Even sympathetic, socialist-minded people often tell us: "Yes, but the working class which you talk about is dwindling. Or, at any rate, fewer and fewer people see themselves as working-class". It's not true.

In the USA, for example, where working-class consciousness has always been weak, where trade unions have for decades habitually defined their constituency as "the middle class", and where unions have received a pummelling in recent decades even worse than anything in Europe - in that same USA, 46% of people define themselves as "working class".

That percentage, while wobbling up and down over the decades, is still around the same level that it was in the early 1970s. Look at this graph from the New York Times, February 2007 [1].

In Britain, according to the sociologist John Scott [2], "Almost a half of the population identify as ‘working class’, while a quarter identify as ‘middle class’. These proportions are barely changed from the 1950s, when the Glass (1954) study found a half of respondents to be working class identifiers..."

The latest British Social Attitudes survey (January 2007) [3] finds a slight shift from people identifying as "working class" to identifying as "middle class" - but still 57% identifying as "working class".

The figures are doubly remarkable because in the last thirty or so years, mainstream media and politicians have pretty much banned the words "working class". Many even on the activist left shy away from those words: when AWL was in the Socialist Alliance together with the SWP and other groups, we found that it would often take long, hard arguments to get the words "working-class" or "worker" into the Alliance's leaflets.

To identify as "working-class" today, therefore, is not just a common-sense matter of slotting oneself into one or another of the categories of common usage, but of adopting an "underground", not-to-be-spoken-of-in-public identity.