This paper will look at the two most important traditions of class analysis in sociological theory. The Weberian and Marxist traditions. However, let me give you my understanding of social class base on the meaning of social and the meaning of class. .
Social according to the Oxford Dictionary is "of society or its organization; of the relations of people or classes of people. It also states that Class is "any set of persons or things grouped together, or graded or differentiated from others. From this I would say social class is a group of individuals who have similar status in a society. I would also like to share with you a definition of social class which I saw on the internet, it states that social class is "a collection of people with similar position; social class is usually measured by education, occupation, and income". Social Class is one of the main ways in which society is stratified.
I will now look at how Max Weber and Karl Marx, two of the first sociologists to analyze social class, differ and agree in what they think social class is.
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Karl Marx believed that Social Class is determined by the ownership or non-ownership of the means of economic production (raw materials, the capital and technology for economic production). Marx theory is that those who own and control the means of production (factories, farms and coal mines) form one class and those who depended on their own labour alone form the other class (the working class). Marx sees the owners of the products as the ruling class, he sees them also as capitalist or bourgeoisie 1 . The working class in Marx perspective is viewed as the subject class or Proleteriat 2. His view was that the ruling ( bourgeoisie) class exploits and oppresses the subject class (proleteriat). Bourgeoisie and Proleteriat were two main classes in a Capitalist society.
Marx believed that Western societies had developed through four main eras, primitive communism, ancient society, feudal society and capitalist society.
