Marx discussed this, briefly, twice: “It is always the direct
relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the
direct producers...” (Capital III, Int'l Pub., 791) And.... “The
owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners,
whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent,
in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists, and landlords, consitute
then three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist
mode of production.”(Capital III, 885)
From Lenin "A Great Beginning" , Collected Works, Vol. 29, p 421:
"Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by
the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social
production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated by
law) to the means of production, by their role in the social
organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the
share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of
acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can
appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they
occupy in a definite system of social economy."
To
which can be added this: "class divisions are based upon three
main criteria: a person's position in the occupational structure, a
person's position in the authority structures (how many people a
person must take orders from versus how many people a person can
give orders to), and a person's ownership of property (or, more
specifically, the ownership of property that produces profit, such as
stock ownership), which we can call the property structure. These
three criteria tend to intersect, producing more of less distinct
class divisions." (p.12)
"The
working class will be used to signify people with little or no
property, middle to low positions in occupation (manual labor), and
little or no authority. A further distinction will be made with
respect to skilled and unskilled manual workers. At times the term
lower class will be used to signify those individuals with no
property, who are often unemployed and have no authority (that is,
the poor). (p.13). These definitions come from Harold R.Kerbo's Social Stratification
and Inequality: Class Conflict in HIstorical and Comparative
Perspective, 3rd edition, McGraw Hill: Boston, 1996. (Compiled
by Dr Richard Gibson)