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It is argued that Karl Marx invented an original concept of class that differed sharply from the major pre-Marxian concepts, which held class to be a matter of property &/or power. The relevance of Marx's work is shown to be its determination to displace these two long-existing concepts of class by an insistent emphasis on class understood as a matter of production & distribution of surplus labor. Surplus labor's very existence implies a complex process that defines groupings of people along a new axis of differentiation; ie, persons can be classified according to whether they perform surplus labor, appropriate someone's surplus labor (or its fruits), or obtain a distribution of surplus labor (or its fruits) from an appropriator. The analysis is applied to the current crisis in French socialism under President Mitterrand. Modified AA

We argue that Marx provided the basis for a far more complex class analysis of social formations than has been recognized. We find this analysis to be consistent neither with the two-class approach long prevalent in the Marxian tradition nor with recent critiques of that approach by Poulantzas, Wright, and others. Marx's most basic philosophic concepts and his value analysis are shown to imply a differentiation between what he terms the fundamental classes (performers and appropriators of surplus labor) and we term the subsumed classes (recipients of distributed shares of the appropriated surplus labor). This differentiated class analysis, in turn, suggests certain adjustments in Marxian value analysis. It also suggests a resolution to the debates over productive/unproductive labor and over the defmiition of "the working class." Finally, we demonstrate how such a class analysis of any concrete social situation requires the specification of the precise fundamental and subsumed classes involved and the contradictions, alliances, and struggles within and between them. We analyze briefly several topics (e.g., the state, household, and capital accumulation) to illustrate the explanatory power of our formulation of Marx's concepts of class.

Foreign exploitation has been a recurrent theme in radical analyses of centre periphery relations. We suggest a new, class-analytical way to analyse the relations between centre and periphery which involves specifying concepts of class (including the space and time dimensions of class processes) and, especially, foreign exploitation different from those that exist in current radical literature. We also discuss the potential role of this type of class analysis for policy debates and social struggles in the Third World.