From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Fri Feb 24 2006 - 11:35:42 EST
The source is Pierre Frank's history of the Comintern (in French, I think published by La Breche). From memory, he did not cite sources - basically, he tried to estimate the total number of wage-earners and some broad categories. To my knowledge, nobody has actually tried to estimate and analyse the composition of the global structure of social classes, although there are some estimates that point in that direction. I've never got that far myself - all I remember doing (in 1987) is compiling longrun time series data on the memberships of the world's Communist Parties and the SD parties to show the rise and decline of these parties. In order to get a prevalence statistic, you then had to estimate the size of the wage-earning class and so on, but I never got round to it. I've started far more inquiries than I pursued to the finish with a published article. Prof. Marcel van der Linden has a useful essay on "conceptualising the world working class" which provides some pointers which you have to consider in the estimation procedure. Jurriaan
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