To every class we have a school assign’d
Rules for all ranks and food for every mind
class is virtually equivalent to rank and was so used in the definition of a middle class. But the influence of sense (i), class as a general term for grouping, was at least equally strong, and useful or productive classes follows mainly from this. The productive distinction, however, as a perception of an active economic system, led to a sense of class which is neither a synonym for rank nor a mode of descriptive grouping, but is a description of fundamental economic relationships. In modern usage, the sense of rank, though residual, is still active; in one kind of use class is still essentially defined by birth. But the more serious uses divide between descriptive grouping and economic relationship. It is obvious that a terminology of basic economic relationships (as between employers and employed, or propertied and propertyless) will be found too crude and general for the quite different purpose of precise descriptive grouping. Hence the persistent but confused arguments between those who, using class in the sense of basic relationship, propose two or three basic classes, and those who, trying to use it for descriptive grouping, find they have to break these divisions down into smaller and smaller categories. The history of the word carries this essential ambiguity.
When the language of class was being developed, in eC19, each tendency can be noted. The Gorgon (21 November 1818) referred quite naturally to ‘a smaller class of tradesmen, termed garret-masters’. But Cobbett in 1825 had the newer sense: ‘so that here is one class of society united to oppose another class’. Charles Hall in 1805 had argued that
the people in a civilized state may be divided into different orders; but for the purpose of investigating the manner in which they enjoy or are deprived of the requisites to support the health of their bodies or minds, they need only be divided into two classes, viz. the rich and the poor. (The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States)
Here there is a distinction between orders (ranks) and effective economic groupings (classes). A cotton spinner in 1818 (cit. The Making of the English Working Class; E. P. Thompson, p. 199) described employers and workers as ‘two distinct classes of persons’. In different ways this binary grouping became conventional, though it operated alongside tripartite groupings: both the social grouping (upper, middle and lower) and a modernized economic grouping: John Stuart Mill’s ‘three classes’, of ‘landlords, capitalists and labourers’ (Monthly Repository, 1834, 320) or Marx’s ‘three great social classes … wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords’ (Capital, III). In the actual development of capitalist society, the tripartite division was more and more replaced by a new binary division: in Marxist language the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. (It is because of the complications of the tripartite division, and because of the primarily social definition of the English term middle class, that bourgeoisie and even proletariat are often difficult to translate.) A further difficulty then arises: a repetition, at a different level, of the variation between a descriptive grouping and an economic relationship. A class seen in terms of economic relationships can be a category (wage-earners) or a formation (the working class). The main tendency of Marx’s description of classes was towards formations:
The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class … (German Ideology)
This difficult argument again attracts confusion. A class is sometimes an economic category, including all who are objectively in that economic situation. But a class is sometimes (and in Marx more often) a formation in which, for historical reasons, consciousness of this situation and the organization to deal with it have developed. Thus:
Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
This is the distinction between category and formation, but since class is used for both there has been plenty of ground for confusion. The problem is still critical in that it underlies repeated arguments about the relation of an assumed class consciousness to an objectively measured class, and about the vagaries of self-description and self-assignation to a class scale. Many of the derived terms repeat this uncertainty. Class consciousness clearly can belong only to a formation. Class struggle, class conflict, class war, class legislation, class bias depend on the existence of formations (though this may be very uneven or partial within or between classes). Class culture, on the other hand, can swing between the two meanings: working-class culture can be the meanings and values and institutions of the formation, or the tastes and life-styles of the category (see also CULTURE). In a whole range of contemporary discussion and controversy, all these variable meanings of class can be seen in operation, usually without clear distinction. It is therefore worth repeating the basic range (outside the uncontroversial senses of general classification and education):
| i. | group (objective); social or economic category, at varying levels |
| ii. | rank; relative social position; by birth or mobility |
| iii. | formation; perceived economic relationship; social, political and cultural organization |
See CULTURE, INDUSTRY, MASSES, ORDINARY, POPULAR, SOCIETY, UNDERPRIVILEGED
Collective appeared in English as an adjective from C16 and as a noun from C17. It was mainly a specialized development from collect, fw collectus, L – gathered together (there is also a fw collecter, oF – to gather taxes or other money). Collective as an adjective was used from its earliest appearance to describe people acting together, or in such related phrases as collective body (Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, VIII, iv; 1600). Early uses of the noun were in grammar or in physical description. The social and political sense of a specific unit – ‘your brethren of the Collective’ (Cobbett, Rural Rides, II, 337; 1830) – belongs to the new DEMOCRATIC (q.v.) consciousness of eC19. This use has been revived in several subsequent periods, including mC20, but is still not common. Collectivism, used mainly to describe socialist economic theory, and only derivatively in the political sense of collective, became common in lC19; it was described in the 1880s as a recent word, though its use is recorded from the 1850s. In France the term was used in 1869 as a way of opposing ‘state socialism’.
See COMMON, DEMOCRACY, MASSES, SOCIETY
Commerce was a normal English word for trade from C16, from fw commerce, F, commercium, L, rw com, L – together, merx, L – ware or merchandise.