Class-in-Itself and Class-for-Itself

Lesson 4.1.3 defined class structurally: a common relationship to the means of production. Lesson 4.1.7 showed why people in the same structural position may hold quite different pictures of the world, and why "false consciousness" is a poor account of that.

This lesson takes the gap between the two. It is, in practical terms, the most important gap in Marxist theory — because a class that exists on paper and does nothing is of no political consequence whatsoever, and Marx knew it.

Three moments, one question.

Sheffield, 1889. Thousands of dockers, gas workers and match girls, in trades long thought impossible to organise, form unions within a single year. The New Unionism sweeps Britain. Men who had competed each morning at the dock gates for the day's work — each one's success another's hunger — begin to refuse work collectively. Something has changed, and it is not their wages or their jobs. It is that they have started to understand themselves as the same kind of person, with the same kind of problem.

Chicago, 1894. Pullman workers strike. The American Railway Union boycotts Pullman cars nationwide. And then the strike breaks, partly on federal troops and injunctions, but also partly on a fault line the union had built into itself: at its founding convention it had voted, narrowly, to exclude Black workers. When the strike came, Black railway workers had little reason to support it, and some worked through it. A class position shared; a class action not.

A city today. Forty thousand people deliver food on bicycles and scooters. They have the same employer-that-is-not-an-employer, the same algorithmic supervision, the same absence of sick pay, the same risk of being deactivated by an automated decision they cannot appeal. By any structural definition they are one group with one situation.

They have never met. Their shifts overlap randomly. They speak a dozen languages. Half regard the work as temporary. The app that dispatches them is also the only thing that connects them, and it is owned by the other side.

Same structural position, three times. Utterly different capacity to act. Explaining that difference is what this lesson is for.

The idea, in plain words

The terminology is Hegelian — an sich and für sich, in-itself and for-itself, denoting something that exists and something that has become self-aware. Marx's own clearest statement is in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), where the concern is not the vocabulary but the process:

"Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle... this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself."

Notice the crucial phrase: "in the struggle." Class consciousness is not a lightbulb that switches on when people think hard enough. It is produced by the process of collective action itself. You do not first become conscious and then organise; you organise, and in organising you become conscious. This is why Marx put such weight on strikes — not chiefly for the wage gains, but as the school in which a class learns what it is.

The potatoes in the sack

Marx's sharpest statement of the problem is his analysis of the French peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852). It is worth having in full because it names the conditions, not just the outcome.

"The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse... 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 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 forms no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name... Their representative must at the same time appear as their master."

And then the image: they are formed "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes."

Marx's conditions for a class-in-itself to become a class-for-itself, extracted from this passage:

Interconnection. People must be in "manifold relations with one another" — the mode of production must bring them together rather than isolate them.

Communication. There must be a way for a common situation to become known as common. Local interconnection is not enough; the identity of interests must form a community.

Organisation. Political and associational forms through which the interest can be pursued.

And an opponent. The interests must stand in "hostile opposition" to another class — the antagonism has to be visible in daily life.

Where these are absent, structural position produces nothing. And Marx adds the political sting: a group that cannot represent itself will be represented — by someone who thereby becomes its master. That sentence, written about Louis Bonaparte, has had a long afterlife.

Set the peasant sack against the factory and the conditions become visible.

The factory concentrates. Five hundred people in one building, doing similar work, at the same time, under the same authority. The peasant works a scattered holding, alone or with family.

The factory makes the antagonism visible and single. One employer, one wage rate, one set of rules, one gate. The peasant's difficulties are dispersed across landlords, moneylenders, merchants, weather and the tax collector, and it is not obvious which is the enemy.

The factory produces communication for free. People talk at the bench, at the gate, in the pub afterwards. Grievances are compared, and comparison converts "my problem" into "our problem" — which is 1.1.1's move, occurring spontaneously.

The factory synchronises. Shared time, shared rhythm. Withdrawal of labour by all of them at once shuts the plant. The peasant's leverage is far weaker: withholding produce hurts the peasant first.

Marx's conclusion in the Manifesto is that capitalism produces its own opposition: "its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" because the bourgeoisie "produces, above all, its own grave-diggers." The concentration of workers is not incidental to production — it is required by it.

And then note what happens when production is reorganised. Subcontracting, franchising, outsourcing, home-working, platform dispatch and the fissuring of the workplace all disperse what the factory concentrated. Whether or not this is intended, it reverses each of the four conditions. The gig worker at the top of this lesson is, in Marx's precise sense, a potato in a sack — and the sack is an app.

Go deeper

What actually produces class consciousness: a century of evidence

This is one of the most researched questions in sociology, and the findings are more specific than the theory.

E. P. Thompson: class as an event, not a category. The Making of the English Working Class (1963) opens with the most influential sentence in the field: "The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making." Thompson's argument is that class is not a structural position waiting to be occupied but a relationship that happens — made by real people out of the materials they had: Methodist chapel organisation, the traditions of the "free-born Englishman," Painite radicalism, the memory of common rights, and a great deal of argument in a great many rooms. Class, he writes, "happens when some men, as a result of common experiences inherited or shared, feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs."

This is not a rejection of structure; it is an insistence that people are the agents of their own class formation, working with inherited cultural materials — and it directly opposed the structuralist Marxism of the 1970s, which Thompson attacked ferociously in The Poverty of Theory (1978).

Mancur Olson: the collective action problem. The Logic of Collective Action (1965) states the difficulty that no amount of consciousness dissolves. If a union wins a wage rise, everyone in the trade gets it — including those who paid no dues and took no risk. Each individual therefore does best by free-riding. Rational, self-interested individuals will not organise to pursue a shared interest unless the group is small, or coercion is available, or there are selective incentives — benefits available only to participants. This explains a great deal: why unions fought so hard for the closed shop; why they historically provided sickness funds, funeral benefits, legal representation and social clubs; and why organising is easier in small groups than in large dispersed ones. Any theory of class action that ignores Olson is not serious.

Union density and the institutional finding. Comparative research shows that the single strongest predictor of union membership across rich democracies is not the militancy of the workers but the institutional architecture: countries with the Ghent system, where unions administer unemployment insurance, have union density two to three times higher than otherwise similar countries. Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Belgium sit far above the rest. This is Olson's selective incentive, operating at national scale — and it means class organisation is substantially a function of institutional design, not of consciousness.

The affluent worker studies. Goldthorpe, Lockwood and colleagues studied well-paid Luton car workers in the 1960s, testing the thesis that prosperity turns workers middle class (embourgeoisement). Their finding was more interesting than either side expected: the workers had not become middle class in their politics or associations, but their orientation to work was instrumental — the job was a means to a wage that funded a private, family-centred life, not a source of identity or solidarity. Not false consciousness, and not class consciousness. A third thing, and one the theory had not anticipated.

The cross-cutting cleavages finding. The Pullman story is the general case. Where class divisions are cut across by race, ethnicity, religion, language, caste, gender or nation, class organisation is systematically weaker. The American case is the most studied: the argument that racial division has been the central impediment to US labour organisation runs from Du Bois (4.5) through the split labour market literature (8.4) to contemporary work on the political economy of race. Du Bois's account in Black Reconstruction (1935) of the "public and psychological wage" of whiteness — compensating white workers for low pay with social status — is one of the most powerful single ideas in the field, and it is a direct amendment to Marx.

Was Marx wrong about the proletariat?

The frank accounting.

The revolutionary proletariat did not appear in the advanced capitalist countries. Where revolutions occurred under Marx's name, they occurred in agrarian societies — Russia 1917, China 1949 — and were led by parties, not spontaneous class movements. Lenin's What Is To Be Done? (1902) faced this directly, arguing that workers left to themselves develop only trade union consciousness — bargaining within the system — and that revolutionary consciousness must be brought "from without" by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. This is a major theoretical departure, and the political consequences of the vanguard doctrine were, in the twentieth century, enormous and largely terrible.

But something did happen. The century after Marx produced mass unions, labour and social democratic parties in government, the eight-hour day, the weekend, universal suffrage, public health systems, pensions and employment law. That is class-for-itself acting, achieving a great deal, and stabilising rather than overthrowing capitalism. Whether one calls this vindication or refutation depends on what one thought was being predicted. It is unambiguously not nothing.

And the conditions have since reversed. Union density has fallen sharply across most rich democracies since around 1980. The causes are well studied and multiple: deindustrialisation and the shift to services; the fissuring of the employment relationship through subcontracting and franchising; legal changes restricting industrial action; globalised production allowing capital to exit; and workplace fragmentation. Each of these can be read as the removal of one of Marx's four conditions.

Meanwhile, new forms have appeared: platform worker strikes coordinated by messaging apps; the Fight for $15; large-scale organising in logistics and warehousing; teachers' strikes; and unionisation drives in tech and games. The mechanisms are new — the app that atomises is also the app that can be used to coordinate — and the outcomes are unsettled.

The question the theory cannot settle

There is a normative problem underneath all of this, and it should be stated rather than buried.

If a class does not act on its interest, either (a) it does not perceive the interest, or (b) the interest is not what the theorist says it is, or (c) it perceives the interest and judges action too costly.

The theory cannot distinguish these from the outside. Choosing (a) is where false consciousness comes from and where condescension begins (4.1.7). Choosing (b) is where the framework starts to be abandoned. Choosing (c) — the collective action answer — is the most defensible, and it makes class consciousness a matter of institutional conditions and organisational capacity rather than of enlightenment.

Most serious contemporary work chooses (c), and it is the more respectful answer as well as the better supported one. People generally know what is being done to them. What they often lack is a means of doing anything about it collectively that does not cost them more than they can bear.

"Class-in-itself and class-for-itself are Marx's own terms." The concepts are his; the crisp Hegelian pairing was formalised by later Marxists, especially Lukács. Marx's own text says "a class as against capital, but not yet for itself."

"Class consciousness comes from understanding theory." Marx says it is produced "in the struggle" — by collective action itself. Thompson says the same from the historical side.

"Workers who don't organise have false consciousness." Usually they face a collective action problem, dispersed workplaces, legal restriction and real costs. Olson explains more than Lukács here.

"Class consciousness rises automatically with exploitation." No relationship of that kind holds. Some of the most exploited workers are the hardest to organise, precisely because insecurity raises the cost of dissent.

"Marx ignored the problem." The Eighteenth Brumaire is largely about it, and the potato passage is one of the most quoted things he wrote.

"Unions are the only form." Cooperatives, mutual societies, tenant unions, worker centres, professional associations and informal-sector organisations are all class organisation in Marx's functional sense.

Why it matters

It is the point where structure meets agency. The whole structure/agency problem (1.2.1, 13) is here in miniature: a position exists, and whether anyone acts on it depends on communication, organisation, opportunity and cost. Neither pole alone explains the outcome.

It converts a political question into a researchable one. Instead of asking whether workers are enlightened, ask: are they concentrated or dispersed? Can they communicate? Is the antagonist visible and singular? What does dissent cost? Are there selective incentives? Every one of these is measurable, and each has a literature.

It explains the strategic importance of workplace design. Whether or not anyone intends it, arrangements that disperse, individualise and fragment work reduce collective capacity. Reading subcontracting and platform dispatch through Marx's four conditions is one of the sharpest applications of the framework to the present.

And it is where Marxist theory acknowledges its own limits. The class that was supposed to make history mostly did not, in the places it was supposed to. What it did instead — building unions, parties, welfare states and labour law — is enormous and was not the prediction. Holding both of those facts at once is what taking a theory seriously looks like.

A class-in-itself shares an objective position in the relations of production, whether or not anyone knows it. A class-for-itself has become conscious of that position, organised, and acts on it. The first is a structural fact; the second is an achievement.

Marx: this mass "is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle ... it constitutes itself as a class for itself." Consciousness is produced by collective action, not prior to it.

The potatoes in the sack: French peasants share conditions but not connections. Marx's implicit conditions for class formation are interconnection, communication, organisation and a visible common opponent — and a group that cannot represent itself will be represented by someone who becomes its master.

The factory supplied all four conditions; subcontracting, franchising and platform dispatch remove them.

The research: Thompson — class "was present at its own making," built from inherited cultural materials. Olson — the collective action problem and selective incentives, which explains the closest thing to a law in this area: the Ghent system countries have two to three times the union density of comparable countries. Goldthorpe and Lockwood — the affluent workers were neither embourgeoisé nor class-conscious but instrumental. Cross-cutting cleavages — race, religion, language and caste systematically weaken class organisation, as Pullman 1894 and Du Bois's "public and psychological wage" show.

The accounting: no revolutionary proletariat in the advanced economies; Lenin's vanguard doctrine was the response, with terrible consequences. But mass unions, labour parties, the eight-hour day, suffrage and welfare states were real class-for-itself achievements — which stabilised capitalism rather than ending it.

Class-in-itself (Klasse an sich) — a group sharing an objective position in the relations of production, irrespective of awareness.

Class-for-itself (Klasse für sich) — that group conscious of its position, organised, and acting collectively.

Class consciousness — awareness of shared class position and interest, produced through collective action.

Collective action problem — Olson's finding that rational individuals will free-ride on shared benefits unless there are selective incentives or coercion.

Selective incentives — benefits available only to participants, which make organisation rational.

Ghent system — union administration of unemployment insurance; the strongest institutional predictor of high union density.

Embourgeoisement thesis — the claim that affluence turns workers middle class; disconfirmed by the affluent worker studies.

Instrumental orientation to work — treating the job purely as a means to income, without identity or solidarity.

Cross-cutting cleavages — divisions (race, religion, language, caste) that cut across class and weaken class organisation.

Trade union consciousness — Lenin's term for consciousness limited to bargaining within the system.

Vanguard party — Lenin's proposed organisation of professional revolutionaries bringing consciousness "from without."

Public and psychological wage — Du Bois's term for the status compensation offered to white workers in place of material gains.

One — score a workforce. Pick any group of workers you know of and rate them on Marx's four conditions: concentration, communication, organisation, visible common opponent. The score will predict their bargaining power better than their level of grievance does.

Two — find the selective incentive. Look up what a union in your country offers members beyond wage bargaining — legal cover, training, insurance, discounts. Olson's argument becomes concrete immediately.

Three — look up union density. Find the figure for your country now and in 1980. Then find one of the Ghent-system countries. The gap is one of the largest institutional effects in comparative sociology.

Four — trace a cleavage. Take one instance where a labour dispute split along lines of race, nationality, language or migration status. Ask who benefited from the split and whether it was engineered, exploited or simply inherited. All three occur.

Five — design against the sack. For the gig workers in the opening story, design a realistic organising strategy that restores each of the four conditions. Then find out what actual platform-worker organisations have tried. The comparison is instructive in both directions.