While I was writing the other day and wanting to refer to the ownership class, I paused to consider the origins of the idea.  I quickly found that most writing about class branches off in some way from Marx' conception of class and classes in conflict.  So I was faced with the problem with how to talke about class, but without entering into the polemic and outright warfare of idealogies that fueled the cold war and continues to be an active complex of collective emotional signals deployable in political contests.  Is class real outside of a particular idealogical description?

Marx contends that the capital class is largely responsible for creating and maintaining the class structure, but stratification doesn't start with capitalism, and I would argue that extreme stratification doesn't serve the needs of capital very well.  Stratification will exist as long as there is difference in incomes, but extreme stratification has to be looked at in another light.  We look to Rawls for a way to think about fairness by considering what would be just if I were in any other man's shoes, if I didn't know my income or wealth compared to others, if I might be a committed believer not of my religion, but of any religion.

We don't end racism by ending racial identity, we construct justice so that it is blind to race.  Not just in principle but in reality.  Likewise, we don't end classism by ending stratification and the symbols of class identity.  There is certainly no solution in having one or another class prevail in a struggle.  Conflict is distructive to everyone.  It is a fact of economics that if too much wealth accumulates at the top, that overall productivity suffers.  Even if your religion is the market, this is a state of market failure.  In terms of dynamic systems, the end state of a game of monopoly is a flatline, system death.

Class membership shouldn't carry shame or hardship, but rather be part of human diversity that can be celebrated.  If our societies continue to produce large classes who cannot live lives of dignity, then we have failed.  If our world includes whole societies that live peaceful, productive lives on little or no financial wealth, do we measure them as living in poverty as we do now?  Measured in terms of health and happiness, there are few traditional societies that have not been negatively effected by growth within the western system.  This isn't to suggest a way forward in an archaic revival, but rather to point to better measures of societal health than monitary ones.

The error of the market fundamentalists isn't in insisting that the market is a good and appropriate mode of production for many situations, but in wanting to use it as a solution for all situations.  By distilling all processes of value determination to the setting of exchange value in competitive market, we make all of society subservient to the systems of valuation that determine capital investment.  That may be a good way to determine the relative value produced by different ways of organizing the factors of production, but it shouldn't be the sole basis for policy.  Firms may externalize costs, but if society can asses those costs in general taxes we still have a functioning system.  If the capital class deprives the commons of necessary nourishment then it finds itself without an available labor force with the skills needed.  If income is fairly distributed, then the classes can take care of themselves and implement social insurance systems with or without the direct involvments of governments.  Markets work fine, they just aren't a universal solution and they can and do fail and require intervention to keep them going.  Markets themselves are in the commons precisely because the represent collective wealth, social capital.