that bourgeoisie and even proletariat are often difficult to translate.) A further difficulty then arises: a repetition, at a different level, of the variation between a descriptive grouping and an economic relationship. A class seen in terms of economic relationships can be a category (wage-earners) or a formation (the working class). The main tendency of Marx’s description of classes was towards formations:
The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class … (German Ideology)
This difficult argument again attracts confusion. A class is sometimes an economic category, including all who are objectively in that economic situation. But a class is sometimes (and in Marx more often) a formation in which, for historical reasons, consciousness of this situation and the organization to deal with it have developed. Thus:
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 the 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 begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
This is the distinction between category and formation, but since class is used for both there has been plenty of ground for confusion. The problem is still critical in that it underlies repeated arguments about the relation of an assumed class consciousness to an objectively measured class, and about the vagaries of self-description and self-assignation to a class scale. Many of the derived terms repeat this uncertainty. Class consciousness clearly can belong only to a formation. Class struggle, class conflict, class war, class legislation, class bias depend on the existence of formations (though this may be very uneven or partial within or between classes). Class culture, on the other hand, can swing between the two meanings: working-class culture can be the meanings and values and institutions of the formation, or the tastes and life-styles of the category (see also CULTURE). In a whole range of contemporary discussion and controversy, all these variable meanings of class can be seen in operation, usually without clear distinction. It is therefore worth repeating the basic range (outside the uncontroversial senses of general classification and education):
| i. | group (objective); social or economic category, at varying levels |
| ii. | rank; relative social position; by birth or mobility |
| iii. | formation; perceived economic relationship; social, political and cultural organization |
See CULTURE, INDUSTRY, MASSES, ORDINARY, POPULAR, SOCIETY, UNDERPRIVILEGED
Collective appeared in English as an adjective from C16 and as a noun from C17. It was mainly a specialized development from collect, fw collectus, L – gathered together (there is also a fw collecter, oF – to gather taxes or other money). Collective as an adjective was used from its earliest appearance to describe people acting together, or in such related phrases as collective body (Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, VIII, iv; 1600). Early uses of the noun were in grammar or in physical description. The social and political sense of a specific unit – ‘your brethren of the Collective’ (Cobbett, Rural Rides, II, 337; 1830) – belongs to the new DEMOCRATIC (q.v.) consciousness of eC19. This use has been revived in several subsequent periods, including mC20, but is still not common. Collectivism, used mainly to describe socialist economic theory, and only derivatively in the political sense of collective, became common in lC19; it was described in the 1880s as a recent word, though its use is recorded from the 1850s. In France the term was used in 1869 as a way of opposing ‘state socialism’.
See COMMON, DEMOCRACY, MASSES, SOCIETY
Commerce was a normal English word for trade from C16, from fw commerce, F, commercium, L, rw com, L – together, merx, L – ware or merchandise. Commerce was also extended from C16 to describe all kinds of ‘dealings’ – meetings, interactions – between men. Commercial appeared from lC17 in the more specific sense of activities connected with trade, as distinct from other activities. It was at first primarily descriptive but began to acquire critical associations from mC18. The fully critical word is commercialism, from mC19, to indicate a system which puts financial profit before any other consideration. Meanwhile commerce retained its neutral sense, and commercial could be used either favourably or unfavourably.
There is an interesting contemporary use of commercial to describe a broadcast advertisement, and in some associated popular entertainment there was, from the 1960s, a use of commercial to mean not only successful but also effective or powerful work, as in popular music the favourable commercial sound. Meanwhile, however, commercial broadcasting preferred to describe itself as independent (cf. CAPITALISM and free or private enterprise).
Common has an extraordinary range of meaning in English, and several of its particular meanings are inseparable from a still active social history. The rw is communis, L, which has been derived, alternatively, from com-, L – together and munis, L – under obligation, and from com- and unus, L – one. In early uses these senses can be seen to merge: common to a community (from C14 an organized body of people), to a specific group, or to the generality of mankind. There are distinctions in these uses, but also considerable and persistent overlaps. What is then interesting is the very early use of common as an adjective and noun of social division: common, the common and commons, as contrasted with lords and nobility. The tension of these two senses has been persistent. Common can indicate a whole group or interest or a large specific and subordinate group. (Cf. Elyot’s protest (Governor, I, i; 1531) against commune weale, later commonwealth: ‘There may appere lyke diversitie to be in Englisshe between a publike weale and a commune weale, as shulde be in Latin, between Res publica & res plebeia.’)
The same tension is apparent even in applications of the sense of a whole group: that is, of generality. Common can be used to affirm something shared or to describe something ordinary (itself ambivalent, related to order as series or sequence, hence ordinary – in the usual course of things, but also to order as rank, social and military, hence ordinary – of an undistinguished kind); or again, in one kind of use, to describe something
