Social Justice and Social Divisions

Abstract

The class structure and class divisions associated with the knowledge/service economy are quite different from those of the industrial age. The blue-collar working class was the largest class grouping in the old social order. Marx labelled the working class the ‘universal class’, and of course expected it to be the agent of revolutionary change. Today, the manual working class is very much a minority, and its numbers are set to reduce further as the proportion working in manufacture continues to diminish. The old working-class communities, that used to be the source of much local solidarity, have largely broken up. What used to be the ‘middle class’ has become much more differentiated, while the land-owning upper class has largely disappeared. Separate agrarian classes have more or less completely evaporated too.