essay
H ALKUBRA
Impact_of_Industrial_Society-11.pptxImpact of Industrial Society: Politics and Identity
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
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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
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Liberalism
Rooted in the Enlightenment
in favor of legal equality before the law
religious toleration
freedom of the press
small government: limit the power of government against the persons and property of individual citizens
governments get powers from the consent of the governed
Those who govern must represent the interests of the governed
Liberalism
Liberals do not believe in universal democracy
system of privilege based on wealth and property
Laissez-Faire Economics:
remove internal barriers to trade and to international commerce.
Corn Laws
opposed minimum wages and pro-labor legislation
Economic liberty provides basis for material progress.
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How the urban workers live
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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.”
Liberal Reform: The English Bill, 1832
Borough Reform
Redistribution of parliamentary seats: who gets what?
Franchise Reform
Urban, male, £10 freeholders
Key missing reform?
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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
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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
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Reaction to the Bill
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The Workhouse
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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
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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!!
A Tale of Two Cities (and Classes): Urban Life, ca. 1851-1900
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The New Urban Environment
Urbanization
Industrial Economies encouraged the growth of cities at an enormous rate
Overcrowding, disease lead to new sanitation
Cities were laid out/re-drawn
New plans to accommodate housing booms
influx of immigrant/worker populations
maintain social stratification/control by dividing the city into industrial/commercial/residential (divided by class)
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The Second Industrial Revolution
Transportation
1. The Railroad
2. The Steamship
Communications
1. Postal Services
2. Telegraph
Mass Communications
1. Lending Libraries
2. Newspapers
The Rise of Physical and Social Sciences – New Ways to Explain Race and Class
Medicine
Cholera Outbreaks
The 1832-33 cholera epidemic claimed 4,000 to 7,000 victims in London.
Darwin
The Origin of Species (1859)
Herbert Spencer, Social Darwinism and the
“Survival of the Fittest” and Eugenics
Social Sciences
History
Anthropology
Charles Darwin
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Haussmannization
Georges Haussmann redesigns the modern (Bourgeois) city
Prefect of the Seine, 1853-1870
Estimates 70% of Parisians live in poverty
destroys the medieval city in favor of pleasing designs
Installs new infrastructure
new sewer and water systems
By 1870, 560 of the capital’s 805 km of streets had sewers
Discharge dangerous to communities downstream.
40,500 houses have running water (up from 6,000)
gas lighting
new, large public buildings
Uniform in height and style
Residential buildings’ interiors unregulated
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Haussmannization
Goals
prevent Parisians from ripping up the city in rebellion
allowed easy access to the army for putting down rebellion
Eradicate filth and disease
Partly inspired by cholera outbreaks
Eliminate threat of insalubrious, dangerous classes from city center
Poor, immigrants and working-class driven from their neighborhoods
Displaced poverty without eradicating it
Creates the modern
Bourgeois café culture of stores/restaurants and people watching
Formal gardens, linear street grids, and facades of buildings betray bourgeois discourse of order
Ending the Disorder of the Medieval City
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A Beautiful, Organized Space
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877)
On the Pont de l’Europe 1876–77
Le pont de l'Europe, c. 1876
Camille Pissarro, Avenue de l’Opera (1898)
The Whitechapel Murders
“Jack the Ripper” August-November, 1888
The Five Victims: Nicholls, Chapman, Eddowes, Stride and Kelly
“With the Vigilance Committee in the East End: A Suspicious Character”
13 Oct 1888
The Ripper Moment – The Emergence of New Voices
Exposure of the “social ills of ‘Outcast London’”
Bernard Shaw called the Ripper a "solitary genius" for the murders' by-product of drawing interest to the plight of the denizens of the East End
FIRST MEMBER OF CRIMINAL "CLASS." "FINE BODY OF MEN, THE PER-LEECE!" SECOND DITTO. "UNCOMMON FINE! - IT'S LUCKY FOR HUS AS THERE'S SECH A BLOOMIN' FEW ON 'EM!!!" "I have to observe that the Metropolitan Police have not large reserves doing nothing and ready to meet emergencies; but every man has his duty assigned to him, and I can only strengthen the Whitechapel district by drawing men from duty in other parts of the Metropolis." - Sir Charles Warren's Statement. "There is one Policeman to every seven hundred persons." - Vide Recent Statistics (13 October 1888)
II. The Ripper Moment – The Emergence of New Voices
B. Emergence of new political forces in response to bourgeois dominance and Liberal Policy
C. Skepticism and Fear of Authorities
1. Science
2. Police
Anti-Semitism
Feminist Concerns
There floats a phantom on the slum's foul air, Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing, Into the Spectre of that loathly lair. Face it--for vain is fleeing! Red-handed, ruthless, furtive, unerect, 'Tis murderous Crime--the Nemesis of Neglect!
Mocking of glance, and merciless of mien. Mocking? Ah, yes! At Law the ghoul may laugh, The sword is here as harmless as the staff Of crippled age; its sleuthhounds are at fault, Justice appears not only blind but halt. It seems to play a merely blinkered gamer, Blundering about without a settled aim, Like boys at Blind-Man's Buff. A pretty sport For Law's sworn guards in rascaldom's resort! The bland official formula to-day Seems borrowed from the tag of Nursery play, "Turn around three times," upon no settled plan, "Flounder and fumble, and "catch whom you can!"
The Second Industrial Revolution
Improving Conditions for the Working Class
Rise of Working-Class Political Ambitions
Keir Hardie (1892) and the Independent Labour Party (1893) in England
James Keir Hardie, MP
Mass Politics
Conservatives co-opt nationalist/liberal rhetoric
shift support from working class organization to mass national parties headed by old elites
Voting rights expanded
1884- 60% of males in Britain have the right to vote (all male householders and £10 lodgers
West still not fully democratic (no women, 40% of British men)
Radical parties emerge
Play on fears over new immigration and antisemitism
Dreyfus Affair (1890s France)
Limitations of Women – Legislating the Separate Spheres
The Angel in the Household
Social Work: Women in the Public Domain
Charles W. Cope, Life Well Spent, 1862.
Man for the field and woman for the hearth, Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head, and woman with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey, All else confusion.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
The Princess, 1847
WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
Western Women remain disenfranchised until World War I
Work for abolition delays efforts for women’s suffrage
Women often relied on liberal politicians to introduce legislation
Women’s legislation often pushed aside
movement largely ignores working-class women
Increased radicalism
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The Shrieking Sisterhood – Women and Political Rights
England
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
2. The Pankhursts and The Suffragettes
“I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right but a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse contributed to that education.”
-Emmeline Pankhurst
Pankhurst being arrested at a rally in front of Buckingham Palace
Photo: Museum of London
When we were patient, when we believed in argument and persuasion, they said, “You don’t really want it because, if you did, you would do something unmistakable to show you were determined to have it.” And they when we did something unmistakable they said, “You are behaving so badly that you show you are not fit for it.”
