IMPACT OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY: POLITICS AND IDENTITY

21 April 2010

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 wide-ranging 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.

From The Communist Manifesto, 1848

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!!

EVOLUTION, SOCIAL DARWINISM, SOCIETY, AND THE STATE

On The Origin of Species, 1859

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.

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 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

THE WORLDS WITHINChallenging European Identities

The World 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 Threat of the New Woman

“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

Discovering the World Within

Max Nordau blames overstimulation Fear of a general

downturn in society, particularly among the “better” classes

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

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

Freud and Dream Interpretation

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 Dreams

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?

Modernity

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?

Edward Munch, The Scream (1893)