Class is always much more than economic positioning. It is also a set of sensibilities, aesthetics, aspirations, social and political privileges, social regard, and so on, all of which can better be arrived at and rationed through economic positioning, to be sure.
Class seems to emerge through necessity in a given societal and environmental structure, as individuals associate to solve problems and then in many cases, clamber over each other in time to live the "worthwhile" life, in which various sets of problems are separated into kinds and tiers, each coming with their own challenges, requirements, regard, and rewards. And then these tiers of living and problem solving have to eventually be clearly defined and maintained as a society matures and seeks to further perpetuate itself.
Historically there are numerous ways to maintain class, such as through the control of land and through hereditary lineage, guild systems, caste systems, educational and bureaucratic institutions, and etc. which regulate the production and reproduction of human beings who are capable of certain things and who have access to certain resources to exercise those capabilities.
Veblen talked about the "leisure class," which was a very different beast in the ancient and medieval worlds, though there are certainly core similarities between those classes and the modern leisure class. For one thing, the early leisure class Veblen was analyzing was in Viking Scandinavia, which looked down on farming and similar means of daily production and reproduction, leaving those things for women and slaves. Though they also weren't afraid to get their hands dirty - or bloody - and could be seen to live violent and dangerous lives. They were a warrior class that considered the highest pursuits to be in battle and martial glory, even if it meant dying for it.
Not the leisure class we think of in the modern world, which seems to be very much concerned with not dying, eventually going to the extremes we see in the pursuit of cryogenics or anti-aging science or bodily transcendence through tech or what have you.
But to be fair the ideal of immortality comes in many forms, with ruling classes across history pursuing those many forms in their own ways, such as in ancient Egyptian concerns with burial, Roman conceptions of eternally-remembered "glory," and for that matter, the Viking passage into eternal remembrance and into Valhalla through death. Though I do digress.
In modern capitalist societies, one prominent way to maintain class boundaries is simply through quantifiable thresholds of monetary resources. We loosely refer to "lower, middle, and higher" classes which imply certain levels of monetary accumulation and attainment.
Theoretically, much of the exercisable power sloshing around in our society is commensurable, in that much of it is reducible to divisible monetary quantities, no matter how incongruent a given form is. For the right quantity of money, you can buy land, you can buy reproducible livestock and plants, you can buy water rights and other resource rights, you can buy capital which in combination with purchasable labor can augment money quantity, and so on. And these various forms of wealth are effectively power: they can do things in the world, or else they can be traded for other things that do things that the owner wants.
We know historically how a currency tends to work: it is the tax that sets the currency into motion. By requiring a tax be paid in a specific currency - the failure of which gets you a club upon the head, or a stay in a cage - it creates a very strong desire for that currency, making it very useful to anyone trading for it, and so it gets that currency moving and in use.
In the same way, for money to act as permission to do just about anything, it requires that the money is highly desirable for just about anyone, and for it to be highly desirable to just about anyone, it must be completely necessary for mostly everyone. If you need money to purchase the various necessities to stay alive and persist in the world, and the only way to get money is to offer your very essential capacity to produce a portion of wealth and power for the rest of the world, that is what you're going to do, and so all the necessary functions to sustain a human society and form the basis for any kind of power is carried out, making widely available the very necessities that money is essential for purchasing.
The rich of the leisure class could trade around their shiny coins all they wanted, but it wouldn't be much fun if those coins couldn't buy the devoted time and energy of a large swathe of the capable population, carrying out the many functions for human survival, comfort, and ecstasy, which form the building blocks of higher and higher forms of wealth and power.
So in a sense, for money to move and circulate, where it can ultimately pool up and accumulate, it is also necessary to maintain gradients of its quantity and availability, so that it is desired in the first place, therefore freeing up those essential forces of human endeavor and resource that it can be traded for. Money must have empty space for it to move to.
This is accomplished through a careful class manipulation of how much quantities of money can accumulate where, and how it can all be acquired. Our fractional reserve banking system, coupled with the financial and oligarchical strangulation of all of our public institutions, ensures that much of the currency creation is done in the private sphere, and controlled through the private sphere
And through the private sphere, the rest is done through the structure of the value chain and how private enterprise is structured: products higher up the chain, with value added, yield greater surplus, because all value added along the way up that chain has to accrue to various private parties skimming their share off of the top. Getting higher up the value chain requires organization and power and capital to begin with, which allows for a manipulation of the structure of that value chain by the incumbents.
That part is a little difficult to wrap one's mind around, so I want to explain it a bit and then we'll wrap things up. Let's go back to quantity and the tiering you can achieve through quantity alone. The very basic essentials that are required to stay alive and stave off mass revolt and revolution are ostensibly available at a low monetary threshold: food, water, clothing, a very basic, shitty shelter that doesn't even have to be owned to carry out its housing function...these are very basic necessities that individuals tend to need to participate and labor in society.
We'll set aside the paradox of thrift for now, which poses serious problems for capital in its own right. Wages are kept as low as possible not just for the benefit of maximal return on capital, though that is an important driving force. They are also kept low so that people just have enough to continue to subsist and labor, and not be given enough power to exercise more autonomy.
Savings for example allow people to hunker down and bide their time, thumbing their noses at their bosses and looking somewhere else, or investing in education to acquire the skills and connections to move further up the value chain. Health care allows not only for subsistence but further thriving due to proper nutrition, cognition, and motivation. Cars allow for more mobility and movement and dynamism, and plane tickets and cross-border travel can do even more. Moving up to the higher tiers past consumer goods, housing can position one within certain communities which contain available desired products, social connections, quality of education, and favorable health and low-stressor environments, while at the same time accruing in value.
All of this allows one to inch one's way up the value chain, acquiring the strength and the confidence and the well-being to produce things and do things at higher tiers that others want, who are unable to do it themselves, and so one can skim more value off of the top.
Finally, if one can make it to the capital tiers, one can begin augmenting one's monetary resources. The rate and extent of that augmentation can vary based on the type of capital, where that capital is based, what that capital can do, and so on, all of which are manipulated and regulated as well. One may get lucky enough to eventually enter the big leagues, to climb to the top of the value chain, skimming off of the top of everyone else's accumulated labor, offering products and services monopolized and controlled by a very few, garnering the value one can get out of the whole of the market. A lot is still being left out in this picture, but we can only do so much in a single post.
This tiering and the maintenance of this tiering is somewhat conscious at its late stage, but it also had to organically develop over a long period of time, and the ruling class had to steadily learn how it all worked and how best to implement it as it continued to develop. And a lot of its workings are so complex that navigating and controlling for them consist of equally complex organizing of the upper classes such as through decades of the evolution of law, political connection, business lobbying, and the like. The upper classes had to learn the limits of what it could get away with in grinding down the loser classes as the labor struggle evolved over the last century. And now that class is also unlearning much of this and destroying much of the basis of their own power, which is a whole other dimension of analysis and beyond our scope at the moment.
This explanation sounds like a thermodynamic explanation - and hence naturalized and eternal - and in a sense it is. But I want to stress that this is not how things have to be. A lot of this is due to how our society is set up and structured, and then what is collectively valued and desired, namely a collectively held regard for material wealth and material power, and then how those things are to be obtained and maintained, and how individuals are to relate to each other in doing this. It is how the energy is moving through our particular society. Later on we'll get into how all of that works and why it is so.
