The working class in the 21st century

Of the 1.4 billion in agriculture, an increasing number work under more-or-less modern capitalist social relations, rather than in archaic or semi-feudal relations, but exact figures are unavailable. Forty per cent of the population of the 'low and middle income' countries live in cities now, and 77% of the population of the 'high-income' countries.

The figure of 2.8 billion includes not only the wage-working class proper but also, surrounding it, and shading off at the edges into it, a class, maybe equally large, of 'semi-proletarians' - people who scrape a living by varying combinations of petty trade, self-employment, theft, begging, domestic work, and straightforward wage-work. But probably today, for the first time in history, the wage-workers and their periphery are a majority, or near a majority, of the population. This is a tremendous shift.

At the time Karl Marx published Capital Volume 1, in 1867, the total employed in more-or-less modern capitalist industry in England and Wales (textiles, clothing, metalworking, mines, railways, gas, etc.) was just 1.7 million - 17% or less of the population of working age. Other countries were far less industrially developed.

Today there are 164 million trade-unionists world-wide (latest International Labour Organisation figures, dated 1995). In 1869, two years after Marx published Capital, there were only 250,000 trade-unionists in Britain, and hardly any in other countries.