Underclass

Abstract

The concept of an “underclass” is an attempt to put a name on the very poor within the United States and describe supposed common characteristics among people at the bottom of the class structure. Thus, along with the upper class, middle class, and working class, there is an underclass, often characterized much as Marx described with his concept of thelumpenproletariat. The term “underclass” was popularized in the second half of the twentieth century in a book by Ken Auletta (1983) which attempted to analyze what needed to be changed among this group to raise them out of poverty and how this could be done. This label of underclass, however, attempts to describe a category of people – we can call them the poor – that have even more diverse characteristics than those who are classified as upper, middle, and working class.