Class and Ideology

Social classes are those distinct social formations made up of groups of people who have a similar relationship to the means of production in society and, as a result, a common social and cultural position within an unequal system of property ownership, power and material rewards. As the term refers to the fundamental determinant of social stratification within modern industrial societies, you should expect to encounter it frequently.

The basic theory of social class, and the one that has shaped all subsequent accounts, was outlined in the work of Karl Marx (1818–83). In the tradition established by Marx, class relations provide the key to understanding central aspects of society, culture and history. Within this approach, classes must be understood as fundamental to the social relations associated with particular modes of economic production and organization. For Marx, the historical development of social and economic relations could be divided into different periods, each of which was characterized by a different mode of production. The production and distribution of material goods is defined as a necessary condition for the existence of any society, and Marx argued that as soon as a society was organized to produce more than the bare minimum required for subsistence, it was historically possible for different social classes to emerge. A basic distinction is drawn here between different modes of production and forms of ownership, between societies which are characterized on the one hand by common ownership of the means of producing (forms of communism), and on the other, those in which such ownership is not common, rather it is distributed unequally, and concentrated in the hands of some groups (owners) to the exclusion of others (non-owners).

Societies of this latter type are class divided, characterized above all by their relations of exploitation, and hence of domination and subordination. Marx divided them into historical epochs of ancient slaveholding, feudalism and capitalism, though he subdivided them even further. In the period of ancient civilization the dominant mode of production could be described as slavery, and the means of production were slaves. During feudalism the mode was agricultural and the means land; under capitalism the major mode is industrial, and the means capital, in all its many forms.

In its broadest sense this means that the most significant social division in these societies lies between a majority class that does the productive labour (be they slaves, serfs, or proletariat/ working class), and the minority class that privately owns the means of production (landowning citizens, aristocracy, or bourgeois/capitalist class), and because of this is able to expropriate and command the surplus goods and wealth produced by such labour. In other words, the most fundamental conflict of interest is between those who own the means of production and those who do not. In feudal society, the conflict was between those who owned the land and those who did not. In capitalist society it is ultimately between owners and non-owners of capital.

The relations between these owning and non-owning classes are therefore defined as primarily exploitative and antagonistic, as their class interests inevitably conflict. They pose the basic historical contradiction which can be resolved only by the transformation of the overall mode of production. It is in this sense for Marx that class conflict becomes the ‘dynamo’ or ‘locomotive’ of social history and social change. The broad contours of historical development are determined by the struggles between dominant or ruling classes, with their interests in maintaining existing economic and political relations and inequalities, and subordinate classes, with their counter interests in challenging and changing them.

While the principal social division within class societies is between the owning class and the producing class, Marx did recognize that there are other classes (for example, the ‘petitbourgeoisie’: shopkeepers and owners of small businesses in capitalism). In addition, it is important to note that neither the owning or dominant class nor the nonowning classes are conceived as unitary. Each class may under certain conditions be divided into different class fractions possessing, within limits, different interests. For example, relations between skilled and unskilled labour, or between industrial and finance ‘blocs’ or representatives of the capital class.

First and foremost then it is useful to think of social classes as socially organized sets of relations within a process of production. Different class positions can be recognized empirically in so far as they confer what Weber called different ‘life chances’ upon individuals. They govern access to a wide variety of scarce and valued products and services in society.

Products such as food and the whole range of consumer commodities, services such as medical care, education, or legal representation. Because of this many attempts to investigate and measure social class have tended to collapse class into its product; and hence pinpoint occupation and wealth as primary indicators of social class position.

It is however important to go beyond this point, and not to restrict class to a convenient way of describing social categories formed by different types of jobs, levels of wealth, property, power and status. What are equally at stake in a full consideration of social class are the ways in which class is recognized, made sense of and responded to within culture.

Marx suggested that different social classes were characterized by differing ideologies, those ‘definite forms of social consciousness’, which correspond with particular class positions. Furthermore, Marx drew an important distinction between what he called a class in itself and a class for itself. This distinction hinges on the degree to which people who share a common relationship to the means of production (a class in itself), develop a class consciousness and class identity which recognizes their commonly exploited situation and interests. This class consciousness, under certain historical conditions, promotes the organized social and political action of a class for itself. In this way class refers not only as is commonly thought to economic or monetary relations, it is central also to the analysis of culture and cultural relations.

Culture becomes the terrain in which class relations are made meaningful, and through which dominant and subordinate classes contest hegemony. A great deal of the recent work in communication and cultural studies can be seen as sharing a common concern with the interrelationships between classes, culture and communication. Much of this work seeks to analyse how underlying material or economic conflicts and inequalities between and within social classes are expressed and reproduced in cultural relations and representations.

Also we can distinguish a concept of elite. Elite is a fragment of the dominant section of a social formation that exercises or claims social and cultural leadership by virtue of some assumed qualities of excellence which are held to belong exclusively to that fragment. The excellence usually claimed by elites in the cultural sphere is of an intellectual, creative or artistic nature; often presented as the ability to discriminate or judge better than others. The term thus implies a relation – usually between an elite and the mass (over whom the elite claims leadership). Both mass and elite are misleading terms, owing more to political debate than to analytical rigour.

However, both have been influential in studies of the media, where the concept of an elite has been used both to describe the media professionals who produce mass communication, and, paradoxically, to separate the mass media from an ‘elite’ culture which is itself used as a yardstick to judge (usually with contempt) media products. You should not use the term as a neutral discriptive category, then, because it tends to reproduce the very kinds of ideologicalassumptions that analysis should expose, not replicate.

 

As for Ideology, it is the social relations of signification (knowledge and consciousness) in class societies. It is often condensed to refer to the products of those relations; knowledges and representations characteristic of or in the interests of a class.

By extension, it refers to the same products, but these may be seen as characteristic of groups other than classes – ranging from gender (male ideology) to jobs (occupational ideology).

Ideology is seen as any knowledge that is posed as natural or generally applicable, particularly when its social origins are suppressed, ex-nominated or deemed irrelevant. Hence, and especially in more recent cultural/communication studies, ideology is seen as the practice of reproducing social relations of inequality within the sphere of signification and discourse.

Ideology as a theoretical concept comes from Marxism. In classic Marxism, the forms, contents and purposes of knowledges, representations and consciousness are not understood as abstracted from the material and social activities of production and class antagonism. On the contrary, the activity of production gives rise directly to knowledge of nature, and this knowledge of nature is directed towards further and increasing production by bringing all its myriad aspects as closely into line with general natural ‘laws’ as possible.

It is Marx’s contention that knowledge of society springs in the same way, directly from class antagonism. But whereas knowledge of nature may be (at least in principle) of benefit to all classes, knowledge of society is produced and reproduced in the interests of those who are for the time being in a position of social supremacy (the ruling class). Thus, for Marx, knowledge of society differs from knowledge of nature by representing as natural those social arrangements that are in fact historically contingent. This is the starting point for a theory of ideology. The fundamental premisses on which the Marxist concept of ideology is based are expressed in two of Marx’s most celebrated contentions: The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas

are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

If the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of an epoch, then ‘bourgeois ideology’, for instance, should not be understood simply as what individual members of the bourgeois class think, but as the prevailing ways of making sense that are established throughout bourgeois society. These ways of making sense may be produced and distributed not by the ruling class directly, but by relatively autonomous and apparently fragmented groups, ranging from intellectuals and teachers to media professionals and hairdressers.

The contention that social being determines consciousness gives rise to the Marxist notion of false consciousness. In case of the ruling class itself, false consciousness occurs when that class imagines that its position in society is determined by the laws of God or nature – as in the doctrine of the divine right of kings for feudal monarchs, or the doctrine of individualism and the conception of society as a social contract in bourgeois philosophy. False consciousness for subordinate classes occurs when they make sense of their social and individual circumstances in terms supplied by the prevailing ideology, rather than in terms of their own class interests in opposition to the dominant classes. In this context, ideology is seen as the production and distribution of ideas in the interests of the ruling classes.

Thus ideology is the means by which ruling economic classes generalize and extend their supremacy across the whole range of social activity, and naturalize it in the process, so that their rule is accepted as natural and inevitable; and therefore legitimate and binding.

For Marx, not all knowledge of society is necessarily ideological. In particular, the science of historical materialism (Marxism) itself could not be seen as an ideology, given the notion of ideology as an illusory knowledge. The understanding gained in the struggle to change both society and nature is partial and limited and can be mistaken but, for Marxists, the objective existence of natural and historical laws is not open to question, nor is the belief that materialist science provides the means to bring those laws into knowledge.

The concept of ideology has proved very influential in the study of communication and culture. So much so, in fact, that it has become somewhat over-extended in use. In particular, ideology has been reduced to a mere reflection of the economic base in some popularized versions of Marxism. As a result, ideology is often confined to the superstructure, where it is defined in terms of ‘bodies’ of thought, beliefs, ideas, and so on which reduces it from a conceptualization of social relations and practices to a set of empirical things.

Just as language is hard to analyse if you look at words rather than the laws which produce words, so the reduction of ideology to ideas does not explain their production or forms.

Thus the concept needed to be re-theorized, and this led to the notion of ideology in general. This notion is associated especially with Althusser, for whom ideology is the mechanism which turns individuals into subjects, but is also implicit in Volosinov’s works. It implies that all knowledge, whether scientific or otherwise, is produced within language, and that language is never a transparent medium through which truth can be observed. Hence all language is seen as ideological, and truth as a product not a motivator of language. It follows from this that no specific discourse (including Marxism itself) is exempt from ideology. Instead, there are at any one time numbers of contending ideological discourses in play within an overall social formation, and that what is at stake in the way they are produced, deployed, regulated, institutionalized and resisted is not only knowledge but also power.

However, at the level of specific ideologies, it is clear that ideology isn’t a unitary medium that we inhabit like fishes in the medium of the sea. Even within what is often called dominant ideology there are contending and conflicting positions – as between, say, different educational philosophies and policies. And ideology is always encountered in institutional forms and local circumstances which ensure that there is never a complete fit between dominant class interests and dominant ideology. Further, however naturalized and successful dominant ideologies might seem, they are always in contention with resistances to them from ‘below’, either in the form of coherent alternatives (feminism, Marxism) or as practical accommodations/rejections.

The concept of ideology has become central in the study of the media in particular and communication in general. It is useful in insisting that not only is there no ‘natural’ meaning inherent in an event or object, but also the meanings into which events and objects are constructed are always socially oriented – aligned with class, gender, race or other interests.

Further, ideology is not a set of things but an active practice, either working on the changing circumstances of social activity to reproduce familiar and regulated senses, or struggling to resist established and naturalized sense thus to transform the means of sense-making into new, alternative or oppositional forms, which will generate meanings aligned to different social interests.