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administrative petty bourgeoisie (which is itself distinct from the traditional petty
bourgeoisie of small property owners who hire no wage labor) by the working class"
complete subordination within the labor process, and from capital in general by the
wage labor relation.

The working class, so defined, does not, as some traditions have it, exist only
in the sphere of production. It is true that industry was early established as the
primary sector of the capitalist economy. Capitalism only really became capitalism
with the beginnings of industrialization, and truly capitalistic class relationships were
largely forged and first developed within the industrial sector. The industrial
working class, comprised of workers in manufacturing and transport, was therefore
the classical proletariat and is sometimes mistaken for the proletariat as a whole.

However, as capitalism developed, capitalistic work relations were
increasingly reproduced in other sectors of the economy — exchange, distribution,
consumption, agriculture — and in the political and cultural institutions of the
society, like government and the schools. In other words, the working class was
generated within more and more of the sectors of capitalist society, although this
occurred at different rates and in somewhat different forms within the various
sectors and within different capitalist societies. Particular historical working classes
are therefore complex formations, divided in the first instance into sectors
corresponding to the major economic divisions present in a region, and into sub-
sectors determined by such factors as skill, function, and size of enterprise within
each economic sector. Cutting across these divisions, as noted above, are other
major contradictions of the social formation in question, such as those of gender
and race/ethnicity. The complexity of a given working class, and its existence
within multiple economic sectors, is a gauge of the degree to which the capitalist
mode of production dominates an economy and to the relative "modernity" of a
capitalist social formation."

A final definitional point is in order. While the working class is essentially