There is a gigantic social group that includes billions of human beings united by some fundamental elements:

  • they all have the same position in production: they are people who, to make a living, rent themselves to entrepreneurs who command them and pay them with a salary;
  • they all have very similar problems in relating to the economic life of the society they belong to: they must negotiate wages with their employer (which is sometimes the government), they must worry about how to obtain a pension, they fear layoffs or the worsening of working conditions imposed from above, their lives depend on the economic performance of the company they work for (which is sometimes not a real company but a state), they produce “things” on which they can rarely have their say and which are sold to someone else (and the proceeds do not go to them)…
  • they have the unpleasant but accurate sensation of “keeping the whole thing going” but that others get the best portions;
  • they have (or would have, but maybe it’s forbidden or dangerous) a fundamental way to fight for their interests (or rights): going on strike.

Is it really so important to divide these people between those who work in factories and those who work in offices? Those who maintain this generally have never worked either in a factory or in an office, at least not recently: in recent decades, factory work has become increasingly similar to office work and vice versa. A blue-collar worker often has a fixed workstation, where they sit all the time and sometimes their task consists of operating knobs, buttons, etc. White-collar workers, on the other hand, almost never have very conceptual tasks that they can carry out independently: they have to move papers, write emails, fill out forms and handle practices in a very mechanical way; procedures are well defined, everybody is just a small cog in a very complex and alienating mechanism. This applies more and more even to highly qualified intellectual workers, such as programmers, biologists, designers.

We must, however, look elsewhere, these thoughts are “folk sociology” and, to some extent, distracting. A high-school teacher and a bricklayer dress differently, speak with a different accent, sweat to different degrees, have very different work schedules and agendas, but if you put a house in place of a classroom, a trowel in place of a blackboard, the foreman in place of the principal, you will have, from the point of view of their social role (which is what really counts), two similar cases, two different members of the same class. Neither of them has to pay the salary or wage to someone else, both receive their own once a month. Even the income of the two seems quite different, but it is much less than the income difference between the teacher and a large shareholder of an important company.

How many members of this social class are there in the world? It’s not an easy figure to recover, you have to struggle a bit with statistics. Isn’t it perhaps curious that on the Internet you can easily find that on June 21, 2006, the number of Seventh-Day Adventist Christians in the world was 16,811,519, while you can’t immediately discover how many people in the world are wage workers, even if you settle for a less precise figure?

Anyway, the calculation has been done in some way, and with a bit of reworking you can get a good estimate. The International Labour Organization (ILO) produced for 2005 a statistical series on 107 countries, for a total of 1,140,112,517 economically active people, a little more than a billion inhabitants of the planet, therefore. Aggregating this data globally is not very easy, but I tried. These people have been classified by the ILO in various ways, but the subdivision that interests us is that into 6 social “pseudo-classes”:

  1. “employees”, who are 60.02% of the active population considered;
  2. “employers”, who are 2.89%;
  3. “own-account workers”, who are 17.14%;
  4. “members of producers’ cooperatives”, who are 1.01%;
  5. “contributing family workers”, workers who contribute to an economic activity owned by a family member, who are a lot, 9.10%;
  6. those who do not clearly fall into any of these categories, “workers not classifiable by status”, who make up just over 2% of the set.

Among these 6 groups, the proletarians (industrial workers, agricultural labourers, tertiary-sector wage earners, etc.), are found in the first and fourth, which together reach 61%. In this 61%, however, there are all those who receive a salary, thus including the executives and managers of companies (private and public). These figures are not part of the proletariat: managers are literally bought by ownership through profit sharing, and in fact thanks to the distribution of shares and numerous other privileges they are assimilated into the ruling class of capitalist countries. Often for simplicity and to avoid using uncommon words we say “waged workers” or “employees” to indicate proletarians, but according to Marx an additional condition for being proletarian was to receive only a part of the value that had been produced: this is certainly not the case of CEOs of large multinational companies, whose income levels moreover have dynamics completely independent from that of the workforce. Middle management, finally, is placed in an intermediate position, they give orders but also receive just as many, they take a few more crumbs but still a pittance compared to the top of the pyramid: everything pushes them to identify with the petty bourgeoisie. How many then are those who receive a salary but are not at the base of the hierarchy, in the mass of proletarians? In a country like Italy, official statistics say that about every 17 proletarians there is a “cadre”, and that every 2 “cadres” there is an executive – it would seem that there are too many executives, but we must consider that in the state apparatus, and particularly in Italy, there is clearly an excess of executives!. If the proportions are roughly these elsewhere too, from 61% we must go down to 56%: it still remains the majority.

The true bourgeoisie (the one that uses others’ labour-power) is certainly made up of members of the second group (where any employer whatsoever goes, from those who have a single employee to those who have thousands), plus the executives, who according to previous calculations are not even 2%: we reach about 4.5%. The petty bourgeoisie, which we can consider divided into urban middle class (artisans, professionals, middle managers, etc.) and peasants, is the most heterogeneous class and therefore the most difficult to define: it is convenient to define it by difference as everyone else and if mathematics is not an opinion it cannot exceed the remaining 39.5%. This figure, contrary to what is not infrequently told, is not kept so high by advanced countries, but by less industrialized ones. In fact, it oscillates around 7-8% in the USA or the UK, rises towards 25% for countries with a weaker economic structure like Italy or Spain, and only in Third World countries does it reach and sometimes exceed 50% thanks to the decisive contribution of small rural landowners.

Let us not forget, however, that this data concerns only 107 countries; in the world there are many more countries, from 190 to 200 (depending on the status attributed to places like Taiwan, Kosovo, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Vatican City, etc.). In particular, in ILO statistics, which cover all the most industrialized countries and many dozens of backward countries, important countries like China (although there are some of its parts: Hong Kong and Macau), India, Nigeria, Iraq do not appear. In fact, since the ILO estimates that the world’s active population is composed of 2.8 billion people, 1.7 billion active people are missing from the statistics in question. To establish the class composition of this 1,700 million, we can do nothing but extend, cum grano salis, the percentages found earlier. Obviously, countries like China and India, although they may contribute to augment the set of proletarians with a notable injection of agricultural labourers, could have a social composition with fewer industrial workers, although it no longer seems absolutely obvious (it is said that China and India are “the factory of the world”): they certainly have fewer white-collar workers though. For now let’s assume the risk of exceeding a little too much in estimating the size of the proletariat, as much as I can anticipate that in the next approximation that will be necessary to make we will certainly exceed much more in the opposite direction. 56% of 2.8 billion is 1.6 billion, the number of active proletarians in the world. For the bourgeois we get a figure of about 120 million. The remaining classes are around 1.1 billion people.

The inhabitants of the planet, however, are approximately 6 and a half billion, largely economically inactive: young people, pensioners, housewives, prisoners and in small part beggars and other people who for various reasons do not work even occasionally. In the “sociological” concept of social class, which is not a purely statistical concept, every person belongs to a class, not only those economically productive. The idea is that the class represents a “social environment”; in reality we often speak of the fact that a family rather than a single individual belongs or does not belong to a certain social class. If we want to divide the entire human species into classes, we must once again extend the percentages we have; with this extension we will more than compensate for any rounding up made previously, because we will suppose that on average the active people of each social class have the same number of inactive family members: in truth it is quite clear that proletarian families are on average more numerous and richer in housewives and other inactive individuals, so this time we are making an underestimate of the global extent of the proletariat. 56% of 6.5 billion is 3.64 billion; the proletariat is composed, on a world scale, of more than 3 and a half billion human beings. The bourgeois class, whose upper stratum holds power almost everywhere, includes only 300 million people. The middle class including peasants counts 2.6 billion people in its ranks.

Surprise: the proletariat is the bulk of humanity. How come it’s not in charge?