3
in the social organization of inequalities?” This question implies the need for a macro-level
concept, rather than simply a micro-level concept capturing the causal processes of individual
lives; and it requires a concept that allows for macro-level variations across time and place. This
question is also important in both the Marxist and Weberian traditions, but as we will see later,
here the two traditions have quite different answers. Within the Marxist tradition, the most
salient aspect of historical variation in inequality is the ways in which economic systems vary in
the manner in which an economic surplus is produced and appropriated, and classes are therefore
defined with respect to the mechanisms of surplus extraction. For Weber, in contrast, the central
problem of historical variation is the degree of rationalization of different dimensions of
inequality.3 This underwrites a conceptual space in which on the one hand class and status are
contrasted as distinct forms of inequality, and an the other hand class is contrasted with nonrationalized ways through which individual life-chances are shaped.
5. Class as a foundation of economic oppression and exploitation. Finally, class plays a central
role in answering the question, “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic
oppression and exploitation within capitalist societies?” This is the most contentious question
for it implies not simply an explanatory agenda about the mechanisms that generate economic
inequalities, but a normative judgment about those inequalities – they are forms of oppression
and exploitation – and a normative vision of the transformation of those inequalities. This is the
distinctively Marxist question and it suggests a concept of class laden with normative content. It
supports a concept of class which is not simply defined in terms of the social relations to
economic resources, but which also figures centrally in a political project of emancipatory social
change.
Different theoretical approaches to class analysis build their concepts of class to help answer
different clusters of these questions. Figure 1 indicates the array of central questions linked to
different approaches to class analysis. Weber’s work revolves around the third and fourth
questions, with the fourth question concerning forms of historical variation in social organization
of inequalities providing the anchor for his understanding of class. The narrower question about
explaining individual life chances gets its specific meaning from its relationship to this broader
historical question. Michael Mann’s work on class, especially in his multivolume study of The
Sources of Social Power is, like Weber’s, also centered on the four question. (Mann, 1986,
1993). John Goldthorpe’s class analysis centers firmly on the third question. While his work is
often characterized as having a Weberian inflection, his categories are elaborated strictly in terms
of the requirements of describing and explaining economic life chances, not long-term historical
variations in systems of inequality.4 For Pierre Bourdieu, class analysis is anchored in a more
open-ended version of the third question. Where he differs from Weber and other Weber-inspired
class analysts is in expanding the idea of life-chances to include a variety of non-economic
aspects of opportunity (e.g. cultural opportunities of various sorts) and expanding the kinds of
3. The concept of “rationalization” is one of the most complex and multidimensional in Weber’s work. In this
context the idea basically refers to the extent to which inequalities are organized in such a way that the actors within
those inequalities can act in precise, calculable ways.
4. See Goldthorpe (1980, 1990, 2000); Goldthorpe and Marshall (1992); Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992).
4
resources relevant to explaining those life-chances from narrowly economic resources to a range
of cultural and social resources (called “cultural capital” and “social capital”). “Class” for
Bourdieu, therefore, is a much more expansive concept, covering all inequalities in opportunities
(life chances) that can be attributed to socially-determined inequalities of resources of whatever
sort.5 Finally, class analysis in the Marxist tradition is anchored in the fifth question concerning
the challenge to systems of economic oppression and exploitation. The questions about historical
variation and individual life chances are also important, but they are posed within the parameters
of the problem of emancipatory transformations.
In the rest of this essay I will examine in some detail how these questions are played out
in the Weberian and Marxist traditions, the two most important traditions of class analysis in
sociological theory. The concepts of class in these two theoretical traditions share much in
common: they both reject simple gradational definitions of class; they are both anchored in the
social relations which link people to economic resources of various sorts; they both see these
social relations as affecting the material interests of actors, and, accordingly, they see class
relations as the potential basis for solidarities and conflict. Yet, they also differ in certain
fundamental ways. The core of the difference is captured by the favorite buzz-words of each
theoretical tradition: life-chances for Weberians, and exploitation for Marxists. This difference,
in turn, reflects the location of class analysis within their broader theoretical agendas. The Weberian Concept: Class as market-determined Life Chances
What has become the Weber-inspired tradition of class analysis (e.g. Giddens 1973; Parkin 1971;
Scott 1996) is largely based on Weber’s few explicit, but fragmentary, conceptual analyses of
class in Economy and Society ([1924] 1978).6 Weber writes:
We may speak of a “class” when (1) a number of people have in common a specific
causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this component is represented
exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for
income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets.
This is “class situation.”
It is the most elemental economic fact that the way in which the disposition over
material property is distributed among a plurality of people, meeting competitively in the
market for the purpose of exchange, in itself creates specific life chances....
But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of
chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the
individual’s fate. Class situation is, in this sense, ultimately market situation. (Pp.927-28)
5. see Bourdieu (1984, 1985, 1986, 1987). For exegetical discussion of Bourdieu’s approach, see Brubaker (1985)
and Weininger (2002, forthcoming)
6. When Weber’s work is excerpted in anthologies on stratification, the selections concerning class are almost
exclusively from these few explicit definitional statements of Economy and Society. (e.g., see Bendix and Lipset
1966; Giddens and Held 1982; Grusky 2001).
5
In short, the kind and quantity of resources you own affects your opportunities for income in
market exchanges. “Opportunity” is a description of the feasible set individuals face, the tradeoffs they encounter in deciding what to do. Owning means of production (the capitalist class)
gives a person different alternatives from owning skills and credentials (the “middle” class), and
both of these are different from simply owning unskilled labor power (the working class).
Furthermore, in a market economy, access to market-derived income affects the broader array of
life experiences and opportunities for oneself and one’s children. The study of the life-chances of
children based on parent’s market capacity, is thus an integral part of the Weberian agenda of
class analysis.
This definition of class in terms of market-determined life chances is clearly linked to the
third question posed above: “What explains inequalities in economically-defined life chances
and material standards of living?” Weber’s answer is: in capitalist societies the material
resources one brings to market exchanges explain such inequalities in life chances. But even
more deeply, Weber’s conceptualization of class is anchored in the fourth question, the question
of how to characterize and explain historical variation in the social organization of inequality.
Two issues are especially salient here: first, the historical variation in the articulation of class and
status, and second, the broad historical problem in understanding the rationalization of social
processes.
Class is part of a broader multidimensional schema of stratification in Weber in which the
most central contrast is between “class” and “status”.7 Status groups are defined within the
sphere of communal interaction (or what Weber calls the “social order”) and always imply some
level of identity in the sense of some recognized “positive or negative social estimation of
honor” (Weber [1924] 1978:932). A status group cannot exist without its members being in
some way conscious of being members of the group: “In contrast to classes, Stände (status
groups) are normally groups” (Weber [1924] 1978:932).
This conceptual contrast between class and status for Weber is not primarily a question of
the motives of actors: It is not that status groups are derived from purely symbolic motives and
class categories are derived from material interests. Although people care about status categories
in part because of their importance for symbolic ideal interests, class positions also entail such
symbolic interests, and both status and class are implicated in the pursuit of material interests. As
Weber ([1924] 1978: 935) writes, “material monopolies provide the most effective motives for
the exclusiveness of a status group” (p. 935). Rather than motives, the central contrast between
class and status is the nature of the mechanisms through which class and status shape inequalities
of the material and symbolic conditions people’s lives. Class affects material well-being directly
through the kinds of economic assets people bring to market exchanges. Status affects material
well-being indirectly, through the ways that categories of social honor underwrite various
coercive mechanisms that, in Weber’s ([1924] 1978: 935) words, “go hand in hand with the
monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities”.
7. A third term in this framework of forms of distribution of power is “party”, although this dimension is generally
given much less attention in the Weberian tradition.
6
The contrast between class and status provide one of the axes of Weber’s analysis of
historical variation in systems of inequality. Weber ([1924] 1978: 938) writes:
When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable,
stratification by status is favored. Every technological repercussion and economic
transformation threatens stratification by status and pushes the class situation into the
foreground. Epochs and countries in which the naked class situation is of predominant
significance are regularly the periods of technical and economic transformations.
One of the central reasons why capitalist societies are societies within which class becomes the
predominant basis of stratification is precisely because capitalism fosters continual “technical
and economic transformation.”
Weber’s concept of class is also closely linked to his theoretical preoccupation with the
problem of historical variation in the process of rationalization of social life.8 Following Levine’s
(1985:210) decomposition of Weber’s complex conceptual inventory of forms of rationalization,
the problem of class for Weber is primarily situated within one particular form of rationalization:
the objective instrumental rationalization of social order. In all societies the ways people gain
access to and use material resources is governed by rules that are objectively embodied in the
institutional settings within which they live. When the rules allocate resources to people on the
basis of ascriptive characteristics, and when the use of those material resources is governed by
tradition rather than the result of a calculative weighing of alternatives, then economic
interactions take place under nonrationalized conditions. When those rules enable people to
make precise calculations about alternative uses of those resources and discipline people to use
those resources in more rather than less efficient ways on the basis of those calculations, then
those rules can be described as “rationalized.” This occurs, in Weber’s analysis, when market
relations have the most pervasive influence on economic interactions (i.e., in fully developed
capitalism). His definition of classes in terms of the economic opportunities people face in the
market, then, is simultaneously a definition of classes in terms of rationalized economic
interactions. Class, in these terms, assumes its central sociological meaning to Weber as a
description of the way people are related to the material conditions of life under conditions in
which their economic interactions are regulated in a maximally rationalized manner.9 Weber is,
fundamentally, less interested in the problem of the material deprivations and advantages of
different categories of people as such, or in the collective struggles that might spring from those
advantages and disadvantages, than he is in the underlying normative order and cognitive
practices – instrumental rationality – that are embodied in the social interactions that generates
8. A number of commentators on differences between Weber and Marx have emphasized the centrality of the
problem of rationalization in Weber’s analysis of capitalism. (e.g., see Lowith [1932] 1982; Jones 1975; and Sayer
1991). Jones and Sayer, in particular, link the problem of rationalization explicitly to Weber’s analysis of classes.
9. It is for this reason that Weber does not regard slaves to be a “class”. While it is certainly the case that their lifechances are deeply shaped by their lack of control over economic resources, it is not the case that their economic
interactions are governed by rationalized principles of calculation and maximization. For a more extended
discussion of Weber’s treatment of slaves, see Wright (2002).
7
these life chances. “Class,” in these terms, is part of the answer to a broad question about
historical variations in the degree and forms of rationalization of social life in general, and the
social organization of inequality in particular. The Marxist Concept: class as exploitation
The pivotal question that anchors the Marxist conceptualization of class is the question of human
emancipation: “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic oppression and
exploitation within capitalist societies?” The starting point for Marxist class analysis is a stark
observation: The world in which we live involves a juxtaposition of extraordinary prosperity and
enhanced potentials for human creativity and fulfillment along with continuing human misery
and thwarted lives. The central task of the theory is to demonstrate first, that poverty in the midst
of plenty is not somehow an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature, but the result of the
specific design of our social institutions, and second, that these institutions can be transformed in
such a way as to eliminate such socially unnecessary suffering. The concept of class, then, in the
first instance is meant to help answer this normatively laden question.
The specific strategy in the Marxist tradition for answering the normative question leads
directly to the question about historical variation. The normative question asks what needs
transforming for human emancipation to occur. The theory of history in Marx – generally called
“historical materialism” – lays out an account of the historical dynamics that make such
transformations possible, and in the more deterministic version of the theory, inevitable. Again,
the concept of class figures centrally in this theory of historical development.
The most distinctive feature of the concept of class elaborated within Marxism to
contribute to the answer of these two questions is the idea of exploitation. Marx shares with
Weber the central idea that classes should be defined in terms of the social relations that link
people to the central resources that are economically relevant to production. And, as with Weber,
Marx sees these relations as having a systematic impact on the material well being of people --
both “exploitation” and “life chances” identify inequalities in material well-being that are
generated by inequalities in access to resources of various sorts. Thus both of these concepts
point to conflicts of interest over the distribution of the assets themselves. What exploitation
adds to this is a claim that conflicts of interest between classes are generated not simply by what
people have, but also by what people do with what they have. The concept of exploitation,
therefore, points our attention to conflicts within production, not simply conflicts in the market.
in the social organization of inequalities?” This question implies the need for a macro-level
concept, rather than simply a micro-level concept capturing the causal processes of individual
lives; and it requires a concept that allows for macro-level variations across time and place. This
question is also important in both the Marxist and Weberian traditions, but as we will see later,
here the two traditions have quite different answers. Within the Marxist tradition, the most
salient aspect of historical variation in inequality is the ways in which economic systems vary in
the manner in which an economic surplus is produced and appropriated, and classes are therefore
defined with respect to the mechanisms of surplus extraction. For Weber, in contrast, the central
problem of historical variation is the degree of rationalization of different dimensions of
inequality.3 This underwrites a conceptual space in which on the one hand class and status are
contrasted as distinct forms of inequality, and an the other hand class is contrasted with nonrationalized ways through which individual life-chances are shaped.
5. Class as a foundation of economic oppression and exploitation. Finally, class plays a central
role in answering the question, “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic
oppression and exploitation within capitalist societies?” This is the most contentious question
for it implies not simply an explanatory agenda about the mechanisms that generate economic
inequalities, but a normative judgment about those inequalities – they are forms of oppression
and exploitation – and a normative vision of the transformation of those inequalities. This is the
distinctively Marxist question and it suggests a concept of class laden with normative content. It
supports a concept of class which is not simply defined in terms of the social relations to
economic resources, but which also figures centrally in a political project of emancipatory social
change.
Different theoretical approaches to class analysis build their concepts of class to help answer
different clusters of these questions. Figure 1 indicates the array of central questions linked to
different approaches to class analysis. Weber’s work revolves around the third and fourth
questions, with the fourth question concerning forms of historical variation in social organization
of inequalities providing the anchor for his understanding of class. The narrower question about
explaining individual life chances gets its specific meaning from its relationship to this broader
historical question. Michael Mann’s work on class, especially in his multivolume study of The
Sources of Social Power is, like Weber’s, also centered on the four question. (Mann, 1986,
1993). John Goldthorpe’s class analysis centers firmly on the third question. While his work is
often characterized as having a Weberian inflection, his categories are elaborated strictly in terms
of the requirements of describing and explaining economic life chances, not long-term historical
variations in systems of inequality.4 For Pierre Bourdieu, class analysis is anchored in a more
open-ended version of the third question. Where he differs from Weber and other Weber-inspired
class analysts is in expanding the idea of life-chances to include a variety of non-economic
aspects of opportunity (e.g. cultural opportunities of various sorts) and expanding the kinds of
3. The concept of “rationalization” is one of the most complex and multidimensional in Weber’s work. In this
context the idea basically refers to the extent to which inequalities are organized in such a way that the actors within
those inequalities can act in precise, calculable ways.
4. See Goldthorpe (1980, 1990, 2000); Goldthorpe and Marshall (1992); Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992).
4
resources relevant to explaining those life-chances from narrowly economic resources to a range
of cultural and social resources (called “cultural capital” and “social capital”). “Class” for
Bourdieu, therefore, is a much more expansive concept, covering all inequalities in opportunities
(life chances) that can be attributed to socially-determined inequalities of resources of whatever
sort.5 Finally, class analysis in the Marxist tradition is anchored in the fifth question concerning
the challenge to systems of economic oppression and exploitation. The questions about historical
variation and individual life chances are also important, but they are posed within the parameters
of the problem of emancipatory transformations.
In the rest of this essay I will examine in some detail how these questions are played out
in the Weberian and Marxist traditions, the two most important traditions of class analysis in
sociological theory. The concepts of class in these two theoretical traditions share much in
common: they both reject simple gradational definitions of class; they are both anchored in the
social relations which link people to economic resources of various sorts; they both see these
social relations as affecting the material interests of actors, and, accordingly, they see class
relations as the potential basis for solidarities and conflict. Yet, they also differ in certain
fundamental ways. The core of the difference is captured by the favorite buzz-words of each
theoretical tradition: life-chances for Weberians, and exploitation for Marxists. This difference,
in turn, reflects the location of class analysis within their broader theoretical agendas. The Weberian Concept: Class as market-determined Life Chances
What has become the Weber-inspired tradition of class analysis (e.g. Giddens 1973; Parkin 1971;
Scott 1996) is largely based on Weber’s few explicit, but fragmentary, conceptual analyses of
class in Economy and Society ([1924] 1978).6 Weber writes:
We may speak of a “class” when (1) a number of people have in common a specific
causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this component is represented
exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for
income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets.
This is “class situation.”
It is the most elemental economic fact that the way in which the disposition over
material property is distributed among a plurality of people, meeting competitively in the
market for the purpose of exchange, in itself creates specific life chances....
But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of
chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the
individual’s fate. Class situation is, in this sense, ultimately market situation. (Pp.927-28)
5. see Bourdieu (1984, 1985, 1986, 1987). For exegetical discussion of Bourdieu’s approach, see Brubaker (1985)
and Weininger (2002, forthcoming)
6. When Weber’s work is excerpted in anthologies on stratification, the selections concerning class are almost
exclusively from these few explicit definitional statements of Economy and Society. (e.g., see Bendix and Lipset
1966; Giddens and Held 1982; Grusky 2001).
5
In short, the kind and quantity of resources you own affects your opportunities for income in
market exchanges. “Opportunity” is a description of the feasible set individuals face, the tradeoffs they encounter in deciding what to do. Owning means of production (the capitalist class)
gives a person different alternatives from owning skills and credentials (the “middle” class), and
both of these are different from simply owning unskilled labor power (the working class).
Furthermore, in a market economy, access to market-derived income affects the broader array of
life experiences and opportunities for oneself and one’s children. The study of the life-chances of
children based on parent’s market capacity, is thus an integral part of the Weberian agenda of
class analysis.
This definition of class in terms of market-determined life chances is clearly linked to the
third question posed above: “What explains inequalities in economically-defined life chances
and material standards of living?” Weber’s answer is: in capitalist societies the material
resources one brings to market exchanges explain such inequalities in life chances. But even
more deeply, Weber’s conceptualization of class is anchored in the fourth question, the question
of how to characterize and explain historical variation in the social organization of inequality.
Two issues are especially salient here: first, the historical variation in the articulation of class and
status, and second, the broad historical problem in understanding the rationalization of social
processes.
Class is part of a broader multidimensional schema of stratification in Weber in which the
most central contrast is between “class” and “status”.7 Status groups are defined within the
sphere of communal interaction (or what Weber calls the “social order”) and always imply some
level of identity in the sense of some recognized “positive or negative social estimation of
honor” (Weber [1924] 1978:932). A status group cannot exist without its members being in
some way conscious of being members of the group: “In contrast to classes, Stände (status
groups) are normally groups” (Weber [1924] 1978:932).
This conceptual contrast between class and status for Weber is not primarily a question of
the motives of actors: It is not that status groups are derived from purely symbolic motives and
class categories are derived from material interests. Although people care about status categories
in part because of their importance for symbolic ideal interests, class positions also entail such
symbolic interests, and both status and class are implicated in the pursuit of material interests. As
Weber ([1924] 1978: 935) writes, “material monopolies provide the most effective motives for
the exclusiveness of a status group” (p. 935). Rather than motives, the central contrast between
class and status is the nature of the mechanisms through which class and status shape inequalities
of the material and symbolic conditions people’s lives. Class affects material well-being directly
through the kinds of economic assets people bring to market exchanges. Status affects material
well-being indirectly, through the ways that categories of social honor underwrite various
coercive mechanisms that, in Weber’s ([1924] 1978: 935) words, “go hand in hand with the
monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities”.
7. A third term in this framework of forms of distribution of power is “party”, although this dimension is generally
given much less attention in the Weberian tradition.
6
The contrast between class and status provide one of the axes of Weber’s analysis of
historical variation in systems of inequality. Weber ([1924] 1978: 938) writes:
When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable,
stratification by status is favored. Every technological repercussion and economic
transformation threatens stratification by status and pushes the class situation into the
foreground. Epochs and countries in which the naked class situation is of predominant
significance are regularly the periods of technical and economic transformations.
One of the central reasons why capitalist societies are societies within which class becomes the
predominant basis of stratification is precisely because capitalism fosters continual “technical
and economic transformation.”
Weber’s concept of class is also closely linked to his theoretical preoccupation with the
problem of historical variation in the process of rationalization of social life.8 Following Levine’s
(1985:210) decomposition of Weber’s complex conceptual inventory of forms of rationalization,
the problem of class for Weber is primarily situated within one particular form of rationalization:
the objective instrumental rationalization of social order. In all societies the ways people gain
access to and use material resources is governed by rules that are objectively embodied in the
institutional settings within which they live. When the rules allocate resources to people on the
basis of ascriptive characteristics, and when the use of those material resources is governed by
tradition rather than the result of a calculative weighing of alternatives, then economic
interactions take place under nonrationalized conditions. When those rules enable people to
make precise calculations about alternative uses of those resources and discipline people to use
those resources in more rather than less efficient ways on the basis of those calculations, then
those rules can be described as “rationalized.” This occurs, in Weber’s analysis, when market
relations have the most pervasive influence on economic interactions (i.e., in fully developed
capitalism). His definition of classes in terms of the economic opportunities people face in the
market, then, is simultaneously a definition of classes in terms of rationalized economic
interactions. Class, in these terms, assumes its central sociological meaning to Weber as a
description of the way people are related to the material conditions of life under conditions in
which their economic interactions are regulated in a maximally rationalized manner.9 Weber is,
fundamentally, less interested in the problem of the material deprivations and advantages of
different categories of people as such, or in the collective struggles that might spring from those
advantages and disadvantages, than he is in the underlying normative order and cognitive
practices – instrumental rationality – that are embodied in the social interactions that generates
8. A number of commentators on differences between Weber and Marx have emphasized the centrality of the
problem of rationalization in Weber’s analysis of capitalism. (e.g., see Lowith [1932] 1982; Jones 1975; and Sayer
1991). Jones and Sayer, in particular, link the problem of rationalization explicitly to Weber’s analysis of classes.
9. It is for this reason that Weber does not regard slaves to be a “class”. While it is certainly the case that their lifechances are deeply shaped by their lack of control over economic resources, it is not the case that their economic
interactions are governed by rationalized principles of calculation and maximization. For a more extended
discussion of Weber’s treatment of slaves, see Wright (2002).
7
these life chances. “Class,” in these terms, is part of the answer to a broad question about
historical variations in the degree and forms of rationalization of social life in general, and the
social organization of inequality in particular. The Marxist Concept: class as exploitation
The pivotal question that anchors the Marxist conceptualization of class is the question of human
emancipation: “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic oppression and
exploitation within capitalist societies?” The starting point for Marxist class analysis is a stark
observation: The world in which we live involves a juxtaposition of extraordinary prosperity and
enhanced potentials for human creativity and fulfillment along with continuing human misery
and thwarted lives. The central task of the theory is to demonstrate first, that poverty in the midst
of plenty is not somehow an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature, but the result of the
specific design of our social institutions, and second, that these institutions can be transformed in
such a way as to eliminate such socially unnecessary suffering. The concept of class, then, in the
first instance is meant to help answer this normatively laden question.
The specific strategy in the Marxist tradition for answering the normative question leads
directly to the question about historical variation. The normative question asks what needs
transforming for human emancipation to occur. The theory of history in Marx – generally called
“historical materialism” – lays out an account of the historical dynamics that make such
transformations possible, and in the more deterministic version of the theory, inevitable. Again,
the concept of class figures centrally in this theory of historical development.
The most distinctive feature of the concept of class elaborated within Marxism to
contribute to the answer of these two questions is the idea of exploitation. Marx shares with
Weber the central idea that classes should be defined in terms of the social relations that link
people to the central resources that are economically relevant to production. And, as with Weber,
Marx sees these relations as having a systematic impact on the material well being of people --
both “exploitation” and “life chances” identify inequalities in material well-being that are
generated by inequalities in access to resources of various sorts. Thus both of these concepts
point to conflicts of interest over the distribution of the assets themselves. What exploitation
adds to this is a claim that conflicts of interest between classes are generated not simply by what
people have, but also by what people do with what they have. The concept of exploitation,
therefore, points our attention to conflicts within production, not simply conflicts in the market.