Definition of Underclass

Underclass refers to segments of populations that live in households that are headed by individuals who are constantly unemployed or underemployed. Although the term is relatively new, as it was first used in the USA in the 1960s, the concept is not as it was used by authors such as Marx and Engels. Marx's view is that in the capitalist societies of Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, there were, at the absolute bottom of the social ladder, below the "proletariat" class, those whom Marx called the "lumpenproletariat." The Lumpenproletariat, or what Engels called the "reserve army of labor," was the product of industrialization and was made up of unemployed workers. This reserve army of labor grows during periods of economic crisis and decreases during periods of economic growth. The reserve army of labor enables employers to easily find workers in periods when the economy is working well and to easily fire workers when there is a period of crisis. Engels' data indicate that in that period in Britain, there were over a million and a half people who belonged to the reserve army of labor, who, in order to survive, did the dirtiest jobs (e.g., collecting horse dung on the streets) or begged.

In its modern usage concept of underclass refers to those who, due to a lack of skills, are, as Gunnar Myrdal says, permanently unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable (1963, 1970). Corralary to unability to have stable work researchers indentified several other characteristics of the underclass: primarily concentrated in urban areas, marginalization from the wider society, preponderance of deviant behavior (violent crimes and drug usage), family instability and lone motherhood, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, rates of high school dropouts, alcohol abuse, physical or mental disability, begging, promiscuity, rejection of conventional morals, values and goals. Members of the underclass mostly come from the poorest minority ethnic or racial communities.

               The Position of the Underclass in the Society

Darity, in his article "Racial Inequality in the Managerial Age: An Alternative Vision to the NRC Report", contends that the underclass served an economic purpose in industrial capitalism as a "reserve army of labor", while in modern managerial capitalism, it becomes superfluous and only an economic burden in the eyes of the dominant social class. Erik Ohlin Wright, in his book Understanding Class (2015), refers to the underclass as “subclass”, and argues that its main feature is complete social exclusion and deprivation of any work skills. Members of the subclass are economically oppressed, but they are not systematically exploited in the capitalist system. In the article "How Many Classes Are There in Contemporary British Society" (1990), Runciman concludes that there are seven classes in Britain: 1) upper, 2) upper middle, 3) middle-middle, 4) lower middle, 5) skilled working class, 6) unskilled working class, and 7) subclass. The most significant difference, compared to similar class schemes of other authors, is the inclusion of a subclass in the class scheme. He sees the subclass as a group that does not have any of the three sources of economic power. Since this fact excludes them from the labor market, they are completely dependent on social assistance. Most of them belong to ethnic minorities or are single mothers, but their dependence on social assistance classifies them into a subclass, not ethnicity or gender.

          Cultural and Attitudinal Explanations of the Underclass

There are two main theoretical approaches to explaining the formation, size, and persistence of the underclass. The first approach focuses on cultural and attitudinal explanations. For authors such as Murray (1984), Mead (1988), and Magnet (1993), the main factor responsible for the underclass is inadequate and deficient attitudes, cultural values, and behavior of the members of the underclass themselves. The underclass members reproduce those attitudes, values, and behaviors throughout generations. This explanation is very similar to the concept of the culture of poverty developed by Oscar Lewis (1966). 

Another factor that contributes to the development of the underclass, according to these authors, is governmental welfare programs that discourage underclass members from finding work, developing usable skills, and taking personal responsibility for their lives. The third factor relates to unstable families, as most members of the underclass live in broken homes where lone mothers are unable to provide positive male sex role models to their children.

         Structural Factors as Explanation for the Underclass

In the book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson re-emphasizes the importance of race for the life chances of African Americans and presents data on the highly vulnerable position of urban poor African Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans began to move from the rural South to the industrialized North of the United States. Lacking qualifications, they performed the worst industrial jobs and had no chance of advancing. Their poverty and physical isolation in the ghettos led to an increase in white prejudice, which further worsened the position of African Americans. A further deterioration in the situation of a large number of African Americans occurred in the early 1960s, due to several structural factors. The decrease in the number of well-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector in cities, and at the same time, the increase in low-paid service jobs, contributed to the reduction of employment, but also to the reduction of real wages of those who were employed. This led to impoverishment, so there was an increase in crime among the male population, as well as an increase in the number of people sentenced to prison terms. The consequence of that was an increased number of single-parent families, in which only the mother was present.

On the other hand, African-Americans, who managed to finish college and find good jobs, left poor urban neighborhoods and thus, even more, increased the poverty of those neighborhoods. Left behind in increasingly isolated concentrations are those with the least to offer in terms of marketable skills, role models, and familial stability. The result is a spiral of negative social and economic outcomes. By creating a spatial and socio-economic distance between poor and middle-class or rich African-Americans, the social isolation of the former has been significantly increased, as the possibility of their upward class mobility has been drastically reduced. Impoverished urban neighborhoods did not have enough money for schools, so the quality of education dropped significantly. All of these factors contributed, not caused, to the development of a culture of poverty among African Americans that internalized feelings of despair and fatalism. Wilson believes that white Americans, partially consciously, socio-economically endangered poor African Americans, and that this was a reaction of whites dissatisfied with the success achieved by African Americans who became members of the middle and upper class. To more clearly define all these aspects of the urban poverty of African Americans, Wilson introduces the term "subclass" to emphasize the extreme socio-economic marginalization of this population, although he later rejected the term because of the negative connotations it received. Wilson re-examines urban poverty in When Work Disappears (1996) and provides a wealth of qualitative data on the lives of the urban poor. Systemic racism evident in policies of judicial discrimination in forms of stricter sentences and higher rates of incarceration, redlining, mortgage discrimination, and other housing barriers all contribute to spacial racial segregation and economic downfall of the poorest African-Americans.

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