We explain what the working class is and how the emergence of this social class was. Characteristics of the working class. Marxism.
What is the working class?
Since the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) it has been called the working class, working class or simply proletariat to the social class that provides society with labor for production, construction and manufacturingreceiving in exchange an economic compensation (salary), without becoming the owners of the means of production in which they work.
The name working class comes from its English equivalent, working classand it began to be used in the 19th century, but it acquired its sociological and political importance from the studies of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of a critical social theory of capitalism that today is known as Marxism, and which is of enormous importance for left-wing political and social movements, such as communism, socialism and anarchism.
It is a term that is distinguished from the bourgeoisie or capitalist classwho are the owners of the means of production and who, according to Marxist logic, exploit workers to accumulate surplus value or production surplus, without having to carry out productive work themselves.
The proletariat is also distinguished, however, from the craftsmanship, since the artisans own the means of production of the objects they make, such as their tools and workshops.
How did the working class emerge?
The origin of the working class It is linked to the Industrial Revolution and the origins of capitalismwhen the Western world took a leap towards industrialization and mass manufacturing of consumer products, leaving behind the agrarian model of the Middle Ages.
Cities became the centers of global production, and former serfs gave way to wage laborers, as money rather than lineage became the main driver of society.
Consequently, the class devoid of means of production such as factories, industries or businesses, offered the new dominant classes, which were no longer the aristocracies and landowners, but the industrial bourgeois, their labor for the mass production of goods. elaborate processes that society as a whole required, as textile factories and artisan workshops required specialized workers who could produce more in less time in exchange for money. There is the birth of the working class.
See also: Class struggle
Characteristics of the working class
The essential characteristics of the working class are, in summary:
- He only has his labor force to offer to the productive apparatus.
- They constitute the weakest productive sector of capitalist society, and the most abundant.
- In capitalism they do not control the means of production (the bourgeoisie does), only in communism or socialism.
- In exchange for their work, they receive a stipend or salary, with which they can consume, including the same products that they produced with their efforts.
The working class according to Marx and Engels
The proletariat is defined in the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels as “…the class of modern wage workers who, deprived of their own means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in order to exist.”
This means that, according to Marxism, workers are exploited by the bourgeoisiewhich makes them work much more than necessary for their own maintenance, paying them per hour worked but keeping all the fruit of their effort, which they then sell to them at a higher cost than it took to produce it. This surplus is known as the capital gain.
Marx and Engels theorized in this regard that the situation of oppression would not change until the proletariat controlled the means of productionwhich went directly against the interests of the bourgeoisie, thus making these two social classes antagonistic by nature.
The only way, then, for the proletariat to triumph and impose a society without social classes It would be through the Revolution and the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat: a government regime in which the entire population was a worker and advantages such as private property or so-called exploitation of man by man.
