• What is the working class?
• How did the working class arise?
• Characteristics of the working class
• The working class according to Marx and Engels

We explain what the working class is and how this social class emerged. Characteristics of the working class. Marxism.

Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) is called the working class, working class Or simply proletariat to social class that contributes to society workforce for production, construction and manufacturing, receiving in exchange an economic consideration (salary), without becoming the owners of the means of production in which they work.

The name working class comes from its English equivalent, working class, and began to be used in the 19th century, but acquired its sociological and political importance from the studies of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of a critical social theory of capitalism which today is known as Marxism, and which is of enormous importance for the political and social movements of the left, such as the communism, socialism Y anarchism.

It is a term that is distinguished from the bourgeoisie or capitalist class, who are the owners of the means of production and who, according to the logic Marxist, they exploit the workers to accumulate the capital gain or production surplus, without having to carry out productive work themselves.

The proletariat is also distinguished, however, from the craftsmanship, since the craftsmen have the means of production of the objects they make, such as their tools and workshops.

How did the working class arise?

The origin of the working class is linked to the Industrial Revolution and the origins of capitalism, when the Western world took a leap towards industrialization and the manufacture massive products consumption, leaving behind the agrarian model of the Middle Ages.

The cities they became the center of world production, and former serfs gave way to wage laborers, as money rather than lineage became the main driver of production. society.

Consequently, the class devoid of means of production such as factories, industries either shops, offered the new ruling classes, who were no longer the aristocracies and landowners, but the industrial bourgeoisie, their labor for the mass production of the elaborated goods that society as a whole required, as the textile factories and workshops handicrafts required workers specialized companies that produced more in less time in exchange for money. Here is the birth of the working class.

Characteristics of the working class

The working class receives a stipend or salary in exchange for their work.

The essential characteristics of the working class are, by way of summary:

• It only has its labor power 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.
• They receive in exchange for their work a stipend or salary, with which they can consume, including the same products that they produced with their effort.

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, the workers are exploited by the bourgeoisie, which makes them work much more than is necessary for their own maintenance, paying them per hour worked but keeping all the fruit of their efforts, which they then sell to a higher cost of what 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 production, which 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 would be through the Revolution and the implantation of the dictatorship of the proletariat: a regime of government in which all the population was a worker and benefits such as the private property or the call exploitation of man by man.