Classless society
Encyclopedia
Classless society refers to a society
in which no one is born into a social class
. Such distinctions of wealth
, income
, education
, culture
, or social network
might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society.
Since these distinctions are difficult to avoid, advocates, such as Anarchists, communists, etc. of a classless society propose various means to achieve and maintain it and attach varying degrees of importance to it as an end in their overall programs/philosophy.
In societies where classes have been abolished it is usually the result of a voluntary decision by the membership to form such a society
, to abolish a pre-existing class structure in an existing society or to form a new one without any. This would include commune
s, of the modern period, such as various Utopian communities, the kibbutz
im, etc. as well as revolutionary and political acts at the nation-state
level such as the Paris Commune
, Russian Revolution, etc. The abolition of social classes and the establishment of a classless society is the primary goal of communism
, libertarian socialism
and most forms of anarchism
.
Classlessness also refers to the state of mind required in order to operate effectively as a social anthropologist
. Anthropological training includes making assessments of and therefore becoming aware of one's own class assumptions, so that these can be set aside from conclusions reached about other societies. This may be compared to ethnocentric
biases or the "neutral axiology
" required by Max Weber
. Otherwise conclusions reached about studied societies will likely be coloured by the anthropologist's own class values.
Classlessness can also refer to a society that has acquired pervasive and substantial social justice
; where the economic upper class
wields no special political power and poverty
as experienced historically is virtually nonexistent. Some Scandinavian
countries are held to have reached this state.
society, primitive communism
, was classless
. Everyone was equal in a basic sense as a member of the tribe and the different functional assignments of the primitive mode of production, howsoever rigid and stratified they might be, did not and could not, simply because of the numbers, produce a class society as such. With the transition to agriculture
, the possibility to make a surplus product
, i.e. to produce more than what is necessary to satisfy one's immediate needs, developed in the course of development of the productive forces
. According to Marxism, this also made it possible for a class society to develop, because the surplus product could be used to nourish a ruling class, which did not participate in production.
The surplus product was stored for a time of distress in special repositories, which then also had to be guarded. Especially during these times the stored products had to be defended against the immediate fears of the population, so that they were not all consumed right away. The people who did this, could, therefore, also decide if someone was not to be fed. They had to be more powerful than the masses of the population. The ruling class was born – hence the negation
of the classless society, or the first negation.
There are three societies that followed the classless tribal society. First, there was ancient society, in which the major class distinction was between master and slave. Then, there was feudal society, in which lord and serf played the roles of class war. The last stage of class society is bourgeois society, or capitalism, in which it has been simplified to owner and worker. According to Marx, there should be a classless society once again at the end of the development of productive forces
, specifically through the development of infrastructure and production technology. Class society, would be sublated
, the Hegelian circuit completed, as the productive forces burst their confinement in bourgeois society as they did those of feudal- and orientalism, and the contradiction of class society is finally resolved into a version of the prior classless state but at the much higher level of human development that would be in effect then. Similar to primitive communism, where everyone must do useful work to have access to the things they need, in communism, everyone can use the means of production
to fulfill their needs, to the extent that a ruling class
is no longer controlling access to these; this final stage of production is the negation of the negation of classless society, in Hegelian terms.
This society would be a co-operative union of free producers, who are both owners of the means of production
and self-employed, i.e. with no intermediary
between themselves and the society that consumes their labor. There is no private ownership of the means of production. These are the property of the whole society. Because all decisions are made in a grassroots democratic
system, there is no longer a need for a state
as an instrument of class rule and it would die off, when it has in fact become superfluous. Because after the proletarian revolution
the economic system would no longer be plagued by rivalry and crises, and rationalized production is assumed to increase greatly. Agriculture would also be rationalized, because it would be practiced on larger farms. It would be possible to get rid of all shortages, so that the reasonable needs of all people could be satisfied. Socially necessary work
is no longer alienated
, and individuals become free to pursue their individual personal interests with time freed from the life-or-death struggle that bourgeois thought poses as a false need for workers to compete for capitalist remuneration (in money which represents that which they, the worker/producers, as a class, created in the first place) in order to secure the necessities of
life.
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
in which no one is born into a social class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
. Such distinctions of wealth
Wealth
Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. The word wealth is derived from the old English wela, which is from an Indo-European word stem...
, income
Income
Income is the consumption and savings opportunity gained by an entity within a specified time frame, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. However, for households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings...
, education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
, culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, or social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society.
Since these distinctions are difficult to avoid, advocates, such as Anarchists, communists, etc. of a classless society propose various means to achieve and maintain it and attach varying degrees of importance to it as an end in their overall programs/philosophy.
Classlessness
The term classlessness has been used to describe different social phenomena.In societies where classes have been abolished it is usually the result of a voluntary decision by the membership to form such a society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, to abolish a pre-existing class structure in an existing society or to form a new one without any. This would include commune
Commune (intentional community)
A commune is an intentional community of people living together, sharing common interests, property, possessions, resources, and, in some communes, work and income. In addition to the communal economy, consensus decision-making, non-hierarchical structures and ecological living have become...
s, of the modern period, such as various Utopian communities, the kibbutz
Kibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
im, etc. as well as revolutionary and political acts at the nation-state
Nation-state
The nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit. The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity...
level such as the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
, Russian Revolution, etc. The abolition of social classes and the establishment of a classless society is the primary goal of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production...
and most forms of anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
.
Classlessness also refers to the state of mind required in order to operate effectively as a social anthropologist
Social anthropology
Social Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...
. Anthropological training includes making assessments of and therefore becoming aware of one's own class assumptions, so that these can be set aside from conclusions reached about other societies. This may be compared to ethnocentric
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one's ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one's own. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with...
biases or the "neutral axiology
Axiology
Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics—philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of value—or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics...
" required by Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
. Otherwise conclusions reached about studied societies will likely be coloured by the anthropologist's own class values.
Classlessness can also refer to a society that has acquired pervasive and substantial social justice
Social justice
Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...
; where the economic upper class
Upper class
In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...
wields no special political power and poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
as experienced historically is virtually nonexistent. Some Scandinavian
Scandinavians
Scandinavians are a group of Germanic peoples, inhabiting Scandinavia and to a lesser extent countries associated with Scandinavia, and speaking Scandinavian languages. The group includes Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, and additionally the descendants of Scandinavian settlers such as the Icelandic...
countries are held to have reached this state.
Marxist definition
In Marxist theory, tribal hunter-gathererHunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
society, primitive communism
Primitive communism
Primitive communism is a term used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe what they interpreted as early forms of communism: As a model, primitive communism is usually used to describe early hunter-gatherer societies, that had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation...
, was classless
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
. Everyone was equal in a basic sense as a member of the tribe and the different functional assignments of the primitive mode of production, howsoever rigid and stratified they might be, did not and could not, simply because of the numbers, produce a class society as such. With the transition to agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
, the possibility to make a surplus product
Surplus product
Surplus product is a concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Marx first began to work out his idea of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill's Elements of political economy...
, i.e. to produce more than what is necessary to satisfy one's immediate needs, developed in the course of development of the productive forces
Productive forces
Productive forces, "productive powers" or "forces of production" [in German, Produktivkräfte] is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism....
. According to Marxism, this also made it possible for a class society to develop, because the surplus product could be used to nourish a ruling class, which did not participate in production.
The surplus product was stored for a time of distress in special repositories, which then also had to be guarded. Especially during these times the stored products had to be defended against the immediate fears of the population, so that they were not all consumed right away. The people who did this, could, therefore, also decide if someone was not to be fed. They had to be more powerful than the masses of the population. The ruling class was born – hence the negation
Negation
In logic and mathematics, negation, also called logical complement, is an operation on propositions, truth values, or semantic values more generally. Intuitively, the negation of a proposition is true when that proposition is false, and vice versa. In classical logic negation is normally identified...
of the classless society, or the first negation.
There are three societies that followed the classless tribal society. First, there was ancient society, in which the major class distinction was between master and slave. Then, there was feudal society, in which lord and serf played the roles of class war. The last stage of class society is bourgeois society, or capitalism, in which it has been simplified to owner and worker. According to Marx, there should be a classless society once again at the end of the development of productive forces
Productive forces
Productive forces, "productive powers" or "forces of production" [in German, Produktivkräfte] is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism....
, specifically through the development of infrastructure and production technology. Class society, would be sublated
Aufheben
Aufheben or Aufhebung is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", or "to sublate"...
, the Hegelian circuit completed, as the productive forces burst their confinement in bourgeois society as they did those of feudal- and orientalism, and the contradiction of class society is finally resolved into a version of the prior classless state but at the much higher level of human development that would be in effect then. Similar to primitive communism, where everyone must do useful work to have access to the things they need, in communism, everyone can use the means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
to fulfill their needs, to the extent that a ruling class
Ruling class
The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
is no longer controlling access to these; this final stage of production is the negation of the negation of classless society, in Hegelian terms.
This society would be a co-operative union of free producers, who are both owners of the means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
and self-employed, i.e. with no intermediary
Disintermediation
In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: "cutting out the middleman". Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediate , companies may now deal with every customer directly, for example via the Internet...
between themselves and the society that consumes their labor. There is no private ownership of the means of production. These are the property of the whole society. Because all decisions are made in a grassroots democratic
Grassroots democracy
Grassroots democracy is a tendency towards designing political processes where as much decision-making authority as practical is shifted to the organization's lowest geographic level of organization: principle of subsidiarity....
system, there is no longer a need for a state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
as an instrument of class rule and it would die off, when it has in fact become superfluous. Because after the proletarian revolution
Proletarian revolution
A proletarian revolution is a social and/or political revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists, communists, and most anarchists....
the economic system would no longer be plagued by rivalry and crises, and rationalized production is assumed to increase greatly. Agriculture would also be rationalized, because it would be practiced on larger farms. It would be possible to get rid of all shortages, so that the reasonable needs of all people could be satisfied. Socially necessary work
Wage labour
Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined...
is no longer alienated
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
, and individuals become free to pursue their individual personal interests with time freed from the life-or-death struggle that bourgeois thought poses as a false need for workers to compete for capitalist remuneration (in money which represents that which they, the worker/producers, as a class, created in the first place) in order to secure the necessities of
life.
See also
|
Class conflict Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes.... Middle class The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class.... New class The "New Class" model, as a theory of new social groups in post-industrial societies, gained ascendency during the 1970s as social and political scientists noted how "New Class" groups were shaped by post-material orientations in their pursuit of political and social goals... |
Proletariat The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian... Stateless communism Stateless communism, also known as pure communism, is the post-capitalist stage of society which Karl Marx predicted would inevitably result from the development of the productive forces... Upper class In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :... Working class Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes... |