Working Class

HISTORICAL CHANGES AND THE WORKING CLASS

ISSUES IN WORKING-CLASS SCHOLARSHIP AND POLITICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The capitalist class structure consists of two main classes: the capitalist class, owners of means of production, and the working class, owners of labor power. The relations between these classes are complementary and contradictory. Complementary, because capitalists need workers to produce the wealth they accumulate, and workers’ economic survival depends on capital investments: Lacking access to means of production, it is only through the sale of their labor power that workers and their families subsist. Their class interests are, however, inherently contradictory: It is in capitalists’ interest to lower production costs—that is, wages, pensions, health plans, and so on—to increase profits and facilitate capital accumulation. It is in workers’ interest not only to attain good wages and benefits but, eventually, to overthrow capitalism and take over the means of production, thus ending their exploitation by the capitalist class: The working classes are bound to become the capitalists’ “gravediggers” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998).

HISTORICAL CHANGES AND THE WORKING CLASS

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) wrote in the nineteenth century, when class differences were stark and the large and growing working class was composed of manual, mostly male workers. Since then and up to World War II (1939–1945), workers lived close to the factories, in dense working-class communities. These conditions facilitated workers’ awareness of shared experiences and interests, and the formation of trade unions that enhanced workers’ economic and political power (Marx [1847] 1969, pp. 172–173). The concentration of capital and emergence of large-scale industry resulted in the spacial concentration of workers, giving “this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle … this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle” (p. 173).

During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries there were in the United States and Europe numerous instances of violent class struggles and widespread working-class mobilization and organizing under socialist, Communist, and anarchist banners: “social and cultural identities were forged by the categories of class and strata; everyday life, aesthetic expressions, and cognitive mappings articulated with production relations” (Aronowitz 1992, p. 23). In 1917 successful revolution in Russia seemed to confirm Marx and Engels’s prediction about the revolutionary role of the working class.

After World War II, however, the world’s economic and political conditions changed, partly as a result of the cold war and anticapitalist struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the advanced capitalist countries, the working classes abandoned anticapitalist politics in exchange for steady employment and a good standard of living. Changes in the forces of production altered the economic and the occupational structures, decreasing the proportion of manual, “blue-collar” workers employed on farms and in the industrial, manufacturing sector. The proportion of workers employed in the service sector and in nonmanual, “white-collar” clerical, professional, and managerial jobs increased, thus giving rise to theories that conceptualized the top echelons of such jobs as a new class. Typical of such views is the “professional managerial class” (PMC) thesis put forth by John and Barbara Ehrenreich (1979). The PMC owes its existence to “the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class” (p. 2) and acts, with some degree of class awareness, in ways detrimental to the working class, leading to, for example, “the reorganization of the productive process, the emergence of mass institutions of social control, and the commodity penetration of working class life” (p. 18). Although professionals and managers may make decisions adversely affecting the working class, it remains open to debate whether such decisions reflect their own antiworking class intentions, or the objectives of the capitalist employers for whom they work. More important is the contention that the PMC is guilty of expropriating the workers’ skills and culture and that this expropriation constitutes a sufficient basis for considering them a social class. Historically, the development of capitalist industrialization has entailed the progressive deskilling of the working class and the emergence of a complex division of labor that includes deskilled masses of workers and layers of intermediate workers (foremen, managers, engineers, administrators, etc.), which embodied the power of capital and its ability to deskill and control the organization and pace of the labor process (see Braverman 1974 for a thorough analysis of these processes). The PMC is found not only in factories, of course, but also in all institutions where high-ranking salaried employees are the visible face of capitalist or of institutional power over rank-and-file workers. The view that the PMC is a “class for itself,” acting autonomously against the working class, overlooks the significance of its intermediate location, as employees who carry out the mandates of their bosses. The PMC can be viewed more appropriately as a strata within the propertyless class, occupying a “contradictory class location” between the capitalist class and the proletariat—that is, foremen, technocrats, bottom and top managers, and so on—and between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat—that is, semiautonomous employees such as teachers, professors, scientists, and so on (Wright 1978, p. 84). In other words, the PMC occupies the top layers in the social stratification of the working population; it is not a class but a social strata within the working class, objectively defined as the class of relatively privileged propertyless workers whose power and economic resources depend on their continued employment. Loss of a job can reduce them to poverty or near poverty because, barring individual exceptions, the members of the PMC do not own capital and depend on their salaries for their economic survival (Gimenez 1978).

In the last twenty-five years the rise and widespread use of information technologies and the increasing mobility of capital resulting in deindustrialization, downsizing, and outsourcing have further changed the occupational composition of the working classes, as well as their conditions of employment: Stable, relatively well-paid blue-collar and white-collar employment is becoming scarce, while contingent and temporary employment is increasing among low-skilled and highly skilled professional workers. Long-standing racial, ethnic, and gender conflicts—which have excluded women and nonwhite workers from well-paid, stable jobs and led to disproportionate female and nonwhite poverty—eventually in the last decades of the twentieth century spurred social movements for civil rights and equal opportunity for all. The politics of class, particularly in the United States, was replaced by identity politics.

ISSUES IN WORKING-CLASS SCHOLARSHIP AND POLITICS

The changing occupational composition of the working class, the decline in workers’ anticapitalist struggles and union membership, and the dominance of identity politics challenge the validity of the Marxist concept of the working class and its revolutionary potential. If narrowly defined as composed only of “productive workers,” that is, blue-collar workers producing surplus value (Poulantzas 1973, pp. 30–31), it would seem the working class is dwindling away within advanced capitalist countries. Reducing the working class to only skilled, craft workers, André Gorz argues that organizational and technological changes that have practically abolished skilled work have rendered obsolete the working class as a class composed of knowledgeable workers capable of taking over control of the means and the process of production; we must, therefore, bid “farewell to the working class” (Gorz 1982, p 46). If broadly defined, in terms of political allegiances, the working class could include everyone mobilized in struggles against the state. Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), for example, celebrated the spontaneous rising of the laboring masses composed of factory workers, rural proletarians, policemen, military personnel, and bank employees (Luxemburg [1906] 2004, p. 180). Historian E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) offered a dialectical understanding of the working class. Emphasizing process and agency, and arguing that class is a historical phenomenon, not a structure or a category, he states that “the working class was present at his own making” (Thompson 1966, p. 9). It is in the midst of struggles, as people sharing similar experiences become aware of common interests and enemies, that the working class “makes itself,” that “class happens” (p. 9). Thompson acknowledges, however, that common experiences, the basis for the emergence of class consciousness, are “determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms” (pp. 9–10). As culture (that is, institutions, value systems, beliefs, traditions, and so on) varies historically and cross-culturally, class consciousness, though it reflects an economically determined experience, is itself undetermined in its content; class struggles, it follows, can be fought under a variety of ideological legitimations.

Like Marx, who stressed the need to distinguish between changes at the level of production and the ideological ways in which individuals become conscious of those changes and engage in political struggles (Marx [1859] 1970, p. 21), Thompson differentiates between the determining role of productive relations and the contingent, cultural, or ideological forms that class consciousness might take. In Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), however, class consciousness—that is, workers’ awareness of their economic and political interests as a class that can succeed only by abolishing all classes, in the struggle to overthrow the economic and political power of the capitalist class—seems to flow unproblematically from the experiences of the working class. Capitalists require, in their economic and political struggles, the support of the working class; capitalists educate the proletariat and supply it with the political and economic know-how to fight and defend its interests as a class (pp. 18–19). Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century capitalists, however, through the mass media and the democratization of consumption, seem to have established firm ideological control over workers’ consciousness, an unsurprising development because “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels [1845–46] 1947, p. 39). The lack of workingclass mobilization and revolutionary upheavals in advanced capitalist social formations, and the successes of globalized capitalism, have undermined, among some academics and most left-leaning activists, the traditional Marxist analysis of the working class as the only revolutionary class, the only class capable of challenging the rule of capital (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, p. 20).

The working classes of the twenty-first century are far less class conscious (in the sense indicated in the Manifesto ) than they were a century ago. Recent social movements, the effects of racial, ethnic, and gender oppression and exclusion, have centered around inequality rather than exploitation. In their work, African American, Latino, and feminist scholars have examined the connections between class, gender, and race and have expanded the concept of working-class politics to include issues related to racial, ethnic, and gender oppression and discrimination (see, for example, Collins 1993; Davis 1981). In the United States the impact of these social movements on the social sciences and on politics was profound. It led to a bifurcation in political practice and in scholarship between those who give primacy to workingclass politics and class analysis, and those who prioritize identity politics and race, gender, and ethnicity as structures of inequality independent from social class, and as equally determinant of individuals’ life chances as social class. A new social science perspective emerged in the late 1980s: the “race, gender, and class” trilogy, popularized by a journal originally called Race, Sex & Class. This perspective is enshrined in countless articles, anthologies, and books (see, for example, Landry 2007). Within this perspective, the role of class, ostensibly given equal visibility, is often minimized, for class is often reduced to income, and/or to another identity.

Another effect of the bifurcation in politics and scholarship mentioned above is the rise of cultural politics and the rejection of class politics and scholarship as forms of economic determinism or class reductionism. The culturalization of politics can be traced in the new academic and political language: policies about diversity, multiculturalism, identity, inclusion of “diverse” (a euphemism for women and nonwhites) populations in educational institutions and the workplace, the value of “multiculturalism” and “cultural diversity,” and so on have replaced, to a large extent, earlier concerns with the economic, racial, and gender discrimination. This discourse obfuscates the class divisions within the “diverse” populations, and the working-class basis of many of the grievances (for example, low wages, segregated labor markets and employment, exclusion from opportunities for upward mobility and access to higher education, etc.) that fueled the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The grounds for the emergence of political solidarity across gender and racial/ethnic differences remain as overlooked, in the context of cultural politics, as the poverty, powerlessness, and economic insecurity of white male workers. This is why, in the absence of a discourse on class that could contribute to undermine racial and gender antagonisms, “many Americans have displaced their resentments resulting from what Sennet and Cobb called the ‘hidden injuries’ of class, to patriotism … nationalism … racism and sexism” (Aronowitz 1992, p. 67).

The philosopher Charles Taylor explored the potential conflict between universalizing democratic politics, which equalize all citizens under the law, and the political affirmation of gender, racial, and ethnic differences as sources of dignity and claims for recognition, rather than second-class citizenship. A positive, rather than negative, public evaluation of difference is the objective of what Taylor calls “the politics of recognition” (Taylor 1992). The feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser offers a clear statement of these divisive issues:

Demands for “recognition of difference” fuel struggles of groups mobilized under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, “race,” gender and sexuality … group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization. Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistributions as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle. (Fraser 1995, p. 64)

Arguing that justice requires both redistribution and recognition, Fraser identifies important problems inherent in the changes necessary to remedy these injustices, whether such remedies support or challenge the status quo. Measures that seek only to redistribute income to different groups require the preservation of group identities, thus provoking negative reactions from the excluded (for example, whites’ critique of reverse discrimination). Though those groups may strive toward the public affirmation of their identities’ worth and dignity, changes in the allocation of respect will remain superficial, because of the endemic struggles triggered by redistribution. But, transforming identities through deconstruction of the categories currently used to define difference would be just as problematic, for this would deprive groups of the identities that today mechanisms of redistribution and inclusion use to identify those who benefit from such policies (pp. 86–91). Although preserving the cultural and economic status quo is inherently problematic, “… the scenario that best finesses the redistribution-recognition dilemma is socialism in the economy plus deconstruction in the culture,” which “to be psychologically and politically feasible requires that people be weaned from their attachments to current cultural constructions of their interests and identities” (p. 91). In reality, these struggles are intertwined, as the feminist philosopher Iris Young argues in her critique of Fraser’s analysis: economic relations presuppose cultural understandings and cultural and political recognitions are a means toward economic and political justice (Young 1997, p. 148). But these struggles so far appear to be remarkably ineffective in mobilizing the U.S. working class as a class, despite its worsening economic situation. As long as workers tend to perceive themselves primarily in terms of group identities rather than common class location—a situation strengthened by the official political discourse, within which any mention of class and class interests is deemed undesirable, almost “un-American”—perhaps only mass unemployment and household bankruptcies on a scale not seen since the Great Depression might create the material conditions for the emergence of working-class political leaders, simultaneously with the rise in workers’ receptiveness to their views.

Class struggles in Latin America, as in China and Vietnam, have included workers and peasants in political mobilizations under socialist and nationalist banners. For Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), national struggles were class struggles; he set in opposition to the ruling classes the masses of “enlightened” workers, farmers, and intellectuals (Mao 1966, p. 10). Some scholars argue, however, that the proletarianization of the middle strata and peasantries has not happened, and that the working class has no privileged role to play. Anticapitalist struggles, in their view, encompass a variety of conflicts between capitalism and sectors of the population inside and outside the working class (for example, conflicts around war and peace, environmental pollution, land management, and so on) (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, pp. 103–104).

Marxist social scientists, however, continue to study the working class and the changes in its size, racial, gender, and occupational composition, giving equal importance to individuals’ relationships to the means of production, skills and credentials, and location in the authority structure (Wright 1997, pp. 17–26). Examining the transformation of the U.S. class structure between 1960 and 1990, Wright concludes that there has been a decline in the proportion of skilled workers (from 13.46% of the labor force in 1960 to 12.77% in 1990) and unskilled workers (from 44.59% to 41.38%). The working class as a whole, skilled and unskilled, declined from 58.05 percent to 54.15 percent (p. 99). In terms of race and gender, “by a large margin, the American working class now predominantly consists of women and racial minorities” (p. 69). Changes in the racial and gender composition of the working class contribute to the persistence of racial/ethnic and gender conflicts within the U.S. working class and the extent to which issues of racial, ethnic and gender oppression are the most salient and important aspect of workers’ consciousness in the United States.

The meaning of the decline in the size of the working class in the United States and other advanced capitalist countries remains an unresolved and unresolvable issue in Marxist theory. For some (for example, Gorz 1980; Laclau and Mouffe 1987) it signals a reversal of the proletarianization process and an end to the revolutionary role of the working class. Others, however, point out that the proletarianization process worldwide proceeds unabated, and that as the size of the working class declines in the wealthy countries, proletarianization is intensifying in the rest of the world (Arrighi 1990; Wright 1997, pp. 109–110). Another issue subject to conflicting interpretations is the rise in the proportion of propertyless but expert, professional salaried workers, placed in “contradictory locations within class relations” (Wright 1997, p. 20). Is this an indicator of the future demise of the working class, the rise of a new class (for example, a “professional managerial class,” according to Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979), or of the rise of a new working class? On the basis of the analysis of the effects of capitalist development upon the characteristics of the labor force that Marx presents in the Grundrisse (Marx [1857–1868] 1953), Nicolaus (1973) reaches this conclusion: The working class fated to lead the revolution is not the impoverished, unskilled, and pauperized working class but the educated, expert, credentialed working class that develops as capitalists develop the forces of production to such an extent that

the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor-time and on the quantity of labor expended, and more on the power of the instruments which are set in motion during labor-time, and whose powerful effectiveness itself is not related to the labor-time immediately expended in their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and the progress of technology. (Marx [1857–1868] 1953, cited in Nicolaus 1973, p. 328)

Marx depicts a time in which the development of the forces of production empowers workers, when

the cornerstone of production and wealth is neither the labor which man directly expends, nor the time he spends at work, but rather the appropriation of its own collective productive power.… As soon as labor in its direct form has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth, labor-time ceases and must cease to be its measure. (Marx [1857–1868] 1953 cited in Nicolaus 1973, p. 329)

Perhaps Nicolaus’s inferences are correct, for it is possible today to observe a bifurcation in the development of the working class: on the one hand, growth in the exploited, poor, and relatively powerless proletariat whose labor fuels the industrialization of Asian and Latin American countries while being the source, through migration, of cheap manual labor and services in the wealthy countries; and on the other hand, growth in the numbers of “the well-fed proletarian, scientifically competent, to whom an eight hour day would presumably appear as a waste of time” (Nicolaus 1973, p. 329). These are issues that can be resolved only by the outcome of current and future political struggles, not by theoretical fiat or the exegesis of scholarly texts.

SEE ALSO Bourgeoisie; Capitalism; Employment; Employment, White Collar; Lumpenproletariat; Proletariat; Underemployment; Unemployment

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aronowitz, Stanley. 1992. The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements. New York: Routledge.

Arrighi, Giovanni. 1990. Marxist Century—American Century: The Making and Remaking of the World Labor Movement. New Left Review 179: 29–63.

Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Collins, Patricia H. 1993. Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection. Race, Sex, and Class 1 (1): 25–45.

Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House.

Ehrenreich, John, and Barbara Ehrenreich. 1979. The Professional-Managerial Class. In Between Labour and Capital, ed. Pat Walker, 5–45. Brighton, U.K.: Harvester.

Fraser, Nancy. 1995. From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Age. New Left Review 212: 64–93.

Gimenez, Martha E. 1978. The Professional/Managerial Class: An Ideological Construct. http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/pmg.html.

Gimenez, Martha E. 1999. Latino Politics—Class Struggles: Reflections on the Future of Latino Politics. In Latino Social Movements: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, eds. Rodolfo D. Torres and George Katsiaficas, 163–180. New York: Routledge.

Gorz, André. 1980. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post Industrial Socialism. Boston: South End Press.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1987. Post-Marxism Without Apologies. New Left Review 166: 79–106.

Landry, Baht. 2007. Race, Gender, and Class: Theory and Methods of Analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Luxemburg, Rosa. [1906] 2004. The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, 168–199. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mao Tse-tung. 1966. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Marx, Karl. [1847] 1969. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl. [1857–1868] 1953. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf ) [Fundamental traits of the critique of political economy (rough copy)]. Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl. [1859] 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. [1845–1846] 1947. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 1998. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Nicolaus, Martin. 1973. The Unknown Marx. In Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Robin Blackburn, 306–333. New York: Vintage Books.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973. On Social Classes. New Left Review 78: 27–54.

Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thompson, Edward P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books.

Wright, Erik Olin. 1978. Class, Crisis, and The State. London: Verso.

Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Iris. 1995. Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory. New Left Review 222: 147–160.

Martha E. Gimenez

Working‐Class Life and Culture. In his landmark study Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976), historian Herbert Gutman drew upon the work of anthropologist Sidney Mintz to define working‐class culture as a “kind of resource” for workers in their daily lives and struggles. Much recent scholarship has focused on interpreting working‐class culture, from its origins in Colonial‐Era artisanal life through the immigrant‐industrial era of the nineteenth century to the diverse and complex patterns of the twentieth century. There is, in fact, no single working‐class culture, but a shifting kaleidoscope of subcultures, in which race and ethnicity, gender, religion, region, and type of employment all play a part.

The Late Colonial and Antebellum Eras.

Distinct urban working classes first emerged in the cities of mid‐eighteenth century America. With craft work the predominant way of producing goods, artisans occupied an important, if subordinate, place in the cultural life of the late Colonial Era. The closely linked values of craft work and “manliness” influenced both revolutionary and class politics, as artisans, inspired by Thomas Paine, adopted the banner of republicanism. The artisanal culture spawned by the Revolutionary War and its aftermath found expression in the politics of the early republic.

As the economic and cultural gap separating the social classes widened in the Antebellum Era, the urban working class was characterized by fear of dependence, loss of political status, and racial and ethnic fissures. While immigrants fleeing Ireland's potato famine flooded into seaboard cities, white migrants arrived from rural America and the poverty‐stricken free black population also increased. Employed largely as day laborers in construction and transportation, these new workers drew upon agrarian traditions to create their own rough culture. U.S.‐born and immigrant white craftsmen, meanwhile, differed from both the emerging middle classes and the laboring poor. Reacting against the threat of their own transformation into wage laborers, craftsmen adopted artisanal republicanism and its labor theory of value to proclaim productive labor of the kind they themselves performed as the moral grounding of republican democracy, even as they distanced themselves from the unskilled masses and the dependent poor by celebrating their autonomy and respectability. Among printers, builders, shoemakers, tailors, and other artisans and mechanics, a sense of solidarity and pride in shared skills generated the first working‐class trade associations and, later, the first labor unions.

Economic dependency and political disfranchisement lowered the status of working‐class women. Politically and economically, men were the principal public actors in the working class. With a few exceptions, such as the early New England textile mills, women were denied employment in either skilled or unskilled occupations. Although most working‐class families required an economic contribution from wives and daughters, fathers and older sons were the principal wage‐earners and authority figures. For some workers, manliness expressed itself in dress, sporting competitions, braggadocio about drinking and sexual prowess, and the equation of masculinity with whiteness. Volunteer fire brigades and political clubs welded younger working men into ethnically defined solidarities. In New York and other cities, an urban subculture of native‐born and immigrant workingmen, typified by New York's “Bowery B'hoys,” glorified drinking, street fighting, and dandified clothes. If this expressed one facet of antebellum working‐class culture, another was revealed in the behavior of respectable artisans whose evangelical Protestantism extolled piety and sobriety.

The Urban‐Industrial Age.

Post‐Civil War working‐class culture assumed new forms in the growing cities of the North and Middle West. Racial divisions and differences among various ethnic immigrant groups, as well as membership in cross‐class organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic and fraternal organizations like the Masonic Order and Odd Fellows, often undercut working‐class solidarity. For a time in the late 1870s and 1880s, however, the Knights of Labor became the dominant institutional expression of working‐class political culture. Dedicated to improving social conditions and educating and organizing the producing classes, the Knights recruited skilled craftsmen, unskilled laborers, industrial workers, and—with less success—small businessmen. Under the banner of worker republicanism, the Knights espoused a radical working‐class political sensibility and adopted innovative forms of working‐class protest. The order also fostered a vibrant working‐class culture through political clubs, newspapers, songs, and literature, as well as land‐reform and home‐ownership associations and trade and industrial unions. The Knights supported women's rights and racial equality as well, rhetorically if not always in practice, as part of the effort to recruit all working people. But the Knights at their peak represented no more than 10 percent of all workers. Most politically active workers remained in the Republican or Democratic parties.

The Knights declined in the early 1890s as the bitter Homestead lockout and Pullman strike (1892 and 1894 respectively) thrust class conflict into national politics and as continued industrialization and immigration contributed to a shifting class terrain and intensified conflicts among workers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. With racism and Jim Crow practices at a peak in America, the hostility of white workers toward the small but growing number of African‐American wage earners and, on the West Coast, Chinese immigrant workers, was particularly intense. With the new immigrants lacking labor‐market power and therefore proving difficult to organize, the railroad brotherhoods and the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor concentrated on advancing their own economic interests, and some actively supported immigration restriction.

Religious differences within the working class also intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Earlier waves of immigration had brought religious diversity to the U.S. working class. German immigrants had been both Catholic and Protestant, and the influx of Irish Catholic newcomers in a predominantly Protestant nation had stirred protests and riots. The religious divisions now deepened as Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants arrived in great numbers from southern and eastern Europe. Immigration peaked at about 1 million people a year between 1900 and World War I. While divergent religious loyalties reinforced ethnic and skill‐based differences among workers, they also encouraged new forms of working‐class organization. Immigrant fraternal organizations and mutual‐aid societies provided insurance benefits and enlivened community life with dances, fairs and holidays, and political activities. Ethnic parishes, publications, shops, taverns, athletic clubs, and cultural societies broadened and nourished working‐class culture. The preservation of Yiddish, Italian, Czech, Polish, and other immigrant languages in newspapers, religious services, and popular entertainments further cemented the solidarity of these immigrant working‐class enclaves.

Russian Jewish radicals, Italian anarchists, and eastern European socialists expanded working‐class political culture. While only a minority of immigrant workers were politically active, these enclaves did generate inclusive forms of worker protest and association. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 to spread industrial unionism, organized immigrant and native‐born workers. Emphasizing class unity, the IWW promoted a vibrant working‐class culture through songs, poetry, and cartoons.

From World War I to the Late Twentieth Century.

Nevertheless, the culture of both immigrant and U.S.‐born workers was inexorably changing. Mass‐market fiction, dime novels, and the popular press increasingly appealed to a broad, cross‐class audience with stories tailored to the language skills and educational levels of working‐class readers. Music halls, vaudeville, amusement parks, professional sports, dance pavilions, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley all attracted working‐class consumers. Vaudevillians, sheet‐music publishers, and early filmmakers appropriated themes from immigrant and working‐class culture while tailoring their products to a mass audience. The immigrant working‐class cultural enclaves remained strong through the 1920s, but thereafter the new mass culture steadily undermined the ethnic associations and businesses that had dominanted the immigrants’ social and cultural life. One result of this process was to make social class more salient than ethnicity and to encourage the formation of a working‐class consciousness. The hard times of the 1930s and the patriotism of World War II contributed to this process as well, as did the decline of immigration caused by World War I and the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. Working‐class life and culture was further transformed as increasing numbers of native‐born women and southern black and white migrants replaced European immigrants in the labor force. Southern whites introduced country music and the “hillbilly” culture of Appalachia to northern cities, even as African Americans brought gospel music and the blues.

As the economic crisis of the 1930s bankrupted ethnic fraternal unions, banks, and businesses, the specter of unemployment, and the continued influence of popular culture, united workers across ethnic and occupational lines. The shift found expression in the political culture of the New Deal. The labor movement of the 1930s, encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act and led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations and a revitalized American Federation of Labor, transformed working‐class culture. Labor newspapers, radical theater, union‐sponsored recreational events, and workers’‐education programs underscored how far many workers had moved toward broad‐based class solidarity. The new language of working‐class unity did not always match its practice, as racial and gender discrimination and conflict continued to roil working‐class life, but World War II furthered racial integration, drew millions of women at least temporarily into the labor force, and encouraged pluralistic values in culture and society.

In the prosperous 1950s, working‐class culture became almost indistinguishable from mass culture. Television, movies, mass magazines, paperback books, chain stores, fast‐food outlets, and the popular music promoted by the recording industry and radio disk jockeys all relied heavily on working‐class consumers. While mass culture producers sometimes employed class themes, they sought to build a consumer market that transcended class. For example, while African‐American music retained its distinctivenes, the blues evolved into rock‐and‐roll, which expressed a youth culture more than a class culture. Its wide acceptance among young people of differing ethnic, racial, and class origins blunted its political edge.

Working‐Class Culture? A Summing Up.

As the twentieth century ended, the question of whether one could even speak of an American working‐class culture remained unresolved. In any simple sense, the answer was probably no. In many respects that had always been true. Throughout the nation's history, the working class had been characterized by its fragmentation, even though class‐defined political movements in the workplace and the electoral arena had sometimes opened a common ground for broad working‐class constituencies. Ironically, the moments of exceptional class solidarity had often come at times of national cultural unity, as in the early national era, the New Deal period, and World War II. The rise of a mass culture and other pressures countering class consciousness did not, therefore, preempt and undermine working‐class culture so much as exist in dynamic relationship with it. Similarly, competing racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities did not erode working‐class culture but rather vastly complicated it, posing major hurdles to efforts to discover and define it. As a new century dawned, the task of understanding both the contradictions and the strengths of America's working‐class culture seemed as challenging as ever.
See also Anarchism; Asian Americans; Consumer Culture; Depressions, Economic; Film; German Americans; Immigrant Labor; Immigration Law; Industrial Relations; Irish Americans; Judaism; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Lowell Mills; Mobility; Radicalism; Railroads; Roman Catholicism; Socialism; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

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Christine Stansell , City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860, 1986.
Herbert Gutman , Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin, 1987.
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David Montgomery , The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, 1987.
Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, 1990.
Elizabeth Faue , Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945, 1991.
Leon Fink , In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture, 1994.
Robin D.G. Kelley , Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, 1994.
Hadassa Kosak , Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881-1905, 2000.

Elizabeth Faue

working class. The 18th cent. often talked of the poor, labourers, and artisans as part of its language of ranks and orders. Somewhere in the early years of the 19th cent. such groups were identified by contemporaries and later historians as a working class, or more frequently ‘the working classes’. This identity was seen as a response to their position as wage earners faced with an intensification of capitalist relationships of production, namely relationships which involved private property and production for profit, mediated by cash. The responses and experiences which accumulated to form the relationships of class included opposition to machinery, the dramatic fall in real wages experienced by hand-loom weavers, and the political inspiration of radicalism. In the 1820s and 1830s, trade unions, especially in the textile and mining industries, became a focus of industrial conflict more extensive than anything experienced by the mainly craft associations of the earlier century. The chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s became a focus of many working-class ambitions and gained mass support for a political programme demanding universal manhood suffrage. Many historians see chartism as a product of the economic experiences of the working classes. Others see chartism as a political movement which offered little analysis of economic relationships in terms of capitalist exploitation, but offered a radical attack upon political privilege and corruption as a base for explaining ‘the people's’ poverty. Debate also exists on the meaning of trade union conflicts. Many reflect particular trades and localities with little sense of the relationships of wage labour as a whole.

The 1860s saw the establishment of a more institutionalized trade union movement with legal status and centralized bodies like the Trades Union Congress (1867). This period saw a move from unstable conflict to social peace often identified with the influence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers prepared to co-operate with the owners of capital. The change was more broadly based and related to improvements in working-class living standards, the acceptance of many working people into political life, especially in the Gladstonian Liberal Party, and the development of a more sophisticated employer paternalism. It was a period in which the wage relationship was still partial and imperfect. Subcontracting, payment in kind, and gender and supervisory hierarchies mediated between labour and capital.

By the 1890s, a distinctive working-class culture had emerged, based upon a sense of neighbourhood and mutual support, especially amongst women, upon old and new leisure patterns built around the public house, spectator sports like football and the music-hall, and upon a labour movement consisting of a variety of institutions like the retail Co-operative societies, trade unions, socialist Sunday schools, and the ILP (Independent Labour Party). These values have been called ‘populist’, involving a pride in work and in mutual support in the face of poverty, a delight in having a good time, a derision of privilege, and a regional pride. Such populism could as easily move to a Union-Jack-waving nationalism as to a conflict-orientated sense of class. It represented a sense of cohesion which lasted into the 1950s and was celebrated by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957).

The working class faced major periods of conflict in the late 19th and early 20th cents. culminating in the General Strike of 1926. This was related to the impact of new technologies, often involving de-skilling, to new management strategies, and to unstable and competitive conditions in world trade. Conflict was firmly related to wages and conditions and there is little evidence of any ambitions for revolutionary change. Socialism in the 1918 constitution of the Labour Party embodied a willingness to use any means including nationalization in the attack on poverty. Major success came with the 1945 Labour government, the welfare state, and the nationalization of key elements of capital.

By the 1950s, the life-style of the bulk of the working class had been transformed by so-called ‘Fordist’ relationships, in which social stability depended upon high productivity, high wages, and the consumption of an increasing variety of goods. A mass culture of film, football, and television began to entail a more private life-style. This was threatened in the 1970s, by de-industrialization, an accelerated shift in the economic structure of Britain away from traditional industries such as coal-mining, textiles, and iron and steel, accompanied by mass unemployment and new forms of poverty.

The problems of writing and understanding working-class history in Britain lie in its political meaning. The initial writings were undertaken by those seeking the origins and inspiration for the Labour Party in a long march of labour history from Tom Paine's Rights of Man, through chartism and the TUC, to the achievements of the 1945 government. Others led by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class wanted to reposition the Marxist tradition of British history and secure a recognition for the agency and creativity of working-class people, in place of a deterministic view of the impact of economic relationships. Recent writing has reflected the uncertainties and multiple identities of the late 20th and early 21st cents.

See also social history; class.

R. J. Morris

working class The working class is classically defined as that class which must sell its labour-power in order to survive. This was essentially what Karl Marx meant by the proletariat. However, this is hardly a satisfactory definition for late twentieth-century developed societies. If there is a working class distinct from the rest of society, then there must be distinctive features to its work and market situations, and indeed there are.

First, in terms of market situation, the working class is defined by the fact that it sells its labour-power in discrete amounts of time (paid by the hour or output piecework) in return for a wage. In the case of work situation, the working class comprises those who are in an entirely subordinate role, such that this is a key feature of their labour contract. Hence the working class basically consists of those who work in manual or blue-collar occupations. However, none of this should be taken to mean that there is one amorphous working class, since there are a number of ways in which the class is divided into distinct groups. One of these is in terms of skill. There is an upper working class or aristocracy of labour which consists of skilled workers—occupations such as fitters, electricians, and the like— where incumbents have been apprenticed or learned a trade. These constitute about one-third of the working class. The remainder are in so-called semi-skilled or unskilled occupations. A second division is that between those working in primary rather than secondary labour-markets. Some members of the working class have better paid and more secure jobs (in the primary labour-market) than have others. Most skilled workers belong to this primary labour-market. Many female and ethnic-minority workers are found in the lower-paid, more insecure secondary labour-market, lacking standard labour contracts, pension and illness entitlements, paid vacations, and so forth. It is among this group that both unemployment and under-employment (where people find that they have periods of employment and unemployment interspersed on a frequent and irregular basis) are most frequently found. The other notable feature of the working class in developed capitalist societies is that it is shrinking, largely due to a combination of technological change (notably automation), and the decline of the primary and manufacturing sectors. Only about one-third of the economically active would be working class by the definition given here.

Finally, what is the popular conception of the working class? In Gordon Marshall's et al. Social Class in Modern Britain (1984)
, the authors report that 49 per cent of respondents mentioned being a manual or unskilled worker as the chief characteristic of the working class, and 16 per cent defined the class as those with low incomes. In general (and somewhat unusually), sociological views of the working class were in broad agreement with the popular conception. See also GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME.

work·ing class • n. [treated as sing. or pl.] the social group consisting of people who are employed for wages, esp. in manual or industrial work: the housing needs of the working classes. • adj. (working-class) of, relating to, or characteristic of people belonging to such a group: a working-class community.