In feudal Europe, lawyers and peasants belonged to the same estate
Before industry, there was no working class in the modern sense. A lawyer, a craftsman and a peasant were all lumped into the third estate: anyone who was neither noble nor clergy. The factory age split that crowd apart and produced a new group defined by selling its labour for wages.
Medieval society treated these positions as ordained by natural law and religion, though peasants did not always accept it, as the German Peasants' War showed. By the late eighteenth century Enlightenment ideas had unsettled belief in a fixed, God-given order. Some wealthy commentators blamed the hardships of labouring people on their own morals, pointing to drink, idleness or a failure to save. The historian E. P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, argued that workers were active participants in their own creation, turning older labouring groups into a class conscious of its political interests.
Definitions still vary. In the United States the term often means people in blue-collar or pink-collar jobs, or those whose income falls short of the middle class. Socialists cast the net much wider, counting everyone who depends on wages to live, which covers almost all workers in industrial economies. Other approaches focus on hourly manual work, divided into unskilled labourers, artisans, outworkers and factory hands, while researchers in Australia have suggested letting people define their class for themselves.
Karl Marx defined the proletariat as those who sell their labour power and own no means of production. They build bridges, make furniture, grow food and nurse children, he argued, yet own neither land nor factories. Beneath them he placed the lumpenproletariat, the very poor and unemployed, whom he thought lacked class consciousness.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that workers would overthrow capitalism and eventually build a society where each person's free development would be the condition for everyone's. Whatever one makes of that forecast, the split between those who live on wages and those who live on accumulated capital remains central to how class is analysed.
Source: Working class
