the accumulation of material wealth by the bourgeoisie at
the expense of the working or ‘productive’ class. In Marx’s analysis this
situation could be resolved only by proletariat revolution. It is this aim
that he understood as driving historical and social change.
Weber, who wanted to draw attention to other stratifications within
society, took the theories of Marx further. While he found no reason
to disagree with Marx’s fundamental classes, Weber argued that the
privileged class could be broken down into another subset that
acknowledged status rather than simply ownership. Managers,
intellectuals and journalists were privileged over other types of
workers in the skills they could offer the market. In this conception, it
is skills and their relation to the market, rather than ownership of the
modes of production, that group together individuals. In Weber’s
analysis, it is relevant to include differences such as education and race
in analysing the ideological construction of class.
While the concept of class continues to have importance in some
branches of sociology (see for example, Crompton et al., 2000), its
usefulness in cultural and communications studies has been re-assessed.
One reason is that cultural and communication studies have tended to
focus on national cultures and various identity groups, rather than on
the global economy. But the traditional two fundamental classes are
now globally separated – the owners of wealth overwhelmingly living
in the US, while the workers who make products for the companies in
which they hold shares are located in cheap-labour countries such as
Indonesia and China.

28