If you work in a shop, for example, you are not producing surplus value. Instead, you’re making sure that this value is realized.
Socialists were primarily interested in the working class that produced surplus value, as these are the people with the most power to demand change - if factory workers go on strike, there will be a much larger impact than if shop workers did.
Objective domination - domination of a class by a system (structure, set of mechanisms) that nobody really controls but which has all of us in its grips. Capitalism consists of a set of mechanisms that we have to follow if we don’t want to “go under”.
Durkheim
Rules of sociological method (1895)
The scientific attitude is looking at various non-things as things, as external to ourselves.