Working class

The word "working class" is now used primarily as a term of Marxism, which is used there is often synonymous with " proletariat " (for more details on Competitive terms on the term " proletariat "). The term goes back to the Industrial Revolution, its definition is controversial today. The members of the working class are not automatically equate with workers within the meaning of predominantly physically working employees.

Definitions

However, some Marxists and Marxism researchers expand the term. After Hal Draper the industrial proletariat forms the core of the working class, then comes the non-industrial proletariat, ie the wage-workers in the service sector and agriculture. Wage workers who do not belong to the proletariat, are by Draper wage workers in the areas where there is no added value in the Marxist sense is created, such as in the government sector.

Finally Draper counts also working with the working class who are not wage workers. This would, for example, unpaid family workers in agriculture, small independent artisans, farmers, self-employed as small shopkeepers and the like ( ie, the traditional petty bourgeoisie ).

The working class today

While earlier it was mainly factory workers were understood as "working class", the contemporary meaning of the term is disputed. Taking the in official statistics as an "employee " (which includes " worker", " workers " and " officials ", the hired manager ) designated persons as a statistical proxy for the extent of the working class, then quantitatively no shrinkage of the working class to Watch. The figure shows the proportion of workers is (a term that was coined as the counterpart of "employer" in the 19th century ) in total represented in the workforce. The workers are the " workers " and the " self-employed and unpaid family workers " (the latter are not only " capitalists "). However, this classification is controversial because as well as highly paid employees are counted as employees. Conversely, there are many independent low-income earners.

The share of industrial workers in total employment reached in the course of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution in the 1960s, a peak and decreases continuously since then.

Informal working class

The informal working class (german informal working class ) is a term coined mainly by Mike Davis sociological term for a class of over one billion of mostly young urban people who formally is in any way with the world economy in the context and primarily try in slums to survive. According to Davis, this class no longer meets the social-theoretical terms of a class, as they were developed by Karl Marx, Max Weber and the modernization theory. After this class developed world since the 1960s, especially in the southern hemisphere. In contrast to previous notions of a class of the lumpen proletariat and the ideas of a " slum of hope" from the 1920s and 1930s, members of this class have little chance to gain formal structures for the economy.

The term ' working class ' in the SBZ / GDR (1945-1990)

The term ' working class ' has been widely used in the Soviet occupation zone (from 1945) and the German Democratic Republic ( 1949-1990 ). He was part of a worldview (see also Marxism -Leninism ), to which the SED - the State party of the GDR - based its raison d'être and its claim to leadership.

The area in the GDR in 1945 by Soviet troops ( Red Army ) occupied and declared the SBZ ( Soviet Occupation Zone ). The Soviet occupation (SMAD ) caused by repression of the merger of the KPD and the SPD to SED and the subsequent development of the SED to Marxist-Leninist cadre party and alone ruling state party of the GDR was founded in 1949. The SED ruled lawful alone and penetrated comprising the organs of all three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial) with SED nomenclature cadres ( one-party rule ). The SED claimed to be the "vanguard of the working class " and enforce their interests. It saw itself as the body to be recognized by all social forces political leadership in the struggle for the building of socialism and communism and the peace. They also saw themselves as integral and inseparable part of the world communist movement.

The SED found himself in close combat alliance with the CPSU ( Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and looked at a world historic mission of the working class and involved in particular as regards the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the socialist constitution of the GDR from 1968 ( as amended in 1974), the leading function of the SED was already described in Articles 1 and set:

" The German Democratic Republic is a socialist state of workers and peasants. It is the political organization of the working people of town and country under the leadership of the working class and its Marxist -Leninist party. "