Working class

• 1. Introduction

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  The working class is a term that cuts differently depending on who is speaking. Karl Marx defined it as those who sell their labour power for wages and do not own the means of production. Socialists broaden it to include nearly everyone who depends on a wage or salary to survive. In the United States, common usage narrows it to blue-collar and pink-collar workers, or those without sufficient income to be considered middle class. One term, and a dozen competing definitions. That tension is not accidental. It sits at the heart of what the working class actually is and what it has meant across centuries of economic and political life. Who counts as working class? How did that category come into being? And what happens to the people left out of the formal economy altogether? Those questions are what this documentary will examine.

• 2. A World Before Workers

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  In feudal Europe, a distinct working class simply did not exist in large numbers. A lawyer, a craftsman, and a peasant were all grouped together into a third estate, people who were neither aristocrats nor church officials. Their social position was understood as fixed by natural law and shared religious belief. That sense of a God-ordained order was not accepted without resistance. Peasants contested their position, most notably during the German Peasants' War. Then, in the late 18th century, the Enlightenment put European society into motion. Change could no longer be squared with the idea of a changeless divine hierarchy. Wealthy members of these societies responded by constructing ideologies that attributed the problems of labouring people to their own morals, including what they framed as excessive alcohol consumption, laziness, and an inability to save money. E. P. Thompson challenged that framing directly in The Making of the English Working Class, arguing that the English working class was present at its own creation. Thompson sought to trace how pre-modern labouring groups became a modern, politically self-conscious class.

• 3. Defining the Proletariat

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  Marx argued that working-class people physically build bridges, craft furniture, grow food, and nurse children, yet do not own the land or factories where that work happens. That gap between labour and ownership was, for him, the engine of a society's wealth and its central injustice. Within the proletariat, Marx identified a subgroup he called the lumpenproletariat, or rag-proletariat, made up of the extremely poor and unemployed, including day labourers and homeless people. He considered them to be devoid of class consciousness. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that it is the destiny of the working class to displace the capitalist system. The goal was a dictatorship of the proletariat that would abolish the social relationships underpinning the class system, eventually giving way to a communist society in which, in their words, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Wage labourers and those dependent on the welfare state fell inside that Marxist definition; those living on accumulated capital did not. That broad divide was, for Marx, the defining line of the class struggle.

• 4. Soviet States and Third World Shifts

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  Starting around 1917, a number of countries came to be governed in the declared interests of the working class. Historians have noted that a key change in Soviet-style societies was a new type of proletarianization, often carried out through the administratively enforced forced displacement of peasants and rural workers. The outcomes varied sharply. Four major industrial states moved toward semi-market-based governance: China, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba. North Korea turned inward into what historians describe as an increasing cycle of poverty and brutalization. The Soviet Union itself eventually collapsed. Since 1960, large-scale proletarianization and the enclosure of commons took hold across the third world, producing new working classes in regions that had not previously fit the industrial model. Countries such as India have been slowly undergoing social change, expanding the size of the urban working class in the process.

• 5. The Informal Billion

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  Sociologist Mike Davis coined the term informal working class to describe a group he estimated at over a billion people. They are predominantly young urban residents with no formal connection to the global economy, surviving largely in slums. Davis argued that this class no longer corresponds to the socio-theoretical frameworks of Marx, Max Weber, or modernization theory. It developed worldwide from the 1960s onward, with particular concentration in the southern hemisphere. Earlier frameworks had imagined similar populations as the lumpenproletariat or, in the language of the 1920s and 1930s, as slums of hope. Davis broke from both traditions. Members of the informal working class, in his account, are given hardly any realistic chances of entering formal economic structures. The informal working class therefore sits outside not just the factory but outside the theoretical categories that scholars had relied on to describe labour and poverty.

• 6. Identity and Higher Education

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  Researcher Diane Reay has focused on a specific pressure point: the experience of working-class students entering higher education, and research-intensive universities in particular. One factor she identifies is that the university community is often perceived as a predominantly middle-class social space. That perception creates a sense of otherness rooted in differences in social norms and in knowledge of how to navigate academic institutions. In Australia, researchers have taken a different angle, proposing that working-class status should be defined subjectively, as a matter of self-identification rather than external categorisation. That approach shifts the authority to define class from researchers to the individuals themselves. Whether the measure is income, occupation, education, or self-description, the working class remains a category whose boundaries keep moving, a fact that reflects the ongoing contest over who gets to name it and what that name is worth.