We Are What We Buy

The concept of class is not what it was.

It used to apply to what people did. At its most essential, it used to demarcate those who owned the means of production from those who owned almost nothing save their labour power; those who, as Marx famously put it in 1848, ‘have nothing to lose but their chains’. To be working class was to be in an economically antagonistic relationship with the capitalist class. At various points in time, that economic antagonism could develop into a political antagonism - such was the nature of class consciousness.