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A social class is a group of people that have similar social and economic status.

The most common class division in historical societies has either been bi-partite or tri-partite: a large class of people who labour and produce controlled by either: one ruling class; or, one ruling class with the assistance of a middling class. An example of this situation is that medieval European countries often had an aristocracy or nobility, a peasantry and a gradually developing urban middle class.

With the social changes stemming from the Industrial Revolution, three strata developed in most Western countries:

• an Upper Class of the immensely wealthy and/or powerful
• a Middle Class of managers and extremely highly paid professionals
• a Lower Class of people paid relatively normal wages

The composition and characteristics of the Lower Class, especially in the United States, is highly controversial; some writers eschew the term Lower Class in favor of the term Working Class.

Marxist usage of class

In Marxist terms a class is a group of people with a specific relationship to the means of production (social production). Marxists explain history in terms of a war of classes between those who control social production and those who produce social goods. In the Marxist view of capitalism this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and workers (proletariat). For Marxists classes are antagonistically opposed to one another. This antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production is necessarily control over the class which produces social goods.

The most important transformation of society for Marxists has been the massive and rapid growth of the proletariat in the last two hundred and fifty years. Starting with agricultural and domestic textile labourers in England, more and more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries. Private enterprise or self-employment in a variety of occupations is no longer viable, and so people who once controlled their own labour are converted into proletarians. Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth--like Doctors, Academics or Lawyers--are now increasingly working as wage labourers. Marxists call this process proletarianisation, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies.

Usage of class following Max Weber

When sociologists speak of "class" they usually mean economically based classes in modern or near pre-modern society. Modern usage of the word "class" outside of Marxism generally considers only the relative wealth of individuals or social groups, and not the ownership of the means of production.

The sociologist Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with class, status and party (or politics) as conceptually distinct elements.

• Class is based on relationship to the market (owner, rentier, employee etc.)
• Status has to do with honour and prestige
• Party refers to factors having to do with affiliations in the political domain.

All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life chances".

Class can be used to describe the stratification of a society. This leads to schemes like the following, relating class to income:

• Upper class
• Middle class
• Lower class

Modern western societies tend to generate a large middle class in the Weberian meaning. Often, class schemes are extend to include sub-classes like "Upper middle class" and "Lower middle class".

Newer sociological theory often sees class as category that isn't very helpful for describing societies. Other approaches include using strata instead of classes, changing the view from objective -- income-based -- classes to subjective classes, having a look at lifestyle based milieux or discussing different kinds of capital (Bourdieu).

Relevance of Class

At various times the division of society into classes has had various levels of support in law. At one extreme we find old Indian classes - castes, which one could neither enter after birth, nor leave (Though this applied only in relatively recent history.) On the other extreme there exist classes in modern Western societies which appear very fluid and have little support in law. The extent to which classes are important differs also in western societies, e.g. between Great Britain and Scandinavia.

The concept of "caste" differs from that of "class", and refers to rigid status groupings, the membership of which is usually inherited. Particular caste groups include:

• the Burakumin of Japan
• the Dalits ("untouchables") of India

Difficulties with the Class Concept

One of the principal difficulties with class as a useful concept is that, depending on one's social background, there may be different models for what many call the class system. Those who recognise this difficulty claim that there is no such thing as this class system, or at least that it is a misnomer, if only because it is so unsystematic. The easiest way to illustrate this is by pointing to the three main class categories:

• Upper Class people, e.g. aristocrats, traditionally refer merely to The Lower Classes, without making any distinction between people who are not aristocrats, i.e. they operate in a two-class model
• Working Class people, similarly, traditionally refer merely to 'toffs', i.e. anyone who isn't working class, and also operate in a two-class system, but a different one from Upper Class people
• Middle Class people, in contrast, recognise Upper Class and Working Class, perhaps on the same bases as people who claim to belong to each, but in addition, draw distinctions between the Upper Middle and Lower Middle classes (or even introduce the notion of Middle Middle Class for anyone they feel doesn't fall into any of the other categories), i.e. they operate from a 4- or 5-class perspective.

The observation therefore is that class cannot be objectively measured as it depends on what class the speaker thinks that they are themself a member of. It hence becomes literally impossible to reach a consensus model.

See also

• proletariat, bourgeoisie, working class, middle class, intelligentsia
• politics, sociology
• Class warfare
• Class in the United States, circa 2004

Further reading

• Consumer's Republic, Lizabeth Cohen, Knopf, 2003, hardcover, 576 pages, ISBN 0375407502 (An analysis of the working out of class in the United States)