This is Western Civilization.
My name is Dr. Long.
This video is entitled class consciousness.
I also talk about class as a category of analysis for historians.
Now social class is something that is universal to all civilizations in human history.
Anthropologists believe that human societies were more egalitarian and without strong class
distinctions in prehistoric times, when humans lived in groups of hunter/gatherers – as
groups of hunter/gatherers, and this is still true today among the few hunter/gatherer societies
that still exist - for instance, tribal peoples in the Amazon and Brazil, and pygmies in Africa.
However, since the development of agriculture, social hierarchies, with a pecking order and
social classes, had been universal in all civilizations.
This is especially true in the modern world with industrial societies.
Even communist nations, which supposedly were moving towards a classless utopia, had class
distinctions.
For example, in the Soviet Union, communist party leaders had material goods that average
Soviet citizens did not.
They also had better food, better cars, and housing.
When we think of class we often think of jobs and income.
For instance, the CEO of a major corporation is wealthy while a janitor at one of the corporations’
factories is often poor.
But class is more than simply one’s income and one’s job.
Class is more encompassing than that.
Class is also about education, habits, mentalities, dress, food, ways of speaking, culture, and
even entertainment.
To use one example, attending an opera or classical musical performance is associated
much more with the upper class than say, attending a professional wrestling match or monster-truck
drag race.
Now on the surface there’s nothing to link an opera versus a profession wrestling event
to any particular social class, but as social classes have their own distinct forms of entertainment
– they are, in fact, linked to social classes.
One of the most influential thinkers on the issue of class, class consciousness, and even
class as a category of analysis is Karl Marx.
Marx was the founder of an ideological school of thought known as Marxism.
Karl Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, was a German political activist, journalist, philosopher,
and economist.
He lived much of his life in London during the middle and latter part of the 19th century,
and he wrote a great deal – a number of essays; a number of books; and his two most
famous books are The Communist Manifesto, which he published in 1848, and Das Kapital,
published in 1867.
The Communist Manifesto is the more accessible of those two.
Now as an ideology, Marx began with a premise of materialism – that the material world
is all there is, and that there is no spiritual world or world beyond ours – and for Marx,
history is defined by class struggle, struggle between the ruling class and the lower class
– the rich versus the poor – and Marx believed this has always been a constant throughout
human history.
And in the industrial world, Marx believed that this was a conflict between the bourgeoisie,
the ruling class – bankers, engineers, managers, and the proletariat – factory workers, miners,
millworkers, and so forth.
Marx also adhered to an idea known as the Value Theory of Labor, and the Value Theory
of Labor states that an object’s value is determined by how much labor is put into it.
Now many economists today find this a bit simplistic, but it is important to Marx’s
ideas.
Marx also believed in what is called the Theory of Alienation, and the Theory of Alienation
is that in the Industrial Age workers deal with very impersonal work that’s disconnected
from who they are as a person.
So if you’re working on an assembly line, you’re just like a cog in a machine – for
instance, and your ideas don’t really count – and so this idea of alienation is that
you are completely disconnected from this and it makes you unhappy.
Now Marx may well have been onto something with this Theory of Alienation, and this brings
me to another element of Marx’s thought, what he calls class consciousness.
Marx believed that with the Industrial Revolution the working class would grow numerically,
but he thought that capitalism – which he saw as cut-throat competition – would make
conditions worse and worse for the working class.
So eventually they would gain what he called class consciousness.
Class consciousness means that they would come to realize that they were being exploited,
and that as workers they have that in common fundamentally.
Now class consciousness – as opposed to false consciousness – false consciousness
is the idea that the bourgeoisie would promote, which the idea is that workers aren’t truly
being exploited or really don’t have anything in common.
Now with class consciousness, the working class would begin to work together to identify
themselves by their class, and to relate to their follow workers, and even workers in
other nations – for that matter – against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie.
With class consciousness workers gain awareness of their common problems, of their exploitation
under capitalism – and as the wealthy get wealthier and wealthier and the poor get poorer
and poorer, according to Marx, class consciousness would increase.
Marx believed eventually capitalism would reach a crisis, what he called the Crisis
of Capitalism, and workers would organize into unions, into socialist parties, and as
Marx puts it in The Communist Manifest, he urged, quote – “Workers of the world unite;
you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Class consciousness would bring about unity in workers – again, in labor unions and
socialist parties.
Now Marx believed that once this Crisis of Capitalism occurred things would get so bad
that workers who were conscious of their exploitation, of the system – would rise up and stage
a violent revolution overthrowing capitalism.
This revolution, in turn, would lead to a socialist state in which workers would control
all the property, the means of production, factories, mines, farms needed to make goods,
and socialism would in turn transform into communism in which all things are owned in
common; there’s no property except property held in common, and this would be a classless
utopia, with everyone equal and happy – and the state then would wither away, it would
be unnecessary, and that would be the end of human history for Marx.
Now between 1848 and his death in 1883, Marx became the most important socialist thinker
in Europe.
It is worth noting, he was not – by far – the only socialist thinker, but after
1848, socialism is typically associated with Karl Marx, and so he’s a very important
figure.
Now workers across the industrial world – and particularly in industrial countries such
as Britain and Germany – do begin organizing, as Marx had predicted, into labor unions – and
Germany, for instance, came to have the largest socialist party in the world.
It had a very lively subculture with clubs, with social organizations for the workers,
and this did certainly go along with Marx’s idea of class consciousness.
However, not all of Marx’s ideas panned out.
Instead of capitalism getting worse and worse, by the late 19th century and early 20th century,
in many industrial societies things were actually slowly getting better for workers, and as
things got better for workers some workers lost interest in a Marxist-style revolution
that would completely overthrow capitalism.
Instead they were content with better wages, working conditions, and living conditions.
Now this caused considerable debate within Germany’s socialist party.
For instance, German socialist leader, Eduard Bernstein, sought to modify some of Marx’s
ideas; he believed they were incorrect.
In the 1890s, he put forward an idea known as revisionist socialism, and this argued
that a violent revolution against capitalism that Marx had predicted was unnecessary.
Rather Bernstein argued, in revisionist socialism, that workers could achieve their goal and
even achieve a revolution democratically through the ballot box – by electing politicians
who would force reform that would increase their pay, lead to better living conditions.
In other words, workers could benefit peacefully, can have revolutionary change peacefully.
For Bernstein, class struggle and class consciousness were important, but workers could improve
their lot by winning elections and making changes democratically.
So this led to a lot of debate, and eventually many socialist parties in Europe would accept
Bernstein’s approach.
However, after the Russian Revolution in 1917, some Marxists would go over to communism,
from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
But in the grand scheme of things, Marxists became divided –
the revisionist socialism – favoring democracy – what has been called a social democracy,
and other Marxists adhering more to Marx’s line of favoring communist regimes.
Now there had been critiques of Marx’s ideas that are much harsher than Bernstein’s.
Our one critique is that Marxism is demonstrably false, that when it’s been implemented it
has failed dramatically; communist regimes are a good example of this and after the collapse
of communist regimes in Europe in 1989, many have seen Marxist itself is discredited.
Marx also has a number of other critics, critics that note that – yes, workers have class
consciousness; yes, they identify by their class, but workers also have other identities
that are important.
You know Marx only stressed class; he ignored things such as nationality or religion or
gender or sexuality, and on and on.
Other theorists, such as Karl Popper, have argued that Marxism is a pseudo-science – which
unlike science is not falsifiable.
Still other critics, such as Nicholas Berdiaeff, and British philosopher, John Gray, have essentially
called Marxism a pseudo-religion because it has faith in historical progress and eventual
classless utopia that simply can’t be proven.
Now Marx was not the only important theorist of class in the 19th century as well.
German economist and political theorist, Max Weber, who lived from 1864 to 1920, also wrote
about class, and his idea is different from Marx.
For Weber, social class and hierarchies emerged from an interplay of 3 factors in any given
society – wealth; prestige; and power.
While Marx saw social class and power as only coming from one’s economic position, for
Weber class and power are more complicated – as is class consciousness.
Weber was one of the first theorists to write about the middle class, or the white-collar
sector, and he was especially interested in the development of bureaucracies.
For Weber, white-collar workers owned little property – compared to the upper class,
but they were different blue¬-collar workers in terms of their education, their habits,
and so forth = and so Weber’s view is more complicated, more sophisticated than Marx.
So this offers a new wrinkle in class consciousness.
For Weber, social classes were not necessarily involved in a zero-sum conflict and he did
not believe that revolution was necessarily inevitable.
So Weber is another important figure, and kind of a counterbalance to Marx in dealing
with class, class struggle, and class consciousness.
Now as a tool of analysis, Marx’s ideas have – to one degree or another – influenced
many historians.
For instance, in the 1960s, Marxists or Marxist-inspired history really flourished.
This led to a type of history known as social history, in which history is approached from
the ground up, not looking at important politicians or ‘the great men of history’ as it’s
been called – quote/unquote – but rather, the working class, the ordinary people.
So in Great Britain, for instance, a number of historians – such as Eric Hobsbawm, who
wrote a wide-ranging series of books, dealt with the working class – or George Rudé,
a pioneer of research into the role of the crowd in the French Revolution.
The most important, arguably, was E.P. Thompson, who in 1963 published The Making of the English
Working Class – a very important work that dealt with class consciousness among the English
working class in the 19th century.
Now Thompson asserted that the working class had agency, and were actually active in shaping
their own fate, and so in looking at history from below – he’s not just looking at
how people lived, but how they came to shape their fate as well.
Now social history has become an important type of history and is still around, used
to analyze a working class, working class movements, and to give a different perspective
than on the sort of important movers and shakers of history.
Social history also is in contrast to intellectual history, which focuses on important ideas
and important thinkers in history.
Now many social historians were influenced by Marxism, but not all of them are hard-lined
Marxists.
Historians still debate the ideas of Marx and the social history approach, in which
Marx in part inspired.
Also, since the 1960s, many historians have noted that other categories of identity – such
as race, gender, sexuality, religion, and so forth are important to understanding the
past.
Still, class and class consciousness are part of the human experience.
As such, they remain an important lens of analysis by which many historians to one degree
or another still use.
So I’ll stop here.
Thanks for watching.