A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class, middle class, and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.
Slave beating in ancient Egypt
Burmese nobles and servants
Nigerian warriors armed with spears in the retinue of a mounted war chief. The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 1892
A symbolic image of three orders of feudal society in Europe prior to the French Revolution, which shows the rural third estate carrying the clergy and the nobility
The working class, or in Marxist terms, the proletariat, includes all employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
Construction workers, commonly regarded as working class, at work at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston
Working class life in Edwardian St Ives in Cornwall, England
Striking teamsters battling police on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 1934
Communist conception of class society. The drawing was based on a leaflet of the "Union of Russian Socialists" 1900/01.
