1. HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION:
1648 TO PRESENT
LECTURE 16:
WHAT IS CLASS?

2. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for Industrialization
1. Natural resources: coal, iron ore, etc.
2. Transportation: canals, roads, rivers, etc.
3. Capital investment: by bourgeoisie and elite
4. New technologies: spinning jenny, flying shuttle, etc.
5. Markets: colonies all over the world
6. Cheap labor: more workers available b/c population
boom

3. The turnpike road network in 1770. Source: Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth-Century
Britain (London: Academic Press, 1977)

4. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for Industrialization
B. Society and Economy
1. The Putting Out System vs. The Factory System

5. The Putting Out
System
The Factory
System (division of
labor)
Town
Household
Household
Household
Route of
Merchant
Household
Household
Household
Factory

6. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for Industrialization
B. Society and Economy
1. The Putting Out System
vs. The Factory System
2. Cotton and Slavery

8. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for
Industrialization
B. Society and Economy
C. Lives of Workers
Back-to-back Houses in Mancheste

9. Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (1844)
Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and
he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found -
especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible
dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at
the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into
and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. This is the
first court on the Irk above Ducie Bridge - in case any one should care to look into it. Below it on the
river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal
putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow,
dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen's
Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated,
swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. Dr. Kay gives a terrible description of the state of this
court at that time. Since then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at least looking
down from Ducie Bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined walls and heaps of debris with some
newer houses. The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a
parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather
stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it
deposits on the shallower right bank.In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-
green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic
gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above
the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high
weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are
tanneries, bone mills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk,
which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies.

10. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for
Industrialization
B. Society and Economy
C. Lives of Workers
D. Socialism
1.Utopian Socialism
a.Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825)
b.Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
c.Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)
d.Robert Owen (1771-1858)
If I were asked to answer the following
question: What is slavery? and I should
answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning
would be understood at once. No extended
argument would be required . . . Why, then, to
this other question: What is property? may I
not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the
certainty of being misunderstood; the second
proposition being no other than a
transformation of the first?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?
(1840)

11. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
A. The Impulses for
Industrialization
B. Society and Economy
C. Lives of Workers
D. Socialism
1.Utopian Socialism
2.Feminism and
Socialism
I demand rights for women because I am
convinced that all the ills of the world come
from this forgetfulness and scorn that until
now have been inflicted on the natural and
imprescriptible rights of the female. I
demand rights for women because that is
the only way that their education will be
attended to and because on the education of
women depends that of men in general, and
particularly of the men of the people. I
demand rights for women because it is the
only means of obtaining their rehabilitation in
the eyes of the church, the law, and society,
and because that preliminary rehabilitation is
necessary if the workers themselves are to
be rehabilitated. All the ills of the working
class are summed up by these two words:
poverty and ignorance, ignorance and
poverty. But to get out of this labyrinth, I see
only one way: to start by educating women,
because women are entrusted with raising
the children, male and female.
Flora Tristan, l'Union Ouvriere (1843)

12. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
III. Class Consciousness
“Class happens when some men, as a
result of common experiences (inherited
or shared), feel and articulate the
identity of their interests between
themselves, and as against other men
whose interests are different from (and
usually opposed to) their. The class
experience is largely determined by the
productive relations into which men are
born – or enter involuntarily.”
The Making of the English Working
Class (1963 ), 8-9.
E.P. Thompson

13. I. An Age of Ideologies
II. The Industrial Revolution
III. Class Consiousness
IV. Karl Marx

14. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a
fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto
(1848)

15. Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into
the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into
the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they
are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.
Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State;
they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and,
above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly
this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more
hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other
words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of
men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer
any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour,
more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an
end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other
portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

16. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
sentence: Abolition of private property….
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your
existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of
the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do
away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is
the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society….
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will
cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs
through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing,
and those who acquire anything do not work.

17. We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is
to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of
democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital
from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of
the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase
the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois
production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically
insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip
themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

18. History Prehistory
Ancient Greece and
Rome
Medieval and Early
Modern World
Nineteenth Century
Mode of Production
(method for
producing goods)
Primitive
Communism
Slavery Feudalism Capitalism Communism
Means of Production
(i.e. the
instruments/tools
and subject/raw
materials used to
create something)
Weapons,basic
tools, etc.
Animals, plows, etc. Animals, plows, etc. Machines, factory, etc.
Machines, factory,
etc.
Forces of
Production/Producti
ve forces
Hunting and
gathering
Advanced
Agriculture (2-field)
Complex Agriculture
(3-field),
Specialization in
crafts
Factory System,
mechanization
Factory System,
mechanization
Relations of
Production (social
relations)
Classless society Master/Slave Lord/Vassal Bourgeois/Proletariat Classless society

19. Labor, Capital, and Alienation
Human Behavior: determined by social context, particularly human labor (i.e.
the ability to transform nature)
Labor: is a social activity in humans. The process of labor is tied to human
consciousness and self-actualization. The conditions of labor change over
time. Thus, social relations, human behavior, and human consciousness is tied
to transformations in labor. In Marx’s framework, the economy is the base
upon which the social superstructure is grounded.
Alienation: happens when humans (whether conscious of the fact or not) lose
control over their own labor. Through selling their labor power through wage
labor, the workers are alienated from their labor since the bourgeoisie owns the
labor process. The workers lose their relationship to the products they create.
Since, in Marx’s scheme, labor is a central feature of human self-actualization,
workers become alienated from their individuality. At its most extreme, human
relations begin to be seen as products of commodity exchange (i.e. the market)
in a process that Marx calls commodity fetishism.