class replaced feudal estate as the most relevant category for describing people’s
position in society. As a response to these developments, various theories of
class were put forth, Karl Marx’s and Max Weber’s models being most
influential. In Marx’s view, there were basically two social classes, the
bourgeoisie which controlled the means of production, and the workers (the
proletariat) who had only their sellable labour force to offer in the market.
Weber’s model integrated three components of class—wealth, prestige, and
power—and related them to the concept of an individual’s life chances. Marx
believed that workers would eventually realize that, though freed from the
bondage of serfdom, they were being exploited and develop a class
consciousness, or a sense of shared identity.
To some extent this happened, as evidenced, for example, by the coming into
existence of Labour Parties, Social Democratic Parties, and the Socialist
International that in the beginning very much represented a workers’ identity.
The Socialist International notably challenged nationality as the most general
reference plane of allegiance and identity formation, though to little avail, if we
just remember the great wars of the 20th century that made workers fight against
workers. People were never only workers or only compatriots or only children,
spouses, and parents. Overlapping, supplementing, and conflicting identities
were always a reality in their lives.
Marx warned against pigeonholing people as members of one social category
only. Yet for some time, being a factory worker was a life-determining feature
for many that related not just to their workplace and wage, but also to where they
lived, how they dressed, whom they married, where their children went to
school, etc. Class consciousness there was, circumscribing a kind of social
identity.
‘Proletariat’ was a political notion, whereas ‘working class’ was usually
considered a descriptive category that contrasted with ‘upper class’, ‘middle
class’, and ‘underclass’. In attempts to refine class theory, some studies further
subdivided the middle class into lower, middle, and upper middle class. As of the
late 1950s, material gains of workers in advanced industrial societies prompted
the question, ‘Does class matter?’—the title of a five-part BBC documentary TV
series in 1958—to stimulate many studies about class, class consciousness, and
class identity. Until about the 1970s, the idea of class was convincing enough to
shape the public image of Western industrial society and to serve social scientists