Proletarianization in the American Class Structure

and by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty by the Department of Health and Human Services pursuant to the terms of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of the American class structure based on data gathered from an explicitly Marxian, relational perspective. Classes in this research are not defined in terms of categories of occupations, but in terms of social relations of control over investments, decisionmaking, other people's work, and one's own work. Data on these dimensions of social relations of production were gathered in a national survey of the U.S. working popula-tion. Five general results from the study are particularly important: (1) the working class is by far the largest class in the American class structure; (2) close to half of all locations within the class structure have a "contradictory character, " that is, their class content is deter