Most people can see that there is class inequality in Britain and around the world.
For Marxists, class means something more fundamental. Classes, essentially, are defined by the role certain groups of people play in the prevailing system of production. The emergence of capitalism created a new situation. With the rise of factory production and the driving of most of the peasants from the land, the majority of working people now owned little or no property. Craftsmen who had previously owned their tools, and peasants who had owned small land holdings, now found themselves in factories where they owned none of the instruments of production.