In the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels define working class—which they label proletariat—as the following:
a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
In the 1888 version of the document, Engels added this footnote:
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
This itself is based on a definition Engels wrote in his 1847 document The Principles of Communism:
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour — hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.
This definition differs from how it’s commonly used today, which is usually blue collar workers (or at least workers who perform physical labour) who aren’t salaried (they get paid an hourly or daily rate, rather than a monthly rate) and who are often low-paid.
Marx and Engels, however, use a more expansive definition, including all wage labourers, regardless of the physicality of the labour they perform. For them, the working class are all those who work for the owning class.
While I do find the distinction between the owning class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat) important, I think their focus on wage labour excludes a significant portion of the population that, like those who perform wage labour, also doesn’t control the means of production.
As a result, when I use the term working class, I’m referring to a broader population, not just those performing wage labour for the owning class.
Rather than referring to only those who sell their labour to the owning class, I see it as referring to everyone who isn’t owning class.
My definition of the working class, for example, includes stay-at-home parents, who are performing unpaid domestic labour. While it is possible that some stay-at-home parents belong to the owning class, I anticipate that most do not own nor control the means of production. Instead, they are caring for children, the future members of the labour force. Their labour in keeping their families fed and healthy helps to ensure a strong and healthy labour force both now (through the labour they perform for to ensure their partner can remain in the workforce) and in the future (as their children enter the workforce).
When I say working class, I’m also including disabled people. Now, there certainly are some disabled people in the owning class, and there are, of course, some participating in wage labour. However, there is also a significant portion of the disabled population that neither owns the means of production nor sells their own labour to those who do. After all, disabilities often interfere with one’s ability to sell that labour. However, they can still be exploited by the owning class, who control their daily living costs by setting the prices of the goods and services that disabled people have to buy. They also exploit disabled people by lobbying governments to reduce funding to social programmes, including income support programmes.
To me, working class also includes post-secondary students. Of course, some students in university, college, or trade school also hold down jobs (full-time or part-time), so it’d make sense that they’d be considered working class. However, I add students who don’t hold down a job, as well. Unless they own the means of production—which most probably don’t—then they’re working class.
I also add retired people to my definition of working class. There are certainly retired people who are owning class, but the majority weren’t. And they still aren’t. As such, they, too, are working class.
And the list goes on.
I find not only the common usage of working class too limiting but also the definition Marx and Engels used. I believe that if we want a better society—one that takes care of the people who live within it—it’ll require solidarity among a much broader group of people.
