ABSTRACT
Piketty 1 defines classes as statistical groupings perched at different steps of a continuous hierarchical distribution of unequal income or wealth. There can be an endless number of classes, the 1 percent wealthiest or top centile class, the 10 percent wealthiest or top decile class, the 25 percent richest or top quartile class, the poorest 10 percent or bottom decile class, the 1 percent poorest or the lowest centile class. The literary Piketty 2 helps us see the grounded social classes that Piketty 1's percentile definitions miss. Marx described the history of classes, as real groups of people with a collective story. The working class emerged with the rise of industrial capitalism, born when peasants were thrown off the land by the eighteenth-century British land enclosures, and had nothing but their labor. Marx tells the true drama of the capitalist and working classes as flesh-and-blood historical actors entangled in endless and complex social struggles.
