NMAT Social Sciences Practice Test

In Marxist terms, the group with access to the means of production—the factories, land, and capital that generate wealth—forms the upper segment of society. This is the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class that owns productive assets and wields economic and political power because of that ownership. The opposite group, the proletariat, consists of workers who must sell their labor since they don’t own productive assets. The term estate comes from feudal-era social hierarchies and isn’t used to describe modern ownership of production, while class systems is a broad idea of social layering without naming who controls production. So, the upper segment characterized by owning the means of production is the bourgeoisie.