We Can’t Win Socialism Without Understanding Class Interests

The socialist project is more complicated than just making a working class “in itself” into a working class “for itself.” Yet understanding objective class interests remains essential.

According to an orthodox Marxist viewpoint, the socialist project requires workers to move from being merely a “class in itself” to a “class for itself.” Working-class people constitute a class in itself in virtue of possessing common material interests, which are a function of their objective position in the economic structure: that is, they are all forced to sell their labor to capitalists in order to survive. The working class only becomes a class for itself when workers become conscious of their shared plight and organize politically against capitalists, with the aim of ending their exploitation. It is the task of socialists, according to this perspective, to help facilitate the development of a mere class in itself to a fighting class for itself.

I alluded to this idea in a piece I wrote last year in response to Dylan Riley’s criticisms of “the new Marxist culture” in the United States. But things are in fact more complicated than the simple class-in-itself/class-for-itself schema suggests. Here I want to take a look at some of the complications socialists today should acknowledge — and consider whether they mean we should abandon the notion of a “class in itself” altogether.

Challenges for the Orthodox View

Marxists of the Second International generally believed that the development of capitalism was pushing most of society into one of two class positions: either proletarian or bourgeois. The “middle class” of shopkeepers, independent artisans, peasants, and so on would “decay and dissolve” into one of these two, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto (1848). This prediction makes socialists’ central political task fairly simple: as the proletariat was gradually and inevitably becoming the “immense majority,” all socialists needed to do was organize that nascent working-class majority into a self-conscious, militant force to do battle with the capitalist class.

Yet this prediction did not come to pass. Capitalist development has continually pushed members of the “petit bourgeois,” like small shopkeepers and merchants, into the working class. But it has not eliminated middle-class positions, and in fact it continually creates new positions of this kind. The twentieth century saw an explosion of white-collar occupations, many of them requiring special skills or training and (to varying degrees) involving significant autonomy on the job or supervisory authority over others. Today in developed economies we are witnessing the growth of “pink-collar” service occupations, some of which are like nineteenth-century proletarian positions in terms of being unskilled, low-wage, low-status roles but some of which — like nursing — require professional training and pay decent salaries.

When it comes to potential political alliances or strategy, the interests of these middle classes are objectively ambiguous. Wage-earners with higher salaries, and/or who enjoy a great deal of autonomy or authority at work, might support collective bargaining rights, but they may be less inclined to support a radical reordering of an economic system that is serving them fairly well. Small business owners may sympathize with workers in wanting to try to limit the economic and political power of large corporations; but they certainly will not find common cause with workers in pushing for, say, higher minimum wages or more labor regulations.

The picture is more complicated still because, in contemporary capitalism, many ordinary people derive incomes without participating in the labor force at all. In the United States, there are tens of millions of pensioners, full-time students who aren’t working, and adults who depend on disability benefits. These groups have distinct economic interests as well.

If early Marxists envisioned that the emerging majority of propertyless workers had a clear interest in abolishing wage-labor altogether, the proliferation of class positions, and ways of earning a living outside the labor force, under capitalism means things are not actually so simple. Workers who resemble the classic proletarians described by Marx and Engels make up, on the most generous estimate, around 50 percent of the adult population.¹ So, if socialists are committed to majoritarian politics, we have to win over some of these middle layers to our project.

Now, one reaction to all this is just to say that we need to take a more sophisticated approach to class theory. Much of Erik Olin Wright’s work was devoted to exactly this. He sought to map the different middle-class positions we see in contemporary capitalism and analyze the distinct economic interests to which those positions gave rise. This project gives us guidance in understanding which of these “contradictory class locations” make for feasible political alliances with workers in the struggle for emancipatory reforms and, ultimately, for socialism itself.

Yet which middle positions exist, and how many people occupy them, is always changing, and is itself in part a function of political struggle. These were challenges to Wright-style class theory raised by Adam Przeworski.² Social democratic programs to build out the public sector, for instance, give rise to or expand strata of white-collar office workers and supervisors; industrial policy that boosts the tech sector might create more of a demand for highly skilled professionals; the creation of a national health system might expand the ranks of nurses and other health care workers; and so on. So we can’t even take the “contradictory class locations” as objective facts that exist independently of and prior to political struggle. Insofar as socialists want to capture state power and use it to enact reforms that benefit and empower workers on the way to moving beyond capitalism entirely — the classic social democratic strategy — we are committed to a strategy that involves changing the class structure, not simply reacting to it.

Moreover, given the complex array of contradictory class locations that capitalism is continually generating and reconfiguring, we can’t even take for granted that the proletariat or the bourgeoisie have a single optimal strategy that best promotes their interests. There are multiple feasible coalitions that workers and capitalists might enter into to pursue those interests. Workers might, for instance, attempt to forge an alliance with other wage-earners, or with other wage-earners plus the self-employed and small business owners. The “big” bourgeoisie, i.e., owners and directors of large corporations and investment houses — or segments thereof — may, depending on the situation, enter into a coalition with middle managers, with wage-earners, with small business owners and individual proprietors, or even with sections of the working class. (In earlier eras, both workers and capitalists would have needed to appeal to the peasantry as well.)

Socialists’ political task, then, can no longer be simply to transform a single working-class-in-itself into the working-class-for-itself. Nor is it simply about identifying a group of classes that has an objective interest in socialism and mobilizing them on that basis. Our project must be to actively organize workers and other classes into a political bloc against capital, convincing them to join our team rather than adopt other strategies that might serve those groups’ interests. And part of that fight very well may involve using the state to actively reshape the class landscape in ways that are more favorable to the Left.

What Is True in the Orthodox View

I think the above line of argument is basically correct. But it’s possible to take it too far — to argue that there’s no point in theorizing objective class locations, even in the sophisticated form attempted by Wright.³ If, contrary to what the early Marxists claimed, the class interests of the people we need to organize for socialism are so varied, and change over time in response to shifting conditions, and are themselves shaped by political struggle, is there any utility in thinking about “objective” class interests? Shouldn’t we just be focused on building a winning political coalition?

This is not actually a fair criticism of the Wright-style framework of objective class interests, however. Precisely because the fight for socialism depends on bringing together distinct class groupings in favor of our coalition rather than a coalition led by capital or other reactionary forces, we have to understand what those distinct class positions are, and what interests correspond to them. And although the terrain of class positions changes over time — again, often because of government policy — a “static snapshot” of class positions at a given moment is indispensable for formulating an effective political strategy.

To make things a bit more concrete: the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary slogan of “Peace, Land, and Bread” was not a shot in the dark as to what would gain them followers. It was a direct appeal to the most urgent material interests of the core of their coalition, the workers, who wanted peace and bread — and also crucially the peasants, who still made up the vast majority of Russia’s population, and in addition stood to benefit from land reform. And as the Bolsheviks intended, the rallying cry pitted those classes directly against the interests of the landed nobility and the nascent capitalist class.

Fast-forward about a hundred years to contemporary New York City. Zohran Mamdani is attempting to hold together a class coalition based around the idea of “affordability”: more precisely, making life in the city more affordable primarily by expanding public services, paid for by taxing the rich. Zohran has pitched this agenda as improving the lives of unskilled and low-wage workers; but also college-educated professionals struggling with the cost of rent and childcare and even some small business owners (e.g., bodega owners and food-cart vendors). The enemies he often names are corporate landlords, abusive gig economy employers, and the ultrawealthy. This is a political strategy to advance socialist goals that depends on appealing to the interests different class strata have in common.

To be clear, appeals to class interests are not limited to the left. The right (and the center-right, and the center-left) also attempts to forge coalitions on the basis of shared or overlapping interests. We might see MAGA as attempting to unite the following groups, for instance:

• Big capitalists who are enthusiastic about tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-union policy and are willing to overlook less savory parts of Trump’s agenda;

• Reactionary small business owners (the “local gentry”) who want much the same;

• Portions of the working class, frustrated with decades of neoliberalism, who (incorrectly) hope immigration restrictions and aggressive tariff policies might boost their employment prospects and wages.

As the left seeks to build a political coalition that can beat both the Trumpian right and the center, it needs to be attentive to the different interests of all the different classes and class fractions in play.

1. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, there are 110 million production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector. Even If we count all 23 million public sector workers as part of the working class (surely an overly generous estimate), that amounts to 133 million workers out of 275 million adults — about 48 percent of the population. (Of course, if we also include all the people who are not in the labor force who are dependents of workers, then the working-class share of the population would be larger. But many people not in the labor force derive their income from sources like disability benefits or pensions or Social Security, as discussed in the main text above.)

2. The arguments I consider here are largely drawn from Przeworski’s Capitalism and Social Democracy. But I am less interested in an exact presentation or criticism of Przeworksi’s views in particular than in evaluating what strike me as the interesting substantive questions they raise for socialist politics today.

3. Przeworski occasionally suggests as much Capitalism and Social Democracy, though I believe it is in tension with the broader argument of the book. But again, I want to avoid getting bogged down in exegetical debates. I do suspect similar thoughts may lurk behind other criticisms of theorizing material interests or objective class positions.