Social class A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class and the Bourgeoisie, capitalist class. Membership of a social class can for exam ...

es in

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

are bourgeoisie, white-collar middle class, urban petite bourgeoisie, rural petite bourgeoisie, urban working class and rural working class.

1970s Italian social classes according to Labini

In his ''Essay on social classes'' the Italian

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...

Paolo Sylos Labini presented the following classification, based on his analysis of

income distribution In economics, income distribution covers how a country's total GDP is distributed amongst its population. Economic theory and economic policy have long seen income and its distribution as a central concern. Unequal distribution of income causes e ...

: *

Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted wi ...

(properly so called), composed by big urban and rural

landowners In common law systems, land tenure, from the French verb "" means "to hold", is the legal regime in which land "owned" by an individual is possessed by someone else who is said to "hold" the land, based on an agreement between both individuals ...

; entrepreneurs and managers of stock companies; autonomous

professionals A professional is a member of a profession or any person who works in a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and ski ...

; * ''

Petite bourgeoisie ''Petite bourgeoisie'' (, ; also anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a term that refers to a social class composed of small business owners, shopkeepers, small-scale merchants, semi- autonomous peasants, and artisans. They are named as s ...

'' ** Clerical ''

petite bourgeoisie ''Petite bourgeoisie'' (, ; also anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a term that refers to a social class composed of small business owners, shopkeepers, small-scale merchants, semi- autonomous peasants, and artisans. They are named as s ...

'' ** Relatively autonomous ''

'': farmers, artisans (including small professionals), traders; ** ''

'' composed by particular categories, such as militaries and clergymen; *

Working class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...

; *

Lumpenproletariat In Marxist philosophy, Marxist theory, the ''Lumpenproletariat'' (; ) is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society expl ...

Contemporary Italian social structure

A hierarchy of social class rank in Italy today. :1. Bourgeoisie (10% of the working population) includes high-class

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

s, managers, politicians, self-employed people, highest-ranking celebrities, etc. :2. White-collar middle class (17% of the working population) includes middle class workers not employed in manual work. :3. Urban petite bourgeoisie (14% of the working population), is mainly made up of shopkeepers, small-business entrepreneurs, self-employed artisans etc. :4. Rural petite bourgeoisie (10% of the working population) consists of small entrepreneurs or estate owners who operate in the countryside, mainly in agriculture and forestry. :5. Urban working class (37% of the working population) refers to the people employed in manual work. :6. Rural working class (9% of the working population) consists of people operating in the primary industry, such as farmers, loggers, fishermen etc.

References

{{Social class