Transcript Impact of the Rise of an Urban Proletariat

21 April 2010
IMPACT OF INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY: POLITICS AND
IDENTITY
SOCIALISM AND THE
VOICE OF THE
WORKER
Social Consequences Of
Industrialization
 Rapid growth of new industrial cities
 lack of sufficient infrastructure
 Creation of the institutional work day
 Mill whistle and the factory clock
 Replacement of the artisan with the unskilled
worker
 Division of Labor, rise of class consciousness
 Child Labor
 In 1835 40% of mill workers were under the age of 18
New Social Figure: The
Bourgeoisie
 Industrialization created not only factory owners
and management, but also created increased
need for lawyers, bankers, accountants, and
merchants
 These individuals began to intermarry with the
struggling landed gentry, accumulating capital
and credibility
 As a dominant source of progress, this class
demands more political power in Britain
How the urban workers
live
Observations On the Effect
of the Manufacturing System
etc., Robert Owen

The acquisition of wealth, and the desire which it naturally creates for a
continued increase, have introduced a fondness for essentially injurious
luxuries among a numerous class of individuals who formerly never
thought of them, and they have also generated a disposition which
strongly impels its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human
nature to this love of accumulation. To succeed in this career, the
industry of the lower orders, from whose labour this wealth is now
drawn, has been carried by new competitors striving against those of
longer standing, to a point of real oppression, reducing them by
successive changes, as the spirit of competition increased and the ease
of acquiring wealth diminished, to a state more wretched than can be
imagined by those who have not attentively observed the changes as
they have gradually occurred. In consequence, they are at present in a
situation infinitely more degraded and miserable than they were before
the introduction of these manufactories, upon the success of which their
bare subsistence now depends.
Robert Owen, 1815
 I now therefore, in the name of the millions of the
neglected poor and ignorant, whose habits and
sentiments have been hitherto formed to render
them wretched, call upon the British Government and
the British Nation to unite their efforts to arrange a
system to train and instruct those who, for any good
or useful purpose, are now untrained and
uninstructed; and to arrest by a clear, easy, and
practical system of prevention, the ignorance and
consequent poverty, vice, and misery, which are
rapidly increasing throughout the empire; for, "Train
up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old
he will not depart from it.”
Post-Reform Politics
 After the 1832 Reform Bill, the newly
enfranchised take a paternalistic
attitude to the new “working class”
 Increased state focus on the condition of
the workers
 Living conditions
 Working conditions
 Sanitary conditions: cities with over
50,000 people had twice the death rates
of the countryside
Post-Reform Politics
 1834: New Poor Law
 Poor Law introduced
during Renaissance
 outdoor relief
 Difficult to get help
 conditions of
workhouses
 Workhouses built in
every parish
Reaction to
the Bill
The Workhouse
Socialism
 Socialism
 Economic planning
 greater economic equality
 state regulation of property
 Utopianism: burden falls on middle class to
help the poor
 Marxism: middle class and working class
interests opposed to each other
Socialism
 Socialists questioned the right to private
property and argued for rights for industrial
workers
 Before the mid-19th Century, there were few
national unions.
 Most labor movements sought higher wages and
better working conditions.
 Chartism in Great Britain called for universal male
suffrage in 1838
Workers and Marx
 Marx’s theory says that
 social hierarchy is based upon work
 how that work is done is called the mode of
production.
 The mode of production shapes all other aspects of social life
 Dialectical materialism
 Hegel’s idea that each age is characterized by a set of ideas,
which produces opposing ideas that will result in a new
synthesis
 Marx’s theory proclaimed that economic relationships were
the driving force of historical change
Marx’s vision for Change
 History as class struggle
 The bourgeoisie vs. the
proletariat
 Class consciousness
 Violent overthrow of the
bourgeois, capitalist system
 Abolition of capitalist
property
 The dictatorship of the
proletariat
 Withering away of the state
 Communism
 collective ownership of
property
 organization of labor for
the common advantage of
all members
Marx, Economic &
Philosophical Manuscripts,
1844
 “The laborer becomes poorer the more wealth he
produces, indeed, the more powerful and wideranging his production becomes. Labor does not only
produce commodities, it produces itself and the
laborer as a commodity, and in relation to the level at
which it produces commodities. The product of labor
is labor, which fixes itself in the object, it becomes a
thing, it is the objectification of labor.”
From The Communist
Manifesto, 1848:
 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 re-constitution of society at
large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the
earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of
social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, equites,
plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, lords, vassals, guild-masters,
journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes,
again, subordinate gradations.
Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized
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 foreman, 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.
From The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the
working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex....The growing competition among the
bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the
workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery,
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more
precarious...The modern laborer, instead of rising with the progress of
industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own
class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than
population and wealth....
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to
win.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD: UNITE!!
From The Communist Manifesto, 1848
EVOLUTION, SOCIAL
DARWINISM, SOCIETY, AND THE
STATE

Significant points that transformed scientific
thought:





biological species are in a constant state of evolution
all life takes the form of a struggle to exist -- to exist and
produce the greatest number of offspring
The struggle for existence eliminates organisms less well
adapted and allows those better adapted to flourish -- a
process called Natural Selection
natural selection, development, and evolution requires
long periods of time
genetic variations that produce increased survivability are
random and not caused by God or by the organism's own
striving for perfection.
On The Origin of Species, 1859
Herbert Spencer
 The Organic Analogy
 Both society and organism grow during most
of their existence; baby to adult, town to city.
 As they grow, they become increasingly
complex.
Herbert Spencer
 The Nature of Social Evolution
 Societies move from simple structures to various levels
of compound structures.




Simple: consists of separate families.
Compound: consists of families organized into clans.
Doubly Compound: Clans are organized into tribes.
Trebly Compound: Tribes are further organized into nations.
 An increase in size of the society results in increase in
structure, which in turn produces differences in power
and roles of the members. Different members or groups
of members also start to play different, specialized roles.
Herbert Spencer
 There is a movement from a military to an
industrial society.
 At the beginning, society is characterized by the
compulsory cooperation of its members -- the
military society.
 The industrial society is characterized by the
voluntary cooperation of its members.
 The highest order is called the Ethical State,
where common resources may be used to
perfect the human character.
Group Assignment
 Each group will assign a leader. The leader will
decide which group members will read which
document. Remember, the Chamberlain and the
Ahlwardt should be read as separate documents.
 Each person will read one of the documents and
report his or her findings to the rest of the group.
A group “secretary” will write out brief
summaries of each report.
 Together, the group should answer the following
in complete sentences/paragraphs (the role of
secretary should be shared, but all answers
should appear on one assignement to be turned
in)
Group Assignment
 Questions:
 How does Renan define “the nation”? What model is he



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applying (inclusive or exclusive)? How does it correspond
to other forms of nationalism?
How does Charles Darwin’s research impact ideas of
science and society?
What are the connections between Darwin, Spencer, and
Comte? How are Spencer and Comte similar? How are
they different?
How are nationalism and social Darwinism connected?
What are examples of similarities (using quotes from the
documents)?
How do these documents discuss race? How are race and
nationalism connected (using quotes from the
documents)?
Group Assignment
 Finally, the group will collaborate on how to
bring all of the articles together under one
thesis statement. Think about:
 Chronology
 What connects them
 What effects these ideas and theories had on
society
Challenging European Identities
THE WORLDS WITHIN
 In the face of imperial and
industrial expansion,
people begin investigating
human nature
 Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
and human sexuality
 New woman
 Homosexuality
 Oscar Wilde
The World Within
 “I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of
battle in order to explain--it seems strange it should have to
be explained--what civil war is like when civil war is waged
by women. I am not only here as a solider temporarily
absent from the field of battle; I am here-- and that, I think,
is the strangest part of my coming--I am here as a person
who. according to the law courts of my country, it has been
decided, is of no value to the community at all; and I am
adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person,
under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison” –
Emmeline Pankhurst
The Threat of the New Woman
 Max Nordau blames
overstimulation
 Fear of a general downturn
in society, particularly
among the “better” classes
 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
and psychoanalysis
Discovering the World Within
 Interested in the human mind
 Seeks to understand the human
personality

To understand the nature of the individual
in a disintegrating society
 To plumb the “depths” of the human
condition
 Marks a radical shift by emphasizing the
irrational nature of human beings in a
rational, scientific way
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
 Freud claims to discover that “we are not in
control of our own minds.”
 Argues that “emotions buried in the
unconscious surface in disguised form during
dreaming.”
 Wish-fulfillment, repressed desire, anxiety
Freud and Dream Interpretation
Dreams are not comparable to the spontaneous sounds made
by a musical instrument struck rather by some external force
than by the hand of a performer; they are not meaningless,
not absurd, they do not imply that one portion of our
stockpile of ideas sleeps while another begins to awaken.
They are a completely valid psychological phenomenon,
specifically the fulfillment of wishes; they can be classified in
the continuity of comprehensible waking mental states;
they are constructed through highly complicated intellectual
activity.
Freud and Dreams
But as soon as we delight in this discovery, a flood of questions assails us. If,
according to dream analysis, the dream represents a fulfilled wish, what
creates the astonishing and strange form in which this wish-fulfillment is
expressed? What transformation have the dream thoughts undergone to
shape the manifest dream which we remember when awake? Through
what means has this transformation taken place? What is the source of
the material which has been reworked into the dream? Where do the
many peculiarities which we notice in dream thoughts come from, for
instance that they may be mutually contradictory? Can a dream tell us
something new about our inner psychological processes? Can its content
correct the opinions that we have held during our waking hours?
Freud and Dreams
 Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso transform art
Modernity
 Isadora Duncan and Russian ballet change
traditional dance
 Schoenberg and Strauss eliminate the musical
aesthetic ideal
 What are the moderns responding to? How do
they transform art and ideas?
Modernity
Edward
Munch, The
Scream
(1893)