Definition of Working Class

Since the French Revolution annihilated the Old Regime and the modern state was installed, with it came a new social order that also overthrew the old stratification caste social: aristocracy, clergy and lower class, and at the same time gave way to a new system of division of society into social classes.

The social class is the concept used to name that set of people who make up the same social and economic level and therefore share tastes, traditions and interests.

Meanwhile, within this new social order we were talking about, we can find the following division of social classes: high, middle and low.

Within the class division it is the lowest class in a society, made up of workers

It is precisely the latter that we can also call the working class since it is made up mostly of people who are dedicated to the worker's trade, which is a job characterized by carrying out manual activities or operating machines in factories.

We must say that the upper class is the one that has the highest concentration of

material resources and is made up of business owners, among others, the middle class that is made up of professionals and has income middle class, and finally the lower or working class that has the lowest incomes of the three and that allow them to satisfy their basic needs but not to reach luxuries.

At the behest of the economy modern, which is the context in which it achieved its reason for being, the working class, designates the set of individuals who economically speaking contribute, which is formally called the labor factor , and informally as the measure of effort made by human beings, in production and at In exchange for that effort, they receive a salary or economic consideration. The opposite or opposite of this class is the call capitalist class, which unlike the first contributes capital, because the working class in a capitalist scenario will never be the owner of the means of production.

Origins in the Industrial Revolution

Undoubtedly, the industrial revolution was a determining event for the emergence of this class, since in this way they began to designate those workers enrolled in the incipient sector of the industry, which with the advances in technology and the sector itself was spreading throughout the world.

The concept is developed precisely in the second half of the 19th century, in England, and arises from the translation into Spanish of the original English concept working class.

The concept according to Marx and Engels

The philosophers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were among the first to spread this concept through of his works that addressed the subject of industry, the means of production, among others issues.
They also liked to call this class the proletariat.

Marx said that the members of the working class sold their capacity to work to the capitalists so that they could run their businesses and factories, in exchange for the perception of a salary.
This sociologist attributed to this class the wealth available to the bosses and, for example, proposed a revolution of it in order to free itself from this oppression and to grow socially.

It should be noted that the working class is a concept that also makes it possible to differentiate the work carried out by salaried industrialists with respect to another group of workers such as peasants, slaves, self-employed workers or employees in the area of services.

That is, all of them belong to a larger group than in modern societies that have a class system known as the lower class, de anyway and as it happens with the middle class, since there is not a complete cohesion in this case, then, there are these differentiations and divisions internal.

Working Class Issues