“Examine Karl Marx’s views on ‘class-in-itself’ and ‘class-for-itself’ with reference to proletarians.” (2010)
For Karl Marx, class is an objective relation to the means of production, but a shared relation does not by itself create a historical actor. Class-in-itself (Klasse an sich) and class-for-itself (Klasse für sich) name the gap between position and organised consciousness: the hinge of his theory of proletarian revolution, and its most tested point.
The distinction in Marx
- Class-in-itself: people sharing a position (propertyless sellers of labour power) without recognising a common interest. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx writes that capital created for the mass of workers a common situation, so that the mass is already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself.
- Class-for-itself: the same mass, united in struggle, whose interests become class interests and whose struggle becomes political.
- The negative case: in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), French smallholding peasants shared economic conditions but, isolated and unorganised, remained like potatoes in a sack, unable to represent themselves.
The trajectory Marx expected for proletarians
Marx and Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto, 1848) argued that capitalism itself would push workers from the first condition to the second:
- Concentration in factories makes common conditions visible.
- Polarisation: intermediate strata sink and machinery levels skills.
- Immiseration and crises sharpen antagonism.
- Organisation grows from local combinations to unions, then to a party aiming at state power.
The brake is ideology, since the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas (The German Ideology, 1846). Engels later called this false consciousness.
Testing the thesis
- Georg Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, 1923) separated the consciousness workers actually hold from imputed class consciousness and saw reification blocking the passage.
- Antonio Gramsci‘s hegemony explains why Western workers consented to capitalism through school, church and press.
- E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) rejected the mechanical two-step: class happens when workers, through shared experience and tradition, come to feel their interests as opposed to others’.
- Counter-evidence: the Western manual working class shrank, a salaried middle class grew, and collective bargaining institutionalised conflict (Ralf Dahrendorf). Nation, religion and ethnicity often outbid class.
The Indian proletariat
- A fragmented class-in-itself: the India Employment Report 2024 estimated that nearly 90% of workers were informally employed (2022), and PLFS 2025 finds 56.2% of workers self-employed. Dispersed work resembles the sack of potatoes more than the factory.
- Caste divides class: B. R. Ambedkar described caste as a division of labourers, not merely of labour, graded so that every layer has someone beneath it.
- Signs of class-for-itself: on 31 December 2025, platform workers’ unions called a nationwide strike against 10-minute delivery targets, ID blocking and falling payouts. The four labour codes in force since 21 November 2025 recognise gig and platform workers. Yet platform incentives kept many riders working that night: the algorithm individualises as the factory once collectivised.
Conclusion
The distinction survives because it refuses to read politics straight off economics; its weak link is the assumption that capitalism would manufacture consciousness automatically. As Thompson and Indian labour show, the move to a class-for-itself is contingent: organisation, culture and identity decide it, not structural position alone.