When people hear “working class,” they may picture a factory worker, a construction worker or a miner. Those workers belong to the class, but the class is far larger.
For Marxists, class is not mainly a question of income, education or lifestyle. It is determined by a person’s relationship to the means of production — the workplaces, machinery, land, transportation and other resources needed to produce society’s wealth. Capitalists own or control the major means of production. Workers generally do not, and so most must sell their labor power — their ability to work — for a wage or salary.
That includes factory and warehouse workers, nurses, teachers, restaurant workers, drivers, farmworkers, clerical and retail workers, programmers, sanitation workers, housekeepers and millions more.
Service workers belong to the working class in the same sense as workers who manufacture physical goods. Marx did not define productive labor by whether it leaves behind a physical object. A service can be sold as a commodity just as a manufactured product can. Marx gave the example of a schoolteacher: a teacher employed by a capitalist school owner to make money for the owner can produce surplus value even though the teacher produces no physical object.
But whether a particular worker directly produces surplus value is not the same question as whether that person belongs to the working class. A public-school teacher, transit worker or government hospital worker may not directly produce surplus value for a private capitalist, but still depends on selling labor power for a wage and has no capitalist ownership of the means of production.
There is also enormous amounts of necessary work done outside the wage system. People who stay home to raise children, cook, clean, care for family members and manage households perform labor without which the working class could not survive or reproduce itself. This unpaid work has historically been imposed on women. A person doing unpaid household labor may not themselves be selling labor power at that moment, but their work is part of the reproduction and maintenance of working-class life.
Capitalism created the modern working class
The modern working class did not always exist. Capitalism created it on a mass scale by separating great numbers of people from the land, tools and other means through which they had once supported themselves.
Stripped of an independent means of livelihood, they had little choice but to seek wages from those who owned the means of production.
Capitalism continually reproduces this relationship. Workers produce the goods and services society depends on, but the major workplaces and accumulated wealth remain under capitalist ownership and control. Workers receive wages or salaries; the capitalist class owns the capital built up through the exploitation of labor.
Marx and Engels called the modern working class the proletariat. The word comes from ancient Rome, where the proletarii were the lowest class of citizens and owned little or no property. The term came from proles, meaning offspring: they were regarded as possessing little to contribute to the Roman state beyond their children.
The ancient Roman proletarii were not the modern working class. Marx and Engels took the older term and gave it a specific meaning under capitalism: the class of people who do not own the means of production and therefore must sell their labor power to live.
The working class is constantly changing
The occupations that make up the working class shift as capitalism develops.
In Marx’s time, the explosive growth of factories brought enormous concentrations of industrial workers together. Industrial workers remain strategically important today, but capitalist development has also built huge workforces in transportation, healthcare, education, communications, logistics, retail and other services.
Technology does not abolish the working class.
Automation eliminates particular jobs, reorganizes others and creates new kinds of work. Computers, warehouses, data centers, transportation networks and automated factories still require human labor to build, operate, maintain and connect them.
Capitalism continually changes the forms of labor while reproducing a class of people dependent on wages.
Gig workers are even classified by law as “independent contractors” while corporations control their work, determine their pay and can cut off their livelihood. The legal label does not necessarily reveal a worker’s real class position.
The working class is not all the same
Workers do not experience capitalism equally.
Racism and national oppression divide the class and place additional burdens on oppressed peoples, who are often the lowest paid, the last hired and the first fired. Women still carry unequal responsibility for childcare and other socially necessary work. Many immigrant workers face the threat of deportation, which employers can use to hold down wages, steal wages already earned and weaken workers’ resistance. LGBTQ+ workers face discrimination in hiring and oppression that shape their lives inside and outside the workplace. Mass incarceration has also created a vast pool of prison labor that is unpaid or paid only pennies, while disproportionately imprisoning oppressed peoples.
Capitalists have used these divisions again and again to weaken workers’ resistance.
But recognizing the different forms of oppression within the working class is not opposed to class unity. It is necessary for genuine unity.
Workers cannot unite by ignoring the oppression borne by part of their own class.
A paycheck does not tell you someone’s class
Class lines can sometimes be complicated.
A highly paid corporate executive may receive a salary while exercising the authority of capitalist owners over thousands of workers. Small shopkeepers, independent farmers and other small proprietors may work very hard themselves while owning some of their means of production.
Between the major classes are intermediate layers whose position can be contradictory.
Marxism does not determine class by asking whether someone works hard or whether they are rich or poor. It asks what position they occupy in the system of production, whether they own or control means of production, whether they depend on selling labor power and what relationship they have to capital and labor.
Unemployed workers are still part of the class
Capitalist accumulation continually produces unemployment and underemployment.
Businesses hire workers when their labor can be employed profitably and lay them off when production is cut, workplaces close or new technology reduces the labor required.
Marx described the unemployed and underemployed population continually produced by capitalism as an industrial reserve army.
Its existence puts pressure on employed workers. The threat of unemployment helps employers hold wages down and impose worse conditions.
High unemployment and the lack of decent jobs also bear heavily on young people. When civilian work offers low wages, insecurity or no job at all, military service can appear to offer a steady paycheck, housing, healthcare, education and a way out. Economic insecurity thus becomes a recruiting weapon for the armed forces, drawing working-class youth into the military machine.
Unemployed workers therefore are part of the working class. Their insecurity grows out of the capitalist labor market that governs the lives of employed workers.
The working class can remake society
Workers possess something the capitalist class cannot do without:
They do the work.
Modern production is deeply social. Thousands or even millions of workers may take part in producing, transporting and distributing a single product. Hospitals, schools, transportation systems, communications networks and cities likewise depend on the coordinated labor of great numbers of people.
Corporations and banks are owned and controlled by a small capitalist class, but their wealth depends on the labor of workers. Without workers, factories do not produce, goods do not move and the machinery of capitalist society does not run.
That gives the working class enormous potential power.
Workers can build unions, strike, halt production and challenge the authority of the owners. In political struggles, workers can unite with oppressed peoples, students, rebellious sections of the military and other exploited and oppressed layers of society against capitalist rule.
But Marxism goes further.
The working class has the potential not merely to bargain with capital but to abolish the capitalist relationship itself.
Workers already carry out the collective labor on which modern society depends. What they lack is power over the wealth they produce and the conditions under which they produce it.
Socialist revolution means the working class taking political power and bringing the great means of production into social ownership.
The working class is revolutionary not because workers are automatically radical or because every worker thinks alike.
It is revolutionary because of its position under capitalism: capital cannot exist without workers, while workers can organize society without capitalists.
Additional reading
Wage Labour and Capital — by Karl Marx (1849). A short introduction to the relationship between wage workers and capital and to the conditions that create the modern working class.
High Tech, Low Pay: A Marxist Analysis of the Changing Character of the Working Class — by Sam Marcy (1986). Examines how technological change and capitalist restructuring alter the composition of the working class rather than eliminating it, including the growing importance of lower-paid workers, women and nationally oppressed workers.
Can the Working Class Change the World? — by Michael D. Yates (2018). Looks at the working class as it exists today, the divisions of race, gender and nationality within it, and the possibilities for building class unity and revolutionary social change.
On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War — by Kim Moody (2017). Examines how changes in production, logistics and corporate organization have reshaped the working class and created new possibilities for worker organization and struggle.