There are two classes

There is a question that economics has spent two centuries trying not to answer: where does profit come from?

Your employer pays you for eight hours of work. In those eight hours, you produce value - you build something, move something, serve something, code something, care for something. The value of what you produce in those eight hours exceeds what you are paid. It has to. If it did not, your employer would not hire you. The difference between what you produce and what you are paid is profit. Your employer keeps it. You do not.

Marx called this surplus value. The mechanism has not changed since he described it in 1867. The spreadsheet looks different. The product might be an app instead of a textile. The factory might be a fulfilment centre run by algorithms instead of a foreman with a pocket watch. But the structure is identical: you produce more than you receive, and the surplus goes to someone who did not produce it.

This is not a theory about exploitation in the emotional sense. It is a description of a mechanism. The mechanism is how the system works. Every corporation, every platform, every gig economy app operates on this principle: hire people, extract more value from their labour than you pay them, keep the difference. If this mechanism stopped, profits would stop. If profits stopped, the system would stop. The system depends on the gap between what you make and what you get. That gap is not an accident. It is the vehicle.

Two classes

If the system runs on the extraction of surplus from labour, then there are two groups of people in it: those who own the thing that extracts, and those the extraction is performed on.

Marx called the first group the bourgeoisie and the second the proletariat. The vocabulary has fallen out of use. The categories have not. Call them what you wish: working class, elites, epstein class, uber-rich, etc; The meaning holds.

The bourgeoisie are the people who own the means of production. In the 19th century, that meant factories, mills, mines, railroads. In the 21st century, it means platforms, data infrastructure, supply chains, financial instruments, and the algorithms that manage all of the above. The owner class has not disappeared. It has concentrated. Three people in the United States own more wealth than the bottom half of the population. Globally, the top one percent holds more wealth than the remaining ninety-nine. These are not "the rich" in the sense of your neighbour with a nice house and a new car. These are people whose wealth is measured in the productive apparatus they control - the servers, the logistics networks, the media empires, the financial systems that determine how resources are distributed across the planet.

The proletariat are the people who work. Not in the narrow image of the 19th-century factory worker - though those workers still exist, in enormous numbers, in the Global South. The working class in the 21st century includes the factory worker in Bangladesh, the Amazon warehouse picker in Manchester, the Uber driver in Toronto, the nurse working double shifts in a public hospital that is being gutted by austerity, the freelance graphic designer bidding against thirty other freelancers for a contract that pays less than minimum wage, the content creator whose ad revenue depends on an algorithm they do not control and cannot see.

You are working class if you do not own the thing you work with. The app, the platform, the algorithm, the warehouse, the hospital infrastructure, the delivery network. If someone else owns that, and you show up and produce value using it, and they keep the difference - you are working class. It does not matter whether you wear a hard hat or sit at a laptop. It does not matter whether you call yourself middle class. The question is the relationship to the productive apparatus. Do you own it, or do you work it?

The fake bourgeoisie

There is a third group that complicates this, and the complication is by design.

The professional-managerial class - lawyers, consultants, mid-level corporate managers, senior engineers at big tech firms, tenured professors, doctors in private practice - earn enough to feel comfortable. They own homes, take holidays, send their children to good schools. They identify upward. They see themselves as closer to the people who own the system than to the people who clean the offices and drive the deliveries.

They are wrong.

A senior software engineer at a technology company earns a good salary and might hold stock options. She is not a capitalist. She does not control the productive apparatus. She does not determine what the company builds, who it sells to, or how its profits are distributed. She can be laid off in a corporate restructuring she had no say in, and twenty thousand people like her were, across the technology sector, in a single week. Her stock options are worth what the market says they are worth, and the market answers to the people who own it, not the people who hold options in it.

A doctor in private practice appears independent. He is, in practice, dependent on insurance companies, hospital networks, pharmaceutical supply chains, and a regulatory framework written by and for the industries it ostensibly regulates. His independence is the independence of a sharecropper who owns his plough but not his field.

The professional-managerial class is not a separate class. It is the top stratum of the working class, granted enough comfort to identify with the owners and enough precarity to be terrified of falling. Capital uses this group as a buffer. They police the workers below them - through management, through cultural gatekeeping, through the reproduction of ideas that make the system seem natural - and they absorb the resentment that might otherwise be directed at the owners above them. When people say they hate "the elites," they often mean their manager, their landlord's property agent, the HR director who denied their leave request. They rarely mean the person who owns the company that employs all three.

This is the function of the fake bourgeoisie. Not to hold power, but to absorb anger. Not to benefit from the system in the way the actual owners do, but to benefit just enough to defend it. They are a class fraction whose material interests are proletarian and whose psychological identification is bourgeois, they are the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" class. And the gap between those two things - between what they are and what they think they are - is one of the most effective tools capital has ever produced.

You are not your identity

There is a conversation that happens in every political space where people try to organize against the system, and it goes like this: is the real problem class, or is it race? Is it economic or is it about gender? Should we focus on redistribution or on recognition? Is it about who owns the factory or about who gets harassed on the way to it?

The framework's answer is: this is a trick question, and the system designed it.

Racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, xenophobia - these are not separate problems that happen to coexist alongside class exploitation. They are produced by the same machinery. Imperialism requires the construction of the Other. A system that extracts wealth from colonized peoples, that exploits the labour of subjugated populations, that maintains hierarchies of access and dignity - that system needs you to believe that the differences between you and your neighbour are more important than the difference between both of you and the person who owns the building you both live in.

The British Empire did not import racial hierarchy to India because the British were unusually prejudiced. It imported racial hierarchy because Empire requires it. You cannot govern 300 million people with a few thousand administrators unless you convince yourself - and enough of the governed - that the hierarchy is natural. Race is the tool. Empire is the purpose.

The same logic applies domestically. In the United States, the racial division of the working class has been the most effective mechanism for preventing class solidarity in the country's history. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the wages of whiteness - the psychological compensation that white workers received for not organizing with Black workers. You do not get higher wages. You do not get better conditions. You get the knowledge that there is someone below you, and that knowledge is enough to keep you from looking up at the people above you.

This is not ancient history. It is the operating logic of every right-wing populist movement in the world right now. Blame the immigrant, not the employer. Blame the trans person, not the landlord. Blame the activist, not the profiteer. The system produces identity-based divisions because those divisions prevent the one thing the system cannot survive: working people recognizing that they have more in common with each other than with the people who exploit them.

The framework's position is this: class is primary. Identity oppression is real, devastating, and must be fought. But it is not independent of class - it is produced by the imperial-capitalist machinery that requires division to function. Defending individual rights - the right to exist as you are regardless of orientation, identity, ethnicity, or origin - is not a liberal add-on to class politics. It is a direct attack on the system that produces identity oppression in the first place. Every time the working class is fragmented along identity lines, capital wins. Every time those lines are refused, capital loses a weapon.

This is why the framework insists that the state does not care if you are gay or trans. Not because tolerance is a nice value. Because the criminalization of queerness, the persecution of minorities, the enforcement of conformity - these are imperial tools that fragment the working class, and under reciprocal materialism, they boomerang. The Soviet Union recriminalized homosexuality under Stalin. The material consequence was a fragmented working class, alienated allies, and internal contradictions that weakened the project from within. The repression did not strengthen the state. It corroded it. The tool turned inward, as the tools always do.

Defending individual rights is anti-imperial praxis. It is not separate from the class struggle. It is part of it.

What your attention is worth

There is one more dimension of the extraction that Marx could not have seen, because his world did not have it. Your attention is a commodity.

When you scroll through a social media feed, you are working. You are not being paid. You are producing value - your engagement, your clicks, your emotional reactions, your data - and that value is being sold. The buyer is an advertiser, the commodity is you. Not your labour in the traditional sense, but your attention, your behaviour patterns, your demonstrated preferences, your revealed anxieties. All of it is captured, packaged, and sold.

This is not a metaphor. Advertising revenue is the primary business model of the largest technology companies in the world. Meta's revenue in 2024 was over 160 billion dollars. Virtually all of it came from selling access to your attention. Google's was higher. The product is not the search engine. The product is not the social network. The product is the population that uses them, measured, segmented, and delivered to the highest bidder.

The labour theory of value says that profit comes from the difference between what a worker produces and what a worker is paid. In the attention economy, what you produce is engagement data and what you are paid is nothing. The surplus extraction rate is total. You are an unpaid worker whose output is your own psychological profile, and the factory floor is your phone screen.

Data extraction operates on the same principle at a different scale. Every interaction you have with a digital system generates data. That data is collected, aggregated, and used to train algorithms, target advertising, assess risk, price insurance, approve or deny credit, and make decisions about your life that you have no visibility into and no control over. You produced this data through your activity. You are not compensated. The entity that collects it profits. The mechanism is surplus extraction. The commodity is behavioural surplus - the predictive data harvested from your actions, beyond what is needed to serve you.

Fetishization of Capital

Then there are derivatives. Financial instruments built not on productive activity but on bets about the future direction of other financial instruments. A credit default swap is a bet on whether a borrower will default. A collateralized debt obligation is a package of debts, sliced and sold as investment products. These instruments hold market value - they can be bought, sold, and traded for enormous sums. But they contain no labour. No one built anything. No one grew anything. No one moved anything. The value is conjured from abstraction, from the gap between expectation and outcome, from the mathematics of risk modelling.

Marx called this commodity fetishism - the process by which the social relations embedded in a commodity become invisible, and the commodity appears to have value in itself, independent of the labour that produced it. Derivatives are commodity fetishism in its purest form. Value abstracted entirely from labour, appearing to generate surplus from nothing. The 2008 financial crisis revealed what happens when an economy is built on a mountain of these abstractions: the mountain collapses, and the people who never held a derivative in their lives lose their homes, their jobs, and their savings, while the people who built the mountain are made whole by the state.

The labour theory of value is not a relic of the 19th century. It is a description of the 21st. The forms of extraction have changed. The relationship has not. You produce. Someone else profits. That is the system.

Where this goes

Class is the foundation of the analysis. But knowing what class you belong to is not, by itself, a programme. The question that follows is: what do you do about it?

The next pieces in this series address this directly. How power is maintained through economic extraction and through the manufacture of consent - the media, the platforms, the incentive systems that make the machinery invisible. How the form of resistance must match the form of oppression, calibrated to the conditions you actually face. How to build economic structures in which the productive apparatus serves the people who work it, not the people who own it. How to design institutions that do not rot from the inside.

Class tells you where you stand. What comes next tells you where to go.