There has been a persistent drive among intellectual advocates of advanced capitalism to identify new class forces to rejuvenate the system, alongside comparable efforts by leftist critics to identify new classes to lead its transformation. But, in fact, the class structure of paid work has shown a fairly consistent tripartite form since the emergence corporate capitalism in the nineteenth century. This structure consists of small numbers of private owners of the means of production, a majority of nonmanagerial workers hired to produce and distribute goods and services commodities primarily for owners’ profits, and overseers selected by owners to control nonmanagerial workers.

Traditionally, intellectuals have thought of class in terms of continua of inequitable consumption, income, or social status. In the 1960s and ’70s, some academics argued that the growth of the services industry, changes in social mobility, and technological advances heralded the death of a class system in industrial societies. But an objective review of the class structure of paid work in any advanced capitalist country over the past century reveals a persistent spectrum of class groups situated on each side of the capital-labor divide.