Concept
Working class
Overview
The working class is a group of people in a social hierarchy, typically defined by earning wages or salaries through their ability to work. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, or whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into the category of requiring income from wage labour to subsist; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Working class is discussed.
The working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power, and remodeled the State according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict between employer and the employed becomes imminent, and cannot be…
Leon Trotsky, Our Revolution
the book is about it; names the idea; opens on it
If the active movement of the middle class may be dated from 1840, that of the working class commences its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian factory operatives in 1844, and we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different stages through which this movement passed.
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual, by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
names the idea; author linked in the graph
Protective Duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois--for the benefit of the working class.
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Nor is it possible for these two classes to unite or to put forward any demands. . . . The American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World represent two different principles of combination; but they also represent two different classes of labor.''[30] The I. W. W. stands for industrial unionism, whereas the American Federation of Labor stands for craft unionism. The I. W. W. were formed in 1905…
Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom
opens on it; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Working class
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Karl Marx
- Simone Weil
- Intellectual
- Étienne Balibar
- Peter Kropotkin
- Constantin Rădulescu-Motru
- Emma Goldman
Related ideas
- Feudalism
- India
- Karl Marx
- Laos
- Ethiopia
- Wealth
- Max Weber
- Vietnam
- Western world
- North Korea
- Natural law
- University of Cambridge
- Soviet Union
- Socialism
- Social class
- The New York Times
- Age of Enlightenment
- Proletariat
- Friedrich Engels
- Means of production
- Cuba
- China
- Education
- Salary
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.