Marxian class theory has been open to a range of alternate positions, most notably from scholars such as E. P. Thompson and Mario Tronti.
Karl Marx's class theory derives from a range of philosophical schools of thought including left Hegelianism, Scottish Empiricism, and Anglo-French political-economics.
Political-economics also contributed to Marx's theories, centering on the concept of "origin of income" where society is divided into three sub-groups: Rentiers, Capitalist, and Worker.
His political and economic thought developed towards an interest in production as opposed to distribution, and this henceforth became a central theme in his concept of class.
Marx distinguishes one class from another on the basis of two criteria: ownership of the means of production and control of the labor power of others.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party describes two additional classes that “decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry”: III.
A small, transitional class known as the petite bourgeoisie own sufficient means of production but do not purchase labor power.
The “dangerous class”, or Lumpenproletariat, “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....
This is the fundamental economic structure of work and property (See also: wage labour), a state of inequality that is normalised and reproduced through cultural ideology.
[2] Max Weber critiqued historical materialism, positing that stratification is not based purely on economic inequalities but on other status and power differentials.
(Communist Manifesto) This would mark the beginning of a classless society in which human needs rather than profit would be motive for production.
[citation needed] For Marx, class has three primary facts:[3] The first criterion divides a society into the owners and non-owners of means of production.
Starting with agricultural and domestic textile laborers in England and Flanders, more and more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries.
Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth—like doctors, academics or lawyers—are now increasingly working as wage laborers.
Marxists call this process proletarianization, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the "first world.
[citation needed] Capitalism breaks for all time the ties between producer and owner, once held by the bond of class conflict.
"Modern industry, by assigning as it does, an important part in the socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes… Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of human development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery."