Class
Class
Much has been written on class in the years since Seymour Martin Lipset wrote his entry in the first edition of this encyclopedia, published in 1968. Lipset viewed the literature on class in terms of “social stratification,” which he believed was divided into two approaches, the functionalist and the “social change” perspectives. Nevertheless, the bulk of his piece was centered not on contemporary studies, but on Karl Marx (1818–1883), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who, Lipset argued, continued to animate the central debates of his time. The classics are no less important today, but this essay will aim to balance them with the now canonical debates of the mid-twentieth century and the vast and multifaceted literature that has amassed since then.
MARX, WEBER, AND DURKHEIM
Any discussion of class must begin with Karl Marx. As Lipset once noted, while David Ricardo (1772–1823), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and others may have written about class before Marx, it was Marx who set the terms of debate for later sociological thinkers (Lipset 1968). For Marx, classes do not exist in societies where production for the group results in an equitable distribution of resources and requires that each member or unit contribute to the collective requirements of life. Classes emerge only when one subset of a community seizes private control of the means of production (e.g., land, factories) and coercively extracts surplus labor from another subset of the community, that is, labor that neither the first group needs nor the second group must give in order to survive.
Marx viewed the extraction of surplus labor as a fundamentally exploitative act, since the real exchange value of any given commodity is only ever equal to the labor time socially necessary to make it. This is called the labor theory of value. Any effort to squeeze out surplus value requires that human beings be forced to work for free beyond the labor time socially necessary both to maintain their labor power (e.g., through food and raiment) and to produce its equivalent in commodities. Thus, one’s class is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production: those who own the means of production and therefore forcibly extract surplus value comprise one class, while those who do not own the means of production and are therefore coerced to generate surplus value form another class. Like master and bondsman under slavery and lord and serf under feudalism, capitalism is predicated on two classes: the factory owners or bourgeoisie and the factory workers or proletariat. All of these, however, only form “objective” classes, meaning that they are classes determined merely by their proprietary relationship to the means of production. The subjective form of class, by contrast, is a class that is conscious of itself as a collectivity of similarly positioned individuals and is therefore capable of class action. The distinction between objective and subjective forms of class is infamously that of the class-in-itself (an sich ) and the class-for-itself (für sich ).
According to some interpretations of Marx’s work, particularly those of the Communist Manifesto (1848), the transition from a merely existing working class to a conscious and therefore revolutionary working class is inevitable, as is the classless communist society that workers will eventually found. Because of its revolutionary and progressive potential in every epoch of production, class is said to be the very motor of history (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998; Marx [1852] 1996; Marx [1867] 1906). Hence, the oft-quoted claim,“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, p. 34).
Max Weber did not doubt the existence of exploitative class relations in modern society. Rather, he questioned Marx’s definition of class, its centrality in modern life compared to other forms of domination, and the apparent inevitability of class action in Marx’s work. In Weber’s foundational piece on this subject,“Class, Status, Party” (1922), class is conceived of not as a group but as a sea of unconnected individuals who share the same “life chances,” of which ownership of the means of production is just one example. Life chances comprise the bargaining power that one brings to the market for the purpose of maximizing income and includes professional authority, skills, and education. Just because one shares a similar set of life chances with others, however, does not mean that one will join with similarly positioned individuals in class action. Shared life chances are a necessary condition of class action, but they are by no means a guarantee, for there are other forms of domination apart from the economic that have the capacity to contravene class action. Societies that are organized according to “status” are less susceptible to class action, because they are stratified according to noneconomic concerns such as family, ethnic, or religious heritage. Partisan allegiances may also be an impediment to class solidarity (Weber 1946).
Émile Durkheim’s foremost contribution to class analysis was to conceive of it in terms of occupational specialization in a modern and largely peaceful division of labor. Durkheim sought to explain the transition from the “mechanical solidarity” of primitive societies, whose coherence was based on the resemblance of actors and the dominance of a collective consciousness, to the “organic solidarity” characteristic of modern societies, whose coherence was based on the complementarity of highly specialized individuals. Organic solidarity breaks down only when individuals are coerced into tasks that they do not want to perform. Thus, the central challenge of modern societies is to match individuals with tasks that suit their natural talents. This is why organic solidarity may be achieved by contracts or exchange, which bind individuals through a system of rights and duties, and in turn give rise to rules that guarantee regular cooperation between the divided functions (Durkheim [1893] 1960).
STRATIFICATION
Kingsley Davis (1908–1997) and Wilbert Moore’s (1914–1987) now-foundational piece,“Some Principles of Stratification” (1945), marked the translation of Durkheimian sociology into contemporary debates on class. Davis and Moore took as their challenge the question of how modern societies so successfully channeled their members into an elaborate and specialized division of labor. Infusing Durkheim with Weber’s emphasis on skills as life chances on the market, they reasoned that this monumental undertaking would require nothing less than a mechanism that could motivate the most qualified people to train for, seek, and perform the duties of the most important positions. Famously they hypothesized that an unequal system of occupational rewards was necessary to track the talented to their rightful place in the division of labor. Thus, professionals earn more than manual laborers, because the former positions must have greater builtin economic incentives to motivate the most highly talented to undertake the costly educational sacrifice necessary for those jobs. Social inequality, in other words, was not the result of the exploitation of one part of society by another and therefore a thing to be abhorred, but merely the system through which society unconsciously placed its most talented members into the most functionally important roles, without which society would be imperiled.
Among the more prominent early responses to Davis and Moore was that of Melvin Tumin (1919–1994), who argued that “functional importance” is an ideological construct. Power, he insisted, is a better measure of who gets ahead, such that the result of stratification, far from tracking the most talented people to the top, actually strangles talent at the bottom, making stratification deeply dysfunctional. Later Lipset and Reinhard Bendix (1916– 1991) showed conclusively that the belief in upward mobility far exceeded the actual rate in the United States, while Peter Blau (1918–2002) and Otis Duncan (1921– 2004) introduced path analysis to demonstrate the enduring effects of parental background and schooling on occupational attainment (Tumin 1953; Lipset and Bendix 1959; Blau and Duncan 1967).
But if Davis and Moore marked the introduction of Durkheim and Weber into the functionalist approach to class, then Ralf Dahrendorf (1957), the founder of modern conflict theory, did so for Marx and Weber. Dahrendorf sought to create an alternative to Talcott Parsons’s (1902–1979) functionalist social system that could better account for internal conflict. A “Left Weberian” who saw class as fundamentally exploitative, Dahrendorf argued that Marx’s focus on property as the ultimate marker of class was limited, especially in light of the control exercised by nonowner managers. Property and the coercive extraction of surplus value were for him subordinate forms of a more general social relation, authority, which served as the basis of binary “class conflict” in a variety of social settings including, but not limited to, industrial production. Dahrendorf, however, was criticized for expanding the meaning of class so far beyond the economic realm as to make the term meaningless (see, for example, Coser 1960).
Responding to Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979), whose Political Power and Social Classes (1973) identified a “new petty bourgeoisie,” Erik Olin Wright (1978, 1997) argued that a new class of white-collar workers had emerged as a result of elaborate organizational hierarchies and the separation of ownership from directive control of large industrial corporations (Giddens and Held 1982). Workers and owners continued to occupy diametrically opposed class positions, but white-collar workers had come to occupy “contradictory class locations” in which the latter enjoyed some degree or combination of autonomy, skill, and authority on the job. Though critics have argued that Wright smuggled Weber into his Marxist framework by expanding the basis of class location beyond exploitation and production, Wright nevertheless found a dividing line between white-collar employees who identify more with labor and those who identify more with capital, thus articulating a bourgeois-proletarian divide for a new age.
TWO CHALLENGES
In the aftermath of the Soviets’ repression of democratic movements in Hungary (1956–1957) and Czechoslovakia (1968–1969), class analysis and in particular Marxism were assailed on several fronts both for what was seen as the perversion of Marx’s humanist vision by state-sponsored socialism and for the exclusion of non-class-based identities, inequalities, and movements from public discourse. With respect to the latter, Frank Parkin (1979), another Left Weberian like Dahrendorf, criticized structural Marxism’s assumption of internally homogeneous classes, as well as its inability to account for the enforcement of social boundaries between elites and workers. As an alternative, Parkin advanced the concept of “social closure,” the process by which social collectivities, whether by class, race, gender, or a combination of these, seek either to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities (in the case of elites) or to usurp rewards previously denied to them (in the case of nonelites).
Alberto Melucci (1980) likewise criticized the social-movement literature for emphasizing the political realm of movement activity while neglecting its nonpolitical or “social” dimensions. This, he noted, made sense in the study of working-class movements, which often have an institutionalized political arm, but did not square with women’s movements, for instance, which, in addition to struggling for political rights, also seek to address social concerns of difference and recognition and do not vie for state power. More recently, Sonya Rose (1992) has argued that gender is not a secondary by-product of class relations as Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and some Marxist feminists have suggested, but rather a central component thereof. Thus, in late nineteenth-century England, factory wages were adjusted by gender not only to the benefit of capital, but also to the benefit of men, as it reinforced a discourse of female respectability tied to the subordination of women in the household and society at large.
E. P. Thompson’s (1924–1993) critique of structural Marxism in the Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a lightning rod for emerging controversies within Marxism itself. The main point of this critique is that workers do not constitute a class because they share a similar structural position, but because they forge themselves into a class through their own language, culture, and struggle. The working class on this account is always already a conspirator in its own creation, thereby negating the analytical necessity for the in-itself/for-itself dichotomy. This challenge to the structural Marxism of Poulantzas, Perry Anderson (1980), and Louis Althusser (1971), among others, was led initially by the British cultural studies school of Thompson, Raymond Williams (1977), and sociologist Stuart Hall (1983).
Subsequent research, not all Marxist, has celebrated the agency of class actors, as in James Scott’s account of subversive everyday behavior in Weapons of the Weak (1985); the indigenous culture of workers, such as Craig Calhoun’s “reactionary revolutionaries”; and the proces-sual, as opposed to the positional, dimensions of class formation exemplified by Anthony Giddens’s concept of “structuration” and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002)“habitus” (Bourdieu 1977; Przeworski 1978; Sewell 1980; Calhoun 1983; Bourdieu 1984; Giddens 1984; Katznelson and Zolberg 1985; Fantasia 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Steinmetz 1992; Somers 1997).
For Bourdieu, as an example, class typically functions at the level of shared dispositions or habitus (e.g., tastes, bodily carriage, language), which, though stemming from certain shared material conditions, manifests itself more as a “feel for the game” than as a primarily economic relationship. One is, without the effort of reflection, a “virtuoso” in negotiating the social terrain of one’s class, very much as a professional soccer player, to use Bourdieu’s analogy, knows precisely when and with what force and curvature to kick the ball in a breakaway situation. These dispositions only emerge recognizably as “class” when crises drag the material and dispositional differences among groups from the field of the unspoken (referred to as doxa ) to the field of public opinion. Habitus, it is important to note, is not a fixed set of dispositions, but rather given to improvisation and thus to transforming the terms of class belonging. The analytical result is that class, through habitus, is neither structure nor agency, but structuring or both simultaneously.
THE FUTURE
One possible implication of this constant reworking of class is that it is no longer a workable analytical concept. Paul Kingston’s The Classless Society (2000) is among the latest in a long line of studies that question the predictive power of class in shaping mobility, culture, voting, and consciousness, among other outcomes. On the other hand, there is a movement afoot to rebuild class analysis. David Grusky and Jesper Sørensen (1998), for example, contend that class models can be made more plausible if analysts radically disaggregate occupational categories to the unit occupational level. Moreover, the eclipse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the attendant rise of neoliber-alism have put the question of class back on the table if there had ever been any doubt. Noting the deepening class polarization since the late 1970s, David Harvey (2006) has argued that neoliberalism is a failed utopian rhetoric masking a far more successful project to restore economic power to the ruling classes. Future lines of inquiry include new forms of international class formation, the evolving relationship of party to class as the institutionalized Left goes into decline, and the disappearance of wage-based employment and thus of the very basis of social citizenship and welfare.
SEE ALSO Bahro, Rudolf; Bourdieu, Pierre; Bureaucracy; Capitalism; Class Conflict; Durkheim, Émile; Elites; False Consciousness; Feudal Mode of Production; Feudalism; Habitus; Hierarchy; Labor; Labor Theory of Value; Left and Right; Marx, Karl; Mode of Production; New Class, The; Oligarchy; Poulantzas, Nicos; Power Elite; Ricardo, David; Slave Mode of Production; Smith, Adam; Stratification; Surplus; Thompson, Edward P.; Weber, Max; Working Class
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Cedric de Leon
Class and Crime
CLASS AND CRIME
The longstanding controversy over the importance of social class in the production of criminal conduct is often an argument over the meaning of class and the measurement of crime. Criminal conduct is far from a unitary phenomenon. In general, for a crime to be committed, there must be some intentional conduct that is prohibited by a criminal law. Occasionally, the law may require specific conduct such as filing a tax return. Under these circumstances, a lawmaking body can create a link between class and crime simply by making rules designed to control the conduct of the rich or the poor. If the legislature creates a law making it a crime to be found in public without money or a permanent address, they will have created a link between poverty and crime. If they make it a crime to engage in "insider trading" on the stock market, they will have created a crime that is almost certain to involve those with access to management decisions that might change stock prices. This kind of law would create a link between wealth and crime.
Definition of crime
Although official definitions of crime are legislative, in practice crime is defined by administrative policies and enforcement practices. While most crime is some form of theft or assault and most of it results in physical harm or property loss for individuals, there are crimes where no loss of property is involved and no injury is inflicted on others. Enforcement policies and practices will determine who is arrested for such crimes. The areas in which these offenses are perpetrated, as well as the prior income and employment status of prison and jail inmates suggest that drug laws and laws against gambling and prostitution have generally worked against the poor more than they have against the rich.
Those who study crime and delinquency also define crime. The definition of crime was greatly expanded when criminologists began asking people to report their own illegal or improper behavior. In some of the early self-report studies, conduct that is only illegal when minors do it was defined as criminal (Nye and Short). In some self-report studies conduct was defined as delinquent even when it was so common than almost everyone could be classified as delinquent. At the other extreme, criminologists have classified some conduct as criminal that does not violate existing law. These writers believe that all forms of economic exploitation, racial discrimination, or creation of unsafe or unhealthy work environments are harmful and should be made criminal. Because they define such conduct as criminal, they argue that crime is evenly distributed across class levels or that it is linked to upper class status (Pepinsky and Jesilow).
Measuring crime
Some measures of crime are based on police, court, correctional, or official survey reports. These efforts produce information on victims and offenders. Reports of offenses known to the police and victimization survey results provide victim-based information. However, such victim information is sometimes used to infer offender characteristics. On occasion, victim-based measures are simply treated as if the offender-victim distinction is unimportant. That is, the focus on victims in such studies is never mentioned. Occasionally, offender information, such as that provided by the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) program or by police reports of arrests, is used to modify victim information. A few studies have used arrest data in combination with offenses known to the police to create race-specific offense rates (Sampson; Ousey). More often, offender information is used to look at offender characteristics or the relationship between victims and offenders (Chilton and Jarvis). It is sometimes used to compute rates for studies that examine the relationship of offense rates to other economic and social characteristics of urban areas.
A different set of crime measures are created when interviews or questionnaires are used to ask people about crimes they have committed. Those asked about their criminal conduct can be juveniles or adults, male or female. They may live in the same community or be part of a national sample. The measures of crime used in such studies vary widely. Respondents may be asked to select, from a list, offenses they have committed at some point in their lives or at some time during the last year. They may or may not be asked about the frequency with which they have engaged in such conduct. The acts presented range from very minor offenses, or offenses that are only illegal for children, to very serious offenses. Measures of crime are sometimes created by counting the number of different types of crime reported and sometimes by using the frequency of crimes reported or by counting specific offenses such as assault or burglary.
Definition of class
In addition to issues of the definition and measurement of crime, disagreements about the meaning and measurement of social class make it difficult to conclude whether or not class is linked to crime. Looking at social class categories as essentially a matter of differences in wealth and income, we can say in a general way that those who own a great deal of property and have high incomes are rich or upper class; those who own little or nothing and have low incomes are poor or lower class. Beyond this general notion the issue is quickly complicated. No commonly accepted set of classes exists. And a wide variety of gradational scales designed to measure social class have been developed. Self-report studies generally use reports of parent's occupation to create social class scores. At least one self-report study of adults asked for work information and used it to assign each respondent to a specific social class depending on his or her business ownership and employee or employer status (Dunaway et al.).
Studies of geographic distribution are more likely to infer the social class of an area based on measures that reflect the income and assets of those living in the area. Measures often used are the median income of the residents of each area, the proportion of home ownership, the median value of homes, median rent, the proportion of the population in poverty, median education, and the prevalence of dilapidated housing. Variations on these indications of area wealth and deprivation are sometimes used. Results vary according to the measures used and their construction and, more often, according to the size of the areas used—census tracts, cities, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), or states. An additional complication in discussions of the social class of geographic areas arises because it is possible to see people as rich or poor in either an absolute or relative sense. This has produced studies of inequality and crime in addition to, and sometimes instead of, poverty and crime. In such an approach the emphasis is on the gap between those with high incomes and those with low incomes.
Early work
For the first half of the twentieth century, the question of the link between class and crime was examined in three basic ways. First, investigators looked at the impact of economic conditions on crime rates, asking if crime increases with an economic downturn. A basic assumption in this approach was that poor economic conditions are harder on the poor than the middle class and that this produces increased crime. A second approach examined the social class of prisoners or others formally identified as offenders to ask about the social class backgrounds of people convicted of crime. Generally, convicts were and are poor. In a third approach, crime rates for specific geographic areas were compared with a set of social and economic characteristics of the areas. These studies asked if areas with indications of high poverty rates and low social class were also areas with high crime rates. In general the answers to this question were yes. All three of these approaches probably influenced the development of theories either attempting to explain the reasons for the class-crime relationship or assuming such a relationship (Merton; Cohen; Cloward and Ohlin).
Some of the earliest empirical efforts to study class and crime used measures of the general economic conditions of regions of a country in combination with official crime rates for the regions to ask if poor economic conditions were associated with high crime rates (Bonger). Although those carrying out these studies often found that poor regions had high crime rates, they also found poor regions in which the crime rates were low. This led Bonger to conclude that the gap in income and wealth between the rich and poor might be more important than the overall poverty or affluence of an area.
When similar studies were done for areas within cities in the early decades of the twentieth century, most suggested a clear link between crime or delinquency rates and the social and economic characteristics of urban areas. By the 1940s there was general agreement that both property crimes and crimes of violence were higher in areas with low average incomes, high transiency, low educational achievement, and high unemployment (Shaw and McKay).
In addition, examinations of the characteristics of prisoners during the first half of the twentieth century indicated that a disproportionate percentage were poor, uneducated, and unemployed before incarceration (Glueck and Glueck). In general, most of these early examinations suggested there was a class-crime link. Moreover, since the relationship could be interpreted as showing that poverty and unemployment produced much ordinary crime, the findings at the early studies were consistent with conclusions reached by a number of philosophers and social thinkers.
Shifts in focus
In the 1940s and 1950s there was a shift in focus in criminology. The first aspect of the shift came when Edwin Sutherland introduced the notion of "white collar crime" to call attention to offenses committed by high status people in conjunction with their occupations. As he saw it, this occurred in two ways. Some high status individuals, acting alone, engaged in large-scale theft by embezzlement or fraud. In addition, groups of high status individuals, acting in concert, engaged in what he called "corporate crime." This frequently involved corporate efforts to reduce competition through some form of price-fixing. It sometimes involved the intentional manufacture and sale of toxic or dangerous products. Thus, "white collar crime" shifted the focus from the poor to the wealthy and is sometimes used to argue against the notion that poverty increases most forms of crime.
A second shift in focus came at about the same time when some criminologists fixed their attention on young people and on middle-class delinquency. Two research procedures were important in this shift. One was the development of self-reported crime studies (Nye and Short). The other was the use of techniques that required researchers to spend time with and observe the actions of middle-class young people. Both of these developments led investigators to conclude that there was a great deal of unreported criminal and delinquent conduct committed by middle-class children. Interest in the observation of middle-class children waned but interest in confessional studies was strong in the 1960s and 1970s and remained strong through the end of the century.
Almost all of the self-report studies used samples of young people in school who were assured of anonymity. Some national samples of minors were selected along with a few studies of adults. In some studies, the children were interviewed more than once and some were followed into adulthood. Most of these studies found weak or nonexistent links between social class and juvenile delinquency or crime. However, some studies using national samples to measure the frequency of self-reported delinquency found that lower-class youth reported nearly four times as many offenses as middle-class youth and one and one-half times as many as working-class youth (Elliott and Ageton).
In trying to reconcile the conflicting results of a number of individual-level confessional studies with those comparing area characteristics with area crime rates, some questioned the accuracy, representativeness, and scope of the surveys. Others played down or ignored the problems presented by the survey approach and concluded that the impact of social class on crime was a myth (Tittle, Villemez, and Smith).
In 1979, John Braithwaite published a careful review of a large number of area and confessional studies and a balanced discussion of the advantages and limitations of each. After reviewing studies carried out through the mid-1970s, he concluded that lower-class children and adults commit the types of crime handled by the police at higher rates than middle-class children and adults. On the "myth" of the class-crime relationship, he warns us "be wary of reviews that pretend to be exhaustive but are in fact selective" (p. 63).
Braithwaite also discussed a related shift in focus that called attention to discrimination in the system of justice. In general, researchers focused on police or court bias and argued that most of the differences in economic background that appear when offenders were compared with people in the general population do not reflect a difference in criminal conduct but reflect biases in the operation of the system of justice. After a lengthy review, Braithwaite felt in 1979 that the tide of evidence was "turning against the assertion that there is an all-pervasive bias against the lower class offender in the criminal justice system" (p. 143).
These shifts in focus and the development of national crime victimization surveys in the 1970s prompted some criminologists to play down or dismiss official measures of crime as biased and misleading. While this approach made it easier to reject the class-crime link shown in most studies of official crime data, it created a need to rely more heavily on surveys, anecdotes, estimates, and ideology in discussions of the topic. In addition it led some to conclude that victimization surveys are more accurate sources of data on crime than police records. Such a focus ignores the great absence of information on suspects and offenders in the victimization data and the many other limitations of the approach. National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) results are reported only for the country as a whole. And only a small set of offenses are used. Even then, the sizes of the samples used make the responses on rape, for example, very shaky. No information is collected on homicide.
However, the NCVS does identify each victim's reported income. These data usually suggest that low-income respondents are more likely to report being victims of burglary and assault than high-income respondents. Unfortunately, the NCVS collects very little information on the offenders involved. Still, the social class of the victims and the characteristics of urban residential patterns suggest that the offenders are also people with low incomes.
Later work
Using slightly different kinds of analysis, studies of the geographic distribution of crime in the 1950s and 1960s generally reinforced the findings of Shaw and McKay that official delinquency rates for small urban areas were linked to indicators of poverty and disadvantage (Chilton). Research done in the last two decades of the century continued in both styles. A renewed interest in studies looking at the geographic distribution of crime produced additional evidence in support of a class-crime link. Patterson's 1991 review of twenty-two studies of poverty and crime published from 1976 to 1986 found that some of the studies used data for different sets of cities, for MSAs, and for areas within cites. Although most of the studies showed positive effects of poverty on crime, some did not. In his analysis of fifty-seven areas within Tampa, Florida, Patterson found that levels of absolute poverty were associated with higher rates of violent crime.
During the same period, some researchers using reports of individuals suggested that while social origin might play a minor role in explaining juvenile criminality, the effect of the subject's own social position is important for adult criminality (Thornberry and Farnworth). Others suggested that the correlations between self-reported delinquency and social class are weak and should be weak in part because of the offenses used and in part because traits associated with high and low social class scores are related to different kinds of crime. Responding to the general absence of studies on the impact of social class on adult crime, Dunaway and his colleagues used three different measures of social class to analyze the responses of an adult sample for a single city.
Dunaway and colleagues' "underclass" measure focused on unemployment, receiving public assistance or food stamps, or living in public housing. Another measure used income and education as gradational measures of class. Their third measure of social class focused on a respondent's business ownership and position as an employer or employee. As a measure of crime they used the total number of offenses reported when respondents were asked to check one or more offenses from a list of fifty that they might have committed over the preceding year. This approach gives equal weight to an admission of marijuana possession, illegal gambling, driving while drunk, income tax fraud, threatening to hit a family member, stealing, burglary, robbery, and assault with intent to kill.
Recognizing the problematic nature of this range of offenses, they created a separate violence measure that included some relatively minor offenses but also included serious assaults, rape, and robbery. Using the violence subset as a measure of crime, they reported an inverse relationship between crime and some of their social class measures. When the full set of offenses is used to measure crime, only income is inversely related to crime. While arguing that there was little impact of class on crime if categorical measures of class are used, they note that family income negatively affects crime by both men and women, that the results vary by race in that the class-crime relationship was stronger for white respondents than for black respondents, and that violence is related to social class when income is used to measure class.
In a New Zealand study, Wright and others report that their Socioeconomic Status Score (SES) had both a negative and a positive indirect affect on delinquency. Using data for 1,037 children born in 1972 and 1973 and reassessed eight times since birth, they found no association between parental SES and delinquency at age twenty-one before they looked at several mediating factors. They interpret this as the result of high self-reported delinquency scores for middle-class young people that are high for reasons different from the reasons for high self-reported delinquency scores of lower class young people. They argue that there can be causality without correlation.
While this may explain the results observed in many individual-level studies, another possible explanation of the conflicting results between self-report studies and area studies is the distinctly different locations of the people and situations studied. Studies of geographic location are usually carried out for urban areas, Metropolitan Statistical Areas, urban counties, cities, or census tracts. Confessional studies have frequently been carried out in small towns and areas with very small minority populations. These studies have often been unable to tap both the high and the low ends of the social class distribution. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way the two approaches deal with race. One classic self-report study dropped all black respondents from the analysis (Hirschi). Other self-report studies attempt to hold constant the impact of race. Such procedures are rare in studies of geographic areas. The area studies include minority populations in the crime counts and in the population counts. Whether the areas are census tracts, cities, or Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the populations studied are almost always urban and multiracial.
U.S. public health statistics on homicide as a cause of death indicate that this is a leading cause of death for black males (Anderson, Kochanek, and Murphy). About 40 percent of all homicide victims are black males though black males make up about 6 or 7 percent of the U.S. population (U.S. Bureau of the Census). Although the 40 percent figure has fluctuated some since 1960, the victimization rate for black males has been remarkably consistent for forty years—ranging from 33 to 49 percent. Forty percent was also the figure provided by the Uniform Crime Reports' Supplementary Homicide reports for 1995 (Snyder and Finnegan).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) also suggest that black offenders are responsible for most homicides with black victims. They suggest that 48 to 50 percent of offenders in homicide cases are black males and that most homicides are intraracial (Federal Bureau of Investigation). More importantly, black males have been overrepresented in both the victimization figures and the offender figures for over thirty-five years. During the period 1960 to 1990, the average percentage of homicide victims reported as black males was about 39 percent. In addition, the SHR offender information suggests that, on average, about 44 percent of the people reported as homicide offenders were described as black males. There is little doubt that black males are, and have for some years been, greatly overrepresented as both victims of homicide and as homicide offenders.
The traditional response to any discussion of this situation is the suggestion that these high homicide-offending rates for black males are more a function of social class than biological or cultural differences. However, it is almost as traditional to suggest that we lack sufficient information on social class to claim empirical support for the social class explanation. One way to clarify this murky situation would be through the construction of race- and gender-specific homicide rates for census tracts. Peterson and Krivo analyzed homicide victimization rates for 125 U.S. cities and found that black homicides were linked to racial segregation. Parker and McCall's city-level analysis of interracial and intraracial homicide provides another indication of the probable utility of race-specific data. Using race-specific independent variables for about one hundred U.S. cities, they conclude that economic deprivation affects the intraracial homicide rates for whites and blacks.
In a study that used arrest counts to create race-specific offense rates, Ousey reported a large gap between black and white homicide rates. The black rates were five times as high as the white rates. Although he found that measures of poverty and deprivation had an impact on both black and white homicide rates, he found that the effects of these variables were stronger for whites than for blacks. He suggests that extensive and long-term disadvantage may have produced cultural and normative adaptations that have produced this gap in the rates.
Because social status is the term used in the self-report studies wherein young people are asked about their parents' occupations and their own delinquency, it may be misleading in a discussion of race, class, and crime. Even a term such as "economic conditions" is too vague to describe the ways in which vast differences in income and assets and a pervasive system of racial separatism probably contribute to high homicide rates in some areas of U.S. central cities. For an understanding of this issue, asking why the homicide rates are so high in specific areas of U.S. cities is probably more useful than asking individuals how much crime they have committed and comparing their reports with the social class implied by reports of a parent's occupation.
The patterns of homicide rates by race suggest that the rates are probably linked to exclusion and segregation—economic, racial, and ethnic—but especially to the separation and isolation of large segments of the urban population based on income and assets. This separation is frequently based on race or ethnicity but it is increasingly linked to a combination of racial separatism and poverty. In most studies using census tracts or other relatively small areas, a concentration of the poor in areas with high homicide rates was related to low median incomes, low educational attainment, higher proportions of lowpaying occupations, unemployment, and underemployment in the areas. These indicators in turn are probably closely related to housing conditions, living arrangements, and family composition. In these same areas, additional research will probably show reduced public service facilities (parks, pools, libraries, recreation centers) and reduced expenditures for schools and possibly even for police services. In short, expanded and race-specific studies of the geographic distribution of homicide rates will probably show that areas with high homicide rates are areas with concentrations of poor individuals and poor families, regardless of race or ethnicity.
To the extent that these rates reflect the impact of exclusion, isolation, and impoverishment, a continuing focus on short-term trends will leave the extensive and persistent long-term differences unexamined and unexplained—especially the relatively stable and unusually high rates of homicide victimization and homicide offending reported for black males. To understand this long-term trend we will probably have to look to widespread practices and procedures that persist over time and continue to exclude and isolate a large number of black males from full participation in the economic, political, and social life of American society. It is in this sense that race is closely linked to class as a cause of violent crime in the United States. The class effects are compounded by racial separatism and racial discrimination.
Moreover, as John Hagan has suggested, the relationship between class and crime may be class- and crime-specific. It is also probably race- and gender-specific. He is probably also right in his assertion that not only does class have an impact on crime but some kinds of crime, or at least some responses to crime, have an impact on the social class of some offenders (Sampson and Laub). This is why he is right in his assessment that "the simple omission of class from the study of crime would impoverish criminology."
All of this suggests that the class-crime relationship will continue to generate research, comment, and debate well into the twenty-first century. As more of the research on this issue is focused on specific offenses and specific types of offenses, there may be greater coherence in the results than is now available. The development of standard measures of social class and greater attention to the kinds of questions being asked when using officially aggregated information as distinct from the kinds of questions asked in cohort or confessional studies may reduce some of the confusion surrounding the issue. However, the issue will remain controversial for reasons unrelated to scholarship or social research because of the implications for social policy suggested by any set of clear conclusions in one direction or the other.
Roland Chilton
See also Crime Causation: Biological Theories; Crime Causation: Economic Theories; Crime Causation: Political Theories; Crime Causation: Psychological Theories; Crime Causation: Sociological Theories; Education and Crime; Gender and Crime; Race and Crime; Unemployment and Crime; White-Collar Crime: History of an Idea.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Robert N., Kochanek, Kenneth D.; and Murphy, Sherry L. Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1995. Vol. 45, no. 11, supplement 2. Monthly Vital Statistics Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 1997.
Bonger, William A. Criminality and Economic Conditions. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916.
Braithwaite, John. Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
Chilton, Robert. "Delinquency Area Research in Baltimore, Detroit, and Indianapolis." American Sociological Review 29, no. 1 (1964): 71–83.
Chilton, Robert, and Jarvis, John. "Using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to Test Estimates of Arrestee and Offender Characteristics." Journal of Quantitative Criminology 15, no. 2 (1999): 207–224.
Cloward, Richard A., and Ohlin, Lloyd E. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. New York: The Free Press, 1960.
Cohen, Albert K. Delinquent Boys. New York: The Free Press, 1955.
Dunaway, R. gregory; Cullen, Francis T.; Burton, Jr., Velmer S.; and Evans, T. David. "The Myth of Social Class and Crime Revisited: An Examination of Class and Adult Criminality." Criminology 38, no. 2 (2000): 589–632.
Elliott, Delbert S., and Ageton, Suzanne S. "Reconciling the Differences in Estimates of Delinquency." American Sociological Review 45, no. 1 (1980): 95–110.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960–1996.
Glueck, Sheldon, and Glueck, Eleanor T. 500 Criminal Careers. 1939. Reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1965.
Hagan, John. "The Poverty of a Classless Criminology—The American Society of Criminology 1991 Presidential Address." Criminology 30, no. 1 (1992): 1–19.
Hirschi, Travis. Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Kovandzic, Tomislav V.; Vieraitis, Lynne M.; and Yeisley, Mark R. "The Structural Covariates of Urban Homicide: Reassessing the Impact of Income Inequality and Poverty in the Post-Reagan Era." Criminology 36, no. 3 (1998): 569–600.
Merton, Robert K. "Social Structure and Anomie." American Sociological Review 3 (October 1938): 672–682.
Nye, F. Ivan, and Short, James F. "Scaling Delinquent Behavior." American Sociological Review 22, no. 3 (1957): 326–331.
Ousey, Graham C. "Homicide, Structural Factors, and the Racial Invariance Assumption." Criminology 37, no. 2 (1999): 405–426.
Parker, Karen F., and Patricia L. M. "Adding Another Piece to the Inequality and Crime Homicide Puzzle: The Impact of Structural Inequality on Racially Disaggregated Homicide Rates." Homicide Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 35–60.
Patterson, E. Britt. "Poverty, Income Inequality, and Community Crime Rates." Criminology 29, no. 4 (1991): 755–776.
Pepinsky, Harold E., and Jesilow, Paul. Myths That Cause Crime. Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1992.
Peterson, Ruth D., and Krivo, Lauren J. "Racial Segregation and Black Urban Homicide." Social Forces 71, no. 4 (1993): 1001–1026.
Sampson, Robert J. "Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness and Family Disruption." American Journal of Sociology 93, no. 2 (1987): 348–382.
Sampson, Robert J., and Laub, J. "Stability and Change in Crime and Delinquency over the Life Course: The Salience of Adult Social Bonds." American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 609–627.
Shaw, Clifford R., and Mckay, H. D. Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.
Snyder, Howard, and Finnegan, Terrence A. Easy Access to the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980–1994. Data Presentation and Analysis Package. Washington, D.C.: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1996.
Sutherland, Edwin H. "White Collar Criminality." American Sociological Review 5, no. 1 (1940): 1–12.
Thornberry, Terence P., and Farnworth, Margaret. "Social Correlates of Criminal Involvement: Further Evidence on the Relationship Between Social Status and Criminal Behavior." American Sociological Review 47, no. 4 (1982): 505–518.
Tittle, Charles R.; Villemez, Wayne A.; and Smith, Douglas A. "The Myth of Social Class and Criminality: An Empirical Assessment of the Empirical Evidence." The American Sociological Review 43, no. 5 (1978): 643–656.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1994. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995.
Wright, Bradley R. E. et al. "Reconsidering the Relationship between SES and Delinquency: Causation but Not Correlation." Criminology 37, no. 1 (1999): 175–194.
Class
Class
WORKING-CLASS ENTERTAINMENTCHALLENGES TO THE CLASS STRUCTURE
DISCUSSING CLASS DURING THE COLD WAR
CINEMA IN THE AGE OF LATE CAPITALISM
FURTHER READING
"Class" is a term used to categorize people according to their economic status. It frequently involves a consideration of income level, type of profession, inherited wealth and family lineage, and a diffusely understood idea of "social standing." Historically, most societies have made distinctions among their members according to some kind of class division—although capitalist cultures promote the idea of being "classless" societies (as in the concept of the "American Dream" that individuals can rise in station based on their ability alone). Motion pictures have been intricately involved in issues of class and modern capitalism, emerging as both a technology and as a form of entertainment at the height of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, and subsequently becoming one of the most powerful market-driven businesses of the twentieth century. Representations of class division on screen have been joined with the history of labor negotiations in the industry, and even attitudes toward the class identities of filmgoers over time. While the dominant Hollywood film industry has largely attempted (whether consciously or not) to soft-pedal its messages about class, various historical eras and film movements across the globe have attempted not only to raise class consciousness but also to encourage social change.
Often discussion of class is caught up within a film's discussion of more manifest social concerns. For example, issues of class disparity tend to be threaded through examinations of gender and sexuality. Hollywood screwball comedies like It Happened One Night (1934) and Easy Living (1937) often frame antagonism between the classes as a rocky (but ultimately resolvable) heterosexual romance between a person of wealth and an average worker. Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936) details the economic power relations of the geisha system in 1930s Japan, but is often regarded as a film about gender oppression. Similarly, depictions of the working class or the poor are also often depictions of a country's ethnic or racial minorities—thus (whether intentionally or not) obscuring the discussion of the economic system with a discussion of racial discrimination (or conversely, an assertion that such people are inferior and thus deserving of—and perhaps even content—being poor).
Such obfuscations seem to reinforce Marxist ideas of base and superstructure—that the economic imperative forms the base of both a society and its ideology, with various other systems (such as concepts of gender and of race/ethnicity) built like a superstructure upon that base. The development of cinema as a capitalist enterprise has tended to lead to the production of films that repeatedly construct superstructural representations that uphold and celebrate capitalism, and any potential downsides to capitalism must be reworked and redirected.
WORKING-CLASS ENTERTAINMENT
Many of the early motion picture pioneers were influenced by the great strides of invention occurring during the Industrial Revolution. While such inventions were touted as bringing easier and more comfortable lives to humankind, profit potential also helped drive many of these developments. New machines helped streamline production, churning out more items in less time for less cost (unless one counts the loss of hearing, limbs, and/or lives in factories that had no safety codes). Inventors with patents could corner the market on their invention and make a fortune. Certainly, such potential economic gain drew Thomas Edison (1847–1931) to research motion pictures and then ruthlessly try to control all the major patents of the technology.
The presumed audience for motion pictures became a matter of contention in the early decades. Edison's Kinetoscope parlors were often situated near boardwalks or amusement parks, low-cost entertainment for the new industrial urban working class. These early films seem geared toward what was thought to be popular with the working class: cockfights, boxing matches, female "cooch" dancers. On the other side of the Atlantic, though, the Lumière Brothers (Auguste [1862–1954] and Louis [1864–1948]) seemed to hypothesize a middle-class audience by making short films depicting the life of the French bourgeoisie: respectable men and women in their homes or their gardens or in town. Similarly, the British gentlemen that became known as "the Brighton school" also centered their films on middle-class lives—even to the extent of imaging the poor as vagrants intent on stealing babies from bourgeois families, as in Rescued by Rover (1905).
Cinema in the United States, though, became associated with immigrants and the working class. A number of early short narratives even sided with the poor, with films such as The Kleptomaniac (1905) and A Corner in Wheat (1909) comparing the suffering of the working class to the mendacity and privilege of the wealthy. Increasingly, middle-class reformers attempted to shut down nickelodeons as dens of iniquity filled with lowlifes and illegal activity. As a consequence, the 1910s saw the industry concertedly wooing middle-class customers, especially since they had more potential spending money. Penny-ante nickelodeons gave rise to motion picture palaces that spoke of luxury and refinement. Filmmakers aimed at legitimacy by adapting great novels or plays, spending more money on costumes and sets, and hiring major theatrical stars. The rise of narrative filmmaking during this time also tended to favor plots that reinforced middle-class morality. In particular, popular American cinema began invoking the Horatio Alger narrative of "rags to riches," supporting the idea that democracy meant a free-market economy that would reward anyone with enough energy and determination. The success of such silent comedians as Buster Keaton (1895–1966), Harold Lloyd (1893–1971), and Harry Langdon (1884–1944) were predicated on little guys succeeding against all odds. Cinderella stories of shopgirls finding love and marriage with a millionaire also became popular. The Horatio Alger narrative works to obscure the existence of class division by suggesting the ease in which someone of meager means can rise in society (even if statistics may indicate otherwise in the actual world).
The success of Hollywood cinema, both in the United States and then around the world, guaranteed that its Horatio Alger formula would be widely imitated. Yet films in other countries subtly worked to reinforce a more established class system during the first half of the century. British cinema, for example, often reinforced the barriers between the working class and the gentry by associating national identity with upper-class culture: fox hunting, the manor-born, and gentility. Working-class people were often depicted as slightly foolish, yet happy with their lot in life serving their betters. (Perhaps the greater awareness of class disparity in British culture made the US films of British-born Charles Chaplin [1889–1977] in his Tramp persona a rare exception to the Horatio Alger plots that dominated Hollywood cinema.) Similarly, early Indian cinema consistently reinforced the lines between classes, offering cautionary melodramas of individuals who dared to consider stepping outside their proscribed positions. Since the under-classes still made up the majority of the filmgoing public in these countries, such narratives worked to keep them reconciled to their place in the social structure.
Mainstream film narratives in many countries also emphasized glamour and wealth, reveling in high production values as men and women wearing high fashion lived in glorious mansions or penthouses. Such films, whether consciously or not, made the lives of the well-to-do seem more important and more desirable—and, by omission, made the lives of the poor or working class seem unimportant and inferior.
The efforts by the industry to move into middle-class respectability was also mirrored in the shift from a penny-ante concern to a thriving big business with a factory-like system. Most obviously in Hollywood, but also in countries such as Great Britain, China, India, and Japan, studios were established that placed workers on a hierarchy as a film went through a virtual conveyor belt of production. Studio executives worked strenuously to maintain total control over their workforce, and used every means at their disposal to keep workers from unionizing. At the same time, though, Hollywood public relations promoted the American film industry as itself an example of the Horatio Alger myth—a tale of immigrants rising to become the heads of major studios, or little nobodies being discovered for stardom on the silver screen.
CHALLENGES TO THE CLASS STRUCTURE
While various national cinemas strove to shed their reputation as "working-class" entertainment, Soviet cinema of the 1920s strove to strengthen and deepen the connection between cinema and the workers. The Soviet leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin himself considered cinema to be the most important art form—specifically because of its ability to attract and speak to the proletariat. As a consequence, Soviet cinema focused directly on drawing audiences out of "false consciousness" in order to make them class conscious, and to energize the socialist revolution. Filmmaker Dziga Vertov's (1896–1954) concept of the kino-eye theorized how the technology and aesthetics of cinema could expand human perception and consciousness. Director Sergei Eisenstein's (1898–1948) ideas of dialectical montage were also founded on attempting to broaden the mind's comprehension of the social order instead of simply acquiescing to the ideological precepts of either monarchy's "divine right" or the demands of capitalism. Unlike the typical Horatio Alger story that focused on individual heroes, Soviet films tended to focus on group protagonists—the crew of the Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), or the villagers in Zemlya (Earth, 1930). Unfortunately, by the 1930s, the regime of Josef Stalin (1924–1953) mandated a shift from a cinema that consistently challenged audiences to think for themselves to a cinema of "Socialist Realism" that championed the working class but attempted to keep workers docile and obedient.
Although Soviet silent cinema was the most obvious counter-argument to Hollywood's celebration of capitalist materialism, a number of German kammerspiel films in the 1920s, such as Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), acknowledged the disparity between the haves and the have-nots in a country dealing with rampant inflation and poverty after World War I. The rest of Europe and the United States was hit with economic hard times when the Depression began as the decade came to a close. The sudden collapse of stocks, credit, and jobs shook many people's faith in capitalism. Although the Hollywood studios usually support the status quo that helps keep them empowered, Hollywood films of the early 1930s were at times shockingly critical of capitalism. Exposés like Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) depicted the failure of the American Dream, usually showing the system of law and government working for big business and against the common citizen. The rise of gangster films glorifying life outside the law also had audiences empathizing with rebellion against the establishment.
Such criticisms in Hollywood films waned by the mid-1930s and the start of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal (1933). A limited expansion of socialist ideas (social security, farm subsidies, work programs) created a new sense of optimism in the United States, and Hollywood films capitulated by reviving the Horatio Alger narrative. Most prominently, the films of director Frank Capra (1897–1991)—notably Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)—have become iconic in their upholding of the American Dream. Even the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's (1902–1968) The Grapes of Wrath (1940) shifted from a depiction of the failure of American capitalism to a story that glorified the determination of the American family. Late 1930s Hollywood films were a return to escapist fantasy—literally, in films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939)—helping audiences forget their woes. A similar pattern emerged in Europe. Alexander Korda (1893–1956) produced high-class costume epics in Britain. A "cinema of distraction," with sophisticated ladies and their white telephones, became prominent in Italian, German, and French cinema. One of the few trends in 1930s European cinema that regularly depicted the underclass was French Poetic Realism, although many of these films tended to tell stories with an air of romanticized fatalism rather than incisive analysis.
Documentaries in the latter half of the Depression also worked to support the opinion that the established system could solve economic hardship without needing a revolution. US documentaries such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) acknowledge the crisis, but end with a rousing tribute to American know-how. The British documentaries of John Grierson's (1898–1972) GPO Film Unit also tended to support the strength and success of the Empire and its industries in films like Song of Ceylon (1934), Housing Problems (1935), and Night Mail (1936). In their own way, Nazi German news-reels and documentaries, such as Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), also asserted that national strength would overcome economic suffering, even as they also blamed such hardship on Jews and communists.
To a certain extent, the outbreak of war throughout Europe and Asia diminished the discussion of class issues, as diverse strata came together to fight the enemy. Films about the war in a number of countries often showed characters from various backgrounds working side by side in shared cause. Maiagaru Jonetsu (Soaring Passion, Japan, 1941), In Which We Serve (UK, 1942), and Bataan (US, 1943) are representative of this trend. After the war, though, awareness of economic disparity grew in many countries. Italian filmmakers in particular began documenting the hardships in recovering from the war through a series of fictional films shot in an almost-documentary style that was soon referred to as neorealism. Throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Italian neorealist films like Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Umberto D (1952) covered the struggles of the disenfranchised. By emphasizing long takes, long shots, and depth of focus, everything on-screen in a neorealist film seemed equally important, instead of Hollywood's use of close-ups and shallow focus to force attention on the glamorous lead actors. The international acclaim that these films received led to strains of neo-realism in other countries, such as West Germany (Die Mörder sind unter uns [Murderers Among Us, 1946],) Mexico (Los Olvidados [The Young and the Damned, 1950]), and Spain (Muerte de un ciclista [Death of a Cyclist, 1955]). In the United States, social problem films such as Force of Evil (1948) or film noir such as Double Indemnity (1944) also critiqued the greed and desperation of individuals trapped by their social standing. By the end of the 1950s, British film (as well as theater and literature) moved away from stories of the posh upper-crust to tales of the working class. The "kitchen sink realism" of films like Look Back in Anger (1958) and
MIKE LEIGH
b. Salford, England, 20 February 1943
Mike Leigh's films consistently focus on the British class system, particularly the working class. Often, issues of class are intertwined with concepts of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity as well. Many critics link his work back to the "kitchen-sink realism" of British cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Others, though, point out how Leigh emphasizes the performativity of life (possibly due to his background in theater), often by exposing the Secrets & Lies (1996) that people hide behind their public facades. In this way, concepts of class identity (as well as other forms of identity) are exposed as social constructions. Most particularly, this is expressed through the characterization of individuals who have forsaken their working-class backgrounds—as in High Hopes (1988), Secrets & Lies, and Career Girls (1997).
After his first theatrical film, Bleak Moments (1971), Leigh worked almost exclusively in television for the next fifteen years. Films such as High Hopes and Life Is Sweet (1990) reintroduced him to film audiences. His films match his TV work in following the everyday events and actions of ordinary or marginalized people. The sense of realism is often accomplished through a lack of fancy camerawork or editing, and through sudden swings from comedy to trauma and back again. Also, protagonists are not always likable—particularly in Naked (1993), about a truly Angry Young Man railing at all of society—and often are shown displaying contradictory reactions.
Rather than pontificating on the ideological implications of the average worker's plight, Leigh's films dramatize the efficacy of socialism through stories of communities learning to support each other (or of the tragedy of individuals cast adrift). Leigh's working method also emphasizes group effort; he develops scripts with his cast in an improvisational atmosphere before setting the dialogue down in stone (a technique that also helps the sense of realism). As microcosms of working-class communities, families figure strongly in Leigh's films, as in Life Is Sweet, Secrets & Lies, All or Nothing (2002) and Vera Drake (2004). Familial relationships create much of the friction within these narratives as gender roles, generational viewpoints, and economic aspirations collide. Yet the families are shown working to overcome those disputes—and they often come together to withstand oppression from outside forces. Even Leigh's high-gloss biography of musical theater songwriters Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999), pictures the duo as a professional family that alternately squabbled with and cared for each other. Leigh's use of family dynamics makes it easy for most viewers to sympathize with the characters, even when they display unlikable qualities. Combining such dynamics with moments of laughter and tears, Leigh's films use emotion rather than rhetoric to portray the lives of the working class.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004)
FURTHER READING
Carney, Ray. The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Jones, Edward Trostle. All or Nothing: The Cinema of Mike Leigh. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
Movshovitz, Howie, ed. Mike Leigh: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Sean Griffin
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) depicted the hardships and frustrations of working class youth.
DISCUSSING CLASS DURING THE COLD WAR
The post–World War II period also saw discussion of class reframed by the simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union espoused socialist rhetoric criticizing the class divisions of Western capitalism, life in the USSR and its sphere of influence was itself often severely stratified between the haves and the have-nots. Anyone who dared to acknowledge such economic disparity was in danger of investigation, imprisonment, torture, and/or death. Such threats did not stop some filmmakers in eastern European countries, such as Jiri Menzel (b. 1938) in Czechoslovakia and Andrzej Wajda (b. 1926) in Poland, from presenting Soviet-dominated society as one that suppressed individual liberty more than it eradicated power hierarchies. These efforts usually led to crackdowns. Soviet-style communism was not alone in such censorship. In the late 1960s, China's Cultural Revolution effectively shut down the film industry entirely because it was considered too Western-influenced, and many filmmakers were imprisoned or went missing.
It is important to recognize, though, that in the United States attempts to discuss capitalism critically were often met with similar suspicions of treason. Many filmmakers who had made social problem films about economic injustice found themselves investigated by the federal government as communist spies or sympathizers. Throughout the 1950s, an era of paranoia reigned within the film industry as studio executives agreed to blacklist any worker suspected of having communist ties. While potentially imperiling Hollywood as a whole, the Red Scare affected the power of the industry's labor unions most of all, weakening the ability for collective bargaining that had been hard-won during the Depression.
Social problem films in Hollywood ebbed in favor of mega-budget spectaculars that promoted happiness and fulfillment through consumerism. Bigger was better in Hollywood in the 1950s—bigger sets, bigger crowds of extras, even bigger screens with the advent of CinemaScope. Such a drift to escapist celebrations of conspicuous materialism occurred throughout most of Europe by the end of the 1950s. With US support behind the scenes, the Socialist Party in Italy was voted out of power, and an "Economic Miracle" began. The new government was outspoken in its criticism of how neorealism portrayed Italian society, and by the end of the decade neorealism had been replaced by high-gloss sex comedies and big-budget peplum (sword and sandal) films. The United Kingdom also saw the rise of an affluent society during the 1960s, and the image of the "angry young man" was succeeded by the icon of James Bond, who reveled in high-tech gadgets, casinos, and "shaken, not stirred" martinis.
Yet, even as much of "First World" cinema seemed to manifestly promote what capitalism had to offer, some films also suggested problems that lay beneath such effusiveness. Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s sometimes hinted at a simmering dissatisfaction—a feeling that money and material goods were not bringing happiness. Italian directors such as Federico Fellini (1920–1993) (La Dolce Vita [1960]) and Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912) (L'Avventura [1960]) portrayed the Economic Miracle as having created a shallow, soulless society. The films of the French New Wave also seemed to rebel against what was portrayed as the stifling values of bourgeois society.
Such attitudes toward First World capitalism became even more attenuated in the various national cinemas that emerged in newly postcolonial Third World countries. As many in these officially independent countries realized their continued psychological, cultural, and economic dependency on the West, they began to call for strategies of resistance. Throughout the 1960s, various film movements matched the growing radical political ideas of the Third World. Brazil's Cinema Novo described itself as an "aesthetics of hunger," for example, attempting to provide a voice for the peasant underclass against growing modernization and Western imperialism. Calls for an "imperfect cinema" in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, or for a type of guerrilla cinema termed "Third Cinema" by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando E. Solanas (b. 1936) and Octavio Getino (b. 1935), similarly attempted to divest themselves from dependence on Hollywood imperialist techniques. Many revolutionary filmmakers also sought to develop alternative or underground systems of production, distribution, and exhibition that were not motivated by the potential for profit.
Radical cinema began to make its presence felt in the United States and western Europe by the late 1960s, as countercultural factions began to swell within the population. Occurrences across the globe in 1968—the events of May in Paris and the riots during the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, as well as uprisings in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan—showed a widespread resistance to the establishment. Many individuals "dropped out" of the economy, creating communes and protesting government policies and business practices. A number of underground and leftist film-makers began producing experimental films and documentaries that challenged and critiqued what often was referred to at the time as the West's "military-industrial complex." Collectives such as Newsreel in the United States and the Dziga Vertov Group in France sought not only to provide alternative content but also alternative stylistics, production methods, and exhibition practices. Much like Soviet cinema of the 1920s or revolutionary Third World cinema of the 1960s, such films used alienation devices to snap viewers out of "false consciousness" and to make them aware and critical of both class division and its attendant ideologies (such as racism, sexism, and militarism). Going to an underground screening itself could feel like a radical act of resistance.
With younger audiences opting for underground or foreign films and older audiences often staying home to watch television, the Hollywood studios suffered major economic setbacks by the end of the 1960s. Desperate to find an audience, the studios began to address the concerns of the counterculture. Films like Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), and Mean Streets (1973) attempted to show the emptiness of the American Dream and the drama of the working class. Studios also began distributing low-budget blaxploitation films that exposed the trials and tribulations that faced America's inner-city African American population (albeit with extensive violence and sex included). Such attempts were not exclusive to US cinema, however. Japanese New Wave directors of the 1960s often voiced the aggravations of a younger generation in the midst of rapid modernization and Westernization. Nihon No Yoru To Kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, Nagisa Oshima, 1960) and Buta To Gunkan (Pigs and Battleships, Shohei Imamura, 1961) are examples of such Japanese New Wave films. New German Cinema (such as Angst essen Seele auf [Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974], Stroszek [1977] and Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979]) often critiqued the effects of modern capitalism on West Germany. The German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) in particular commonly invoked Hollywood melodramas and "white telephone films" but in an overly stylized manner in order to lay bare their issues of class (as well as race, gender, and sexuality issues).
CINEMA IN THE AGE OF LATE CAPITALISM
While the politically engaged cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s attempted to address social issues such as economic oppression, it turned out that most of those who could be defined as "oppressed" preferred to watch escapist films that helped them forget their hardships. By the mid-1970s, the Hollywood film industry had resurrected itself with a number of blockbuster films that revived old formulas and genres. Audiences flocked to pictures such as The Godfather (1972), Jaws (1975), and Star Wars (1977) not for their political critiques (which some analysts have pointed out) but for their ability to provide simple entertainment. Among the formulas dusted off and repackaged was the Horatio Alger narrative. In Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977), working-class men make better lives for themselves through sheer determination and hard work, with little-to-no discussion of the institutionalized forces that, in the real world, work to inhibit such mobility. Such optimistic messages would continue in popular American film for the rest of the century, from teen comedies such as Risky Business (1983) or Pretty in Pink (1986) to biopics such as Erin Brockovich (2000) or Ray (2004).
Certain trends in European cinema also began celebrating old-fashioned ideas of glamorous wealth and happy workers. Most particularly, the rise of British "heritage films" exuded nostalgia for the era before World War I, reveling in well-groomed manor grounds, lavishly appointed drawing rooms, and tuxedos and satin ball gowns. A number of similarly glossy films from other countries, such as Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, Italy, 1989), Mediterraneo (Italy, 1991), Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Mexico, 1992), and Belle Epoque (Spain, 1993) portrayed peasant life in a golden hue of romanticism. Such films often seemed like cinematic postcards, packaging the country (and its quaint working-class customs) for tourists to purchase.
By the start of the twenty-first century, the communist government of the Soviet Union had collapsed, and China had begun integrating itself into the international economy. A new era of triumphant capitalism (dubbed "late capitalism" by philosopher Herbert Marcuse [1898–1979]) seemed to have dawned. Much of contemporary cinema (and mass media generally) reflects the increased commodification of life. From Hollywood summer blockbusters to Japanese anime, modern cinema functions simultaneously as a product and as an advertisement for related products—the video, the soundtrack CD, the computer game, the collectible figures, the theme park ride. Hollywood studios (and many media companies worldwide) were subsumed into larger international corporate identities toward the end of the twentieth century. Thus, many films were meant to keep the profits flowing from all the various arms of a conglomerate rather than to expose how the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer.
Yet some filmmakers wished to expose the class struggles that remained. Often focusing on groups rather than Horatio Alger protagonists, directors like Mike Leigh (b. 1943) (Life Is Sweet, 1990) in Britain, Denys Arcand (b. 1941) (Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions], 2003) in Canada, John Sayles (b. 1950) (Matewan, 1987) in the United States, and Hou Hsaio-Hsien (b. 1947) (Beiqing Chengshi [City of Sadness], 1990) in Taiwan depicted the complex nature of economics and class, and how they interrelate with issues such as gender and sexuality, national identity, history, and religious belief. While their work was often overlooked by audiences, such efforts kept the spirit of such early cinema as The Kleptomaniac alive as the new millennium began.
SEE ALSO Ideology;Marxism;Neorealism;Populism;Propaganda
FURTHER READING
Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971.
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980.
Compaine, Benjamin M., and Douglas Gomery. Who Owns the Media? Competition and Concentration in Mass Media Industry. 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000. Originally published in 1982.
Downing, John D. H., ed. Film and Politics in the Third World. New York: Praeger, 1987.
Harvey, Sylvia. May '68 and Film Culture. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Hill, John. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963. London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Overbey, David, ed. Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism. London: Talisman, 1978.
Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Youngblood, Denise J. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Sean Griffin
Class
CLASS.
The term class is used in a wide range of intellectual discourses, including logic, the natural sciences, and pedagogy. At its Latin origins, however, classis was first and foremost a social term, denoting the division of the Roman people attributed to King Servius Tullius (r. 578–534 b.c.e.). In early Rome, class connoted a distinction in rank between those who paid tribute (property tax) and those who did not, as well as the system of divisions between types of military service. In particular, classis often seems to have been reserved to describe citizens on the lower social and economic rungs. Only after the principate of Augustus (31 b.c.e.–14 a.d.) did classis come to be employed in a more general sense to mean a division of all sorts of things into groups.
Early Histories
The Latin genesis of class nomenclature does not mean that the idea behind it (in either a social or general sense) did not exist prior to the rise of the Roman Republic. Aristotle's Organon proposed a logical system of classification of natural and linguistic types into genus and species according to categorical criteria. For the ancient Greeks, the Few and the Many constituted a central measure of division within the social order. Both Plato and Aristotle divided social groups into functional classes whose status and power was graded according to the contributions each made to the purposes of the civil community as a whole. Plato's Republic famously identified within the city three parts—rulers, soldiers, and laborers—while Aristotle distinguished six socioeconomic classes—soldiers, priests, judges, farmers, artisans, and traders—of whom only the first three were deemed fully qualified to exercise the rights associated with citizenship, at least in the best political system.
Class thus has generally been associated with systems of social exclusion. Indeed, elaborate mythologies have been generated to support or justify class divisions. The tale of Noah's curse on the descendents of his son Ham, in Genesis 9:20–27, has been taken as an explanation for class inequality. Likewise, the Koran (Sura 43:31) declares that social differentiation arises from Allah's will that the inferior should be subjected to the superior. The caste system that long governed social organization and relations in India and elsewhere in Asia purported to reflect the disparate origins of the various groups as described in the Vedas: the Brahmans from the lips of Brahma, the Kshatriya from the shoulders, the Vaisya from the thighs, and the Sudra from the feet.
During the European Middle Ages, the idea behind class distinctions was popularly captured by various forms of organic unities. Many medieval thinkers, quite possibly under the indirect influence of Plato, divided society into the threefold functional ordering of those who fight, those who work, and those who pray. In the High Middle Ages, this was gradually replaced by the more developed organic doctrine of the body politic, the most influential exponent of which was John of Salisbury (1115 or 1120–1180). His Policraticus (completed 1159) contained an extensive account of how each of the organs and limbs of the human body—from the head to the toes—had a direct counterpart in society, from the king, his advisors, soldiers, and diverse magistrates all the way down to the peasants and artisans. Class divisions were natural and necessary in order to maintain justice and the common good. Essentially this view enjoyed wide currency in Europe well into early modern times.
The Renewal of Class
For the first millennium and more of European history, the term class was not invoked in order to describe the distinctions between and identities of social groups. Rather, class was invoked through what we might call "status language," such as gradus in Latin, état in French, Stand in German, and "orders" or "estates" in English. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, a notable linguistic shift that renewed the nomenclature of class appeared in most major European languages. This change seems to have accompanied the transformations wrought by the industrial revolution and the rise of political economy: class conveyed an essential economic overtone that was not fully captured by the status language of earlier times. The work of authors such as Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) did much to disseminate class discourse, and especially phrases such as "the laboring classes" and "the working class."
The nineteenth century was the heyday of discussions about class in this updated economic sense. Class divisions were upheld by classical political economy on the grounds that the division of labor and the competition implied therein were necessary for the efficient use of productive resources. Critics of capitalism, whether communitarians such as Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) or utopians such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837) or anarchists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), remained convinced that the sources of exploitation were not inherent in class divisions per se so much as in unequal distribution of property or wages or the material benefits of work. Differentiation in the contributions made by laborers thus did not excuse their subordination in economic, political, or social standing.
The Marxist Transformation
Without doubt, the most famous promulgator of the idea of class in the modern world was also its most profound critic: Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx treated class distinction as a universal characteristic of human history from the earliest times of social organization until his own day. For Marx, classes were economic groups constituted by differential access to the means of production—that is, the technologies and natural resources necessary for human beings to reproduce their physical existence. In every social formation, there were two essential and contending classes: a working class, which used, but did not directly own or control, the means of production; and an appropriating class, which lived directly or indirectly from the labor of workers. In different economic systems, the type and nature of technology, and of the social relationships employed in organizing labor and maintaining domination over it, might vary considerably. Hence, tribal societies met the physical and extraphysical needs of their members differently than did subsequent ancient slave or feudal systems. But the fundamental clash of interests between workers and appropriators was a permanent feature of history up to the present day.
In previous social systems, Marx held, the struggle between the classes had wound up with the replacement of one exploitative mode of production (the material and social elements of the economy) with another, culminating in capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism, with its veneer of freedom and equality, produced the most intense exploitation of the worker ever achieved. Yet, on the other hand, just because the condition of the capitalist working class, termed the proletariat, was so degraded, Marx believed that it formed a "universal class," capable of releasing and realizing all of the untapped potential of a truly liberated humanity. For this reason, Marx held that the proletariat, once it became conscious of its own circumstances and the source of its immiseration, would revolt against its capitalist oppressors and would generate a qualitatively different kind of society. The future society, which Marx called communism, would be classless, since the proletariat, as the most completely exploited class in history, would have no remaining object to exploit. Communism would see the end of human history as a dynamic series of class struggles and would instead herald a new beginning of history in which each and every individual as a full human being would have the opportunity to pursue and attain his or her freely chosen needs.
The Weberian Reply
The primary response to Marx's conception of class was proposed by the German sociological thinker Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber's main insight was to recognize the empirical faults of an exclusive emphasis on class as an economic phenomenon. Rather, Weber saw society—in particular, in the modern world—as far too complex in its stratification to fit into the straightjacket of economic determinism. It should be noted that Weber's critique was directed not just at Marx and other radical critics of capitalism, but also at the classical political economists, who shared with Marxism a stridently economistic orientation.
In one sense, Weber does adopt an economic conception of class ; it is the term he employs to designate social differentiation based on occupation and function as defined by the market. But class is simply one form of distinction. Equally important are status and power. Status denotes the factors of honor and reputation that attach to specific ways of life and are accorded deference by others. Thus, individuals of certain status (say, from a landed nobility) may enjoy greater repute than those of a given class who are wealthier but whose sources of income (say, commerce) are generally held to be debased or ignoble. Power applies to the capability of a group to impose its collective will on others, even in the face of their resistance. Weber points out how, in the modern world, those with the greatest class position or status often do not occupy the positions of administrative or bureaucratic authority. In turn, bureaucrats can and do enact policies that run contrary to the real or perceived interests of economic and reputational elites. This demonstrates that their social position depends on a source—power—that cannot be entirely assimilated to class or status.
Later social scientists have extended and enlarged the factors that influence social differentiation well beyond Weber's original triad. Such elements as kinship, occupation, race and ethnicity, and education have been added to the basic dimensions of class, status, and power. But it seems safe to say that the dominant perspective on social stratification both normatively and empirically during the last century remained Weberian in orientation.
Marxist Rejoinders
Somewhat ironically, many of the fiercest critics of the classical Marxist doctrine of class would consider themselves to fall into the Marxist camp. The failure of the proletariat to rise up against and to crush capitalism even as the conditions of its exploitation worsened led some Marxists, especially in Western Europe, to revisit Marx's conception of class struggle. The so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory renounced the crass economism of classical Marxism in favor of an analysis that emphasized the cultural sources of working-class conservatism, including the mass media, out-group scapegoating (anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic and racial hatred), and the predominance of so-called technological rationality. Members of the Frankfurt School embraced, alternately, pessimism about the possibility of successful class struggle (as in the work of Max Horkheimer [1895–1973] and Theodor W. Adorno [1903–1969]) or optimism that other marginalized groups, such as racial minorities, students, denizens of Third World nations, women, and environmentalists, might become the bearers of the revolutionary subjectivity of Marx's proletariat (as Herbert Marcuse [1898–1979] asserted). In either instance, traditional Marxian class analysis leading to proletarian revolution was set aside as an unrealistic and unrealizable expectation.
Another school of Marxist thought, drawing upon the rigorous methodological principles of modern economics and the other social sciences, sought to wed so-called rational choice doctrines of economic behavior to a radical worldview. Authors such as Jon Elster (b. 1940) and John Roemer (b. 1938) argue that class should be reinterpreted according to the standards of methodological individualism, so that a class is not greater than the sum of its parts, but a coordinated body of similarly positioned individual agents. Known as "rational choice" or "analytical" Marxism, this approach attempts to strip class of perceived metaphysical accretions—for example, the holism criticized by Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994)—without eliminating it as a workable foundation for a viable theory of economic exploitation.
Still other thinkers within a Marxist vein have set out to restore the "political" dimension to Marx's conception of class struggle. Historians such as Robert Brenner (b. 1943) and political theorists such as Ellen Meiksins Wood (b. 1939) stress the contingency of class relations depending on political context, and thus they foreground local juridical-coercive institutions in understanding the constitution of class identities. This perspective insists on the wholly illusory nature of the supposed separation of the economic and the political under capitalism. Political power shapes class conflict, and thus the state itself is the prime site for class struggle and opposition.
Beyond Class
An important trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been to resist both Marxian and Weberian theories of social differentiation in favor of other fundamental sources of division among human beings. Feminism provides an example of one such line of reasoning. Feminist theory claims that gender, rather than class, constitutes the defining division in human historical dynamics. Broadly stated, feminists assert that reproduction trumps production as the organizing principle around which human social institutions are fixed. Thus, it is the gender divide, emerging from the male oppression of women, that drives social processes throughout history. Patriarchalism, not classism, constitutes the major division among human beings, and the obsession with class is itself a patriarchal trick to divert attention from the fundamental struggle between the sexes.
Class-oriented conceptions of social power and dynamic have also come under attack from proponents of critical race theory. The orientation of critical race theory raises questions quite similar to those of traditional Marxism concerning the ways in which state power (in its legal-juridical and coercive applications) reinscribes and reinforces racial divides. Thus, just as gender is foregrounded in feminist analysis, so race becomes the central focus of analysis among proponents of the critical race school.
The Future of Class?
Class has become anathema in political discourse in the West. Politicians are able to silence their opponents with the mere assertion that "class war" is being invoked. Liberalism—democracy's insistence that equality constitutes the salient feature of social life—even in spite of the evident social, economic, racial, and political disparities that exist in liberal-democratic regimes—suggests that class is effectively dead as a category of social analysis and critique. Yet the discourse of class seems to reappear regularly among the intellectual categories with which social thinkers, and social movements, narrate their self-understandings. May class yet outlive those whose interests prescribe its obsolescence?
See also Communism ; Critical Race Theory ; Marxism ; Power .
bibliography
Brennan, Catherine. Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification: An Introduction and Critique. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997.
Brown, Donald E. Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.
Calvert, Peter. The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction. New York: St. Martin's, 1982.
Carling, Alan H. Social Division. London: Verso, 1991.
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. The Breakdown of Class Politics: A Debate on Post-Industrial Stratification. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: Norton, 1995.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Horowitz, Maryanne C., ed. Race, Class, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1991.
Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1969.
McNall, Scott G., Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds. Bringing Class Back in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991.
Moravcsik, J. M. E., ed. Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Roemer, John, ed. Analytical Marxism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Russ, Joanna. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cary J. Nederman
Class
CLASS
CLASS. "Class is obviously a difficult word," Raymond Williams wrote in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Class was a difficult word for Williams "both in its range of meanings and its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes social division." As a word in English, class probably first appeared in a Latin form, classis, during the sixteenth century. Classis was a Roman term for the differences of property among citizens. One mid-seventeenth-century scholar, Williams reports, glossed the term as "an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees" but restricted the meaning by adding "in Schools (wherein the term is most used)." In 1705 Daniel Defoe remarked, "tis plain the dearness of wages forms our people into more classes than other nations can show." Defoe identified a main force in class formation within early capitalism: the payment of wages for labor. But Defoe referred to an ambiguous plurality of classes, not to a hierarchy based on a division between employers and employed. Class in its modern sense is defined not only by the form of economic subsistence but also by a hierarchical division of labor, privilege, and authority. The formation of classes in America—followed by modern usage of the term "class" to describe them—accelerated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the commencement of the Industrial Revolution in the Atlantic basin. It began earlier, however, and occurred in relation to the historical development of race and gender.
The Division of Society into Owning and Working Classes
Long before the word "class" gave a label to the status arrangements within industrial capitalism, the conditions that the term would describe were developing. None were more important than the division between a large and growing population that owned nothing but its labor and a much smaller, profit driven population that owned productive property, whether land or tools and shops. Where this process began is a source of continuing debate, but one place to look for some of the earlier developments is early modern England. Beginning in the sixteenth century and stretching into the nineteenth century, a series of enclosure acts in England eliminated the traditional feudal rights of peasant communities to hold large pieces of land in common for general use. The termination of these rights made possible the creation of large private, individual holdings for commercial production. The English state simultaneously expanded its power to compel the dispossessed and mobile commoners to labor either in agriculture or the crafts. Commoners either worked in the new system voluntarily or were treated by the state as criminal vagrants and sentenced to workhouses. In North America, where land was much more widely available, workhouses were less common, but both forced and voluntary labor took contractual forms similar to those practiced in England: craft apprenticeships and agricultural indentures.
The indentured agricultural laborer contracted to work for a number of years for a master, or planter, in exchange for the cost of transport to the British North American colonies, not wages. During the late seventeenth century growers in the Chesapeake Bay region, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean shifted exclusively to enslaved African labor. Through the end of slavery, small planters and their families often worked alongside their handful of enslaved laborers and whites continued to do hired agricultural labor. But agricultural labor in commercial production of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton became the work of a caste of enslaved workers, distinguishing it from the wage system developing in the crafts. The craft apprentice served a master for a number of years, usually about seven or until maturity, and then became a journeyman who likely earned wages from his master. Journeymen lived with their masters until they married or became skilled enough to complete their own "masterpiece" and open their own shop. The English guilds, which enforced these relationships among craft workers and controlled prices, never crossed the Atlantic. Initially, there were fewer journeymen in craft operations in North America. Masters usually worked for themselves, perhaps with an apprentice or a journeyman. And many of those called masters were really journeymen who simply set up shop for themselves in American cities with few or no craft workers. During the late eighteenth century these masters, like many of their English counterparts, began to enlarge their operations, employing more labor and demanding more from it. These small groups of journeymen who worked together in the shops and lived together in neighborhoods apart from their masters increasingly organized themselves and found cause to strike over wages and hours. Consequently, although master bakers went on strike in New York City in 1741 and master carpenters struck in Savannah, Georgia, in 1746, demanding better prices, it was journeymen carpenters who went on strike in Philadelphia in 1791.
Between 1780 and 1840, the transformation of the craft system into a system of ownership and working classes was perhaps "one of the outstanding triumphs of nineteenth century American capitalism," according to Sean Wilenz (Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 [1984]). It was during this period that the changes in labor practices that were detectable in the eighteenth century suddenly seemed to move more rapidly, encompassing a wider demographic. Master craftsmen and shopkeepers had formed a significant—if uncertainly situated—middling class status, or rank, in the commercial cities of British North America from Boston to Savannah. But by 1815 merchant capitalists dominated some of the craft markets, such as textiles and many in this first middle class of small independent producers could no longer maintain themselves. Some masters, in crafts such as silver smithing, possessed significant wealth, but others endured hard labor and seasons of desperate want for themselves and their families. Many master craftsmen became managers working for capitalist owners who controlled the tools, inventory, and marketing and expected masters to push for the greatest possible productivity for the lowest possible wage. By 1820 New York City had twelve "manufactories" that employed twenty-five or more workers and thirty-five other facilities that employed tenor more workers. Many other masters lost their independence and became wageworkers in these early factories alongside journeymen and apprentices. After about 1820, the rise of stereotyping in printing and sweatshops in clothing and shoes heralded the expansion of mechanized, frenetic, and standardized production.
The emerging class relations of industrialization were broadly impacted by the American Revolution's ideological discourses, which lauded national and individual independence as masculine virtues. Masters who worked crafts that were still not industrialized maintained an independence that could put them in a middling rank, along with small-scale yeoman farmers. This independence was an important source of distinction—or class—and it defined white masculinity while separating it from the status of the enslaved and women, all of whom could not vote and owned little or no property. Even when they organized into citywide craft unions, larger and better organized versions of the eighteenth-century journeymen's combinations, white industrial workers were dependent on insecure employment over which they exercised little control. Class subordination and republican masculinity were contradictory. As both slave labor and wage labor expanded in the early nineteenth century, American workers discovered that "one way to make peace with the latter was to differentiate it sharply from the former," according to David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1992). African Americans both enslaved and free were stereotyped by all whites as licentious, lazy, and dangerous by nature, fit only for hard labor and dependence on whites. A model of white masculinity defined itself in terms of protecting against blackness and blacks. In nonslave states, white working-class Republican Boys harassed the free black population of the cities, chasing them from public spaces. Whites produced and eagerly attended blackface minstrel productions, which were stereotyped and distorted representations of black culture. In the slave states, whites of all classes, including workers, helped police the enslaved and protect against insurrection.
As the manufactory owners looked less for skill than for cheap, rapid output, they also participated in altering the economic role of women, creating new class cultures, particularly in the cities. In The North, the unpaid labor of women in the household helped fuel early capital accumulation by consuming and using the ever-expanding "labor-saving" devices produced by the industrial sector and reproducing the laboring population. The famous Lowell Mills in Massachusetts, one example of a regional practice, employed farm girls in factory production for fourteen hours a day at a fraction of the wages paid to men. In The larger cities, such as New York, the outwork system, in which women took wage work home, the low wages it paid, and the difficulty for these dispersed women workers to organize helped fuel a new street culture. Juvenile delinquency, attacks against women, and public intoxication all seemed more prevalent after 1820. Middle-and upper-class men sought prostitutes in the working-class neighborhoods. Workingmen had developed a moralistic and paternal attitude toward the street culture and women's labor exploitation. Middle-and upper-class women, claiming an especially moral status as women of "respectable" classes, discovered a public role in moral reform work within the workers' neighborhoods.
Racial Divisions and Rising Worker Consciousness
In the South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived, most of them were enslaved. Slaves were workers, but racism divided them from "the working class," a phrase that, as in the North, carried an often unspoken association to "white." The degree to which the slave South was capitalist and class conscious continues to be a source of debate. Slavery was principally an agricultural labor system with some feudal qualities, but it was also a source of labor for the crafts and industry. In Charleston, South Carolina, artisans employed or owned enslaved African laborers in the eighteenth century. In the antebellum period the Tredgar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia—the third-largest iron producer in the United States—used slaves for about half of its one-thousand-person labor force. Tredgar's enslaved workers earned wages, mostly for their masters, and worked in every phase of production as founders, colliers, miners, teamsters, and woodchoppers. Slaves were cheap to hire from their masters and could be made to work hard. Racism divided this biracial workforce, making strikes difficult. An unsuccessful strike by white workers at Tredgar in 1847 unsuccessfully demanded the removal of black workers.
Although the Civil War, in a sign of a growing class consciousness, workers formed the first nationwide labor unions and organizations in the United States beginning in the 1860s. In 1877 railroad workers struck after four years of depression in the economy and repeated merciless wage cuts by the railroads, engaging the Pennsylvania militia in a bloody armed confrontation at Pittsburgh and spreading the strike throughout the national rail systems. Another sign of growing class consciousness was the fact that labor organizations grew despite failures such as a massive nationwide strike effort for the eight-hour day in 1886. The Knights of Labor, an early nationwide union, rejected the antebellum model of organizing only skilled white workers and instead organized skilled and unskilled, white and black, reaching possibly one million members, or nearly 10 percent of the American workforce, in 1886. That same year the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized by a group of national and regional craft unions. The more massive industrialism became, the more massive the confrontations and workers' organizations became. In 1892 the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, had only 11,000 residents, but 3,800 of them worked in its twelve mills. When workers in Andrew Carnegie's Homestead mill went on strike that year after his associate, Henry Clay Frick, announced he would not renew the union's contract and would replace all the workers, virtually the whole town, men and women, joined in active support of the walkout. Frick hired several hundred armed soldiers, and after violent armed confrontations with the strikers and towns people, he ultimately succeeded in breaking the strike and the union. The Homestead strike and the use of armed force to break it became common during the early twentieth century and underscored the class divisions within American society.
The movement of European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and African American migrants into U.S. industries during the years between the 1890s and the 1940s greatly altered the class system. Millions of immigrant workers labored in Chicago factories and Colorado mines alongside southern-born African Americans who moved North in two great migration waves between 1910 and 1940. Both the men and women of these populations worked in industry. In 1910 nearly one-third of working women still labored in domestic service, but the numbers of women in industrial wage labor were increasing. Ten percent of married women worked for wages in 1920, the year women won the right to vote. Women's total employment reached eleven million before World War II, nearly doubling the female workforce.
These changes in the rapidly expanding industrial workforce stimulated a reformation of the middle class, both outside the corporations and within them. Problems and injustices that were of interest to philanthropic gentlemen and ladies in the British colonial, early national, and antebellum periods—orphan rescue, poor relief, and educational reform—became the concern of new intellectuals. This class not only managed the factories and corporations, but also taught in the expanding universities and colleges, administered the growing state bureaucracies, and founded settlement houses to address the poverty of the largely immigrant and working-class urban population. Their approach to social problems remained moralistic and paternal—teaching immigrant women to be "good mothers," for example—but as in the factories, where managers sought to regulate production through "scientific" discipline and efficiency, reformers adopted "scientific" methods, expanding the study of poverty and creating state welfare programs.
The Great Depression and the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt further institutionalized this new middle, bureaucratic class and removed the barriers of violence and law to union organization that employers and state governments had erected. In addition, the Great Depression delegitimized the capitalist class and its system of private corporate benefit programs. These conditions encouraged not only an expanded welfare state but vigorous union organizing: total American union membership tripled between 1932 and 1939, exceeding eight million. By the end of World War II, as many as one-third of American workers were union members. But the growing Cold War ideological tension between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II fundamentally altered class politics. After nearly a century, that "spectre" that Marx had declared was "haunting Europe" in 1848 seemed to haunt Americans anew: communism, more as a specter than as an actual mass movement, became enmeshed in American racism and class politics. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—later to merge with the AFL—expelled nine unions in 1949 and 1950 because of their refusal to purge communists. The CIO had organized 800,000 southern workers during the war, one-third of them black, but it stagnated under accusations that unions were the leading edge of a communist miscegenation plot to subvert white Christian capitalism. Many workers in the South, North, and West supported the anticommunist campaign. The mainstream of worker consciousness had never been revolutionary; rather it supported the development of a welfare state that protected laborers from the worst vicissitudes of capitalism.
In the later twentieth century, the stall in working-class organization and the relatively higher wages that industrial workers earned, compared to prewar levels, helped spark debate about the reality of class divisions in the United States among the intellectual middle classes. Qualitatively it seemed obvious that class divisions mattered in America: strikes, unions, and police repression of workers all seem to indicate serious class conflict. One Chicago worker in 1940, answering a question about whether there was a working class, expressed a common opinion when he cited class-segregated neighborhoods and social networks:
Hell, brother, you don't have to look far to know there's a workin' class. We may not say so. But look at what we do. Work. Look at who we runaround with and bull with. Workers. Look at where we live. If you can find anybody but workers in my block, I'll eat 'em." (Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 [1990])
In 1940, however, Fortune magazine announced the results of a survey showing that 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as middle class. Fortune took the results as evidence that capitalism, "the American way of life," produced general affluence, not class animosities. Fortune's findings were soon challenged by sociologists who found a majority of Americans identified as working class. Ultimately, however, querying Americans on their self placement within the class system offered few solid conclusions. As study after study tested each others' assumptions, methods, and categories and ended with different conclusions, the Left grew skeptical of the objectivity of sociological surveys and the Right grew skeptical of a putatively leftist academy.
Globalization and a New Class Formation
In 1963 the widely influential English historian E. P. Thompson insisted, in The Making of the English Working Class, that class was not a fixed social structure or a possession of a fixed set of people, hinting that sociology was looking in the wrong direction. Rather, "class" was simply "something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships." With similar logic, two American sociologists argued in the late 1980s that the role of authority and the nature of work have become "central in the capital accumulation process and … the exploitation of the working class" (Reeve Vanneman and Lyn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class [1987]). What defines class is not ownership of property or self-identification, but a person's type of labor and ability to control it. The industrial working class had been defined by hourly and insecure wage labor since its formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And workers built ever-larger organizations—first in shops, then cities, and finally, nationally—to combat this insecurity and its frequent poverty. As the globalization of industrial capitalism picked up pace in the late twentieth century, North American industrial workers watched their multinational employers move their higher-wage jobs overseas, precipitating a new class formation still unfinished at the end of the century.
The first feature of the new class formation was increased poverty and insecurity, but this "flexibility" and "efficiency" in the workforce—as corporate culture described it—yielded only a moderate degree of new militancy from worker organizations in the United States. During the last decades of the twentieth century, actual poverty—the inability to pay for necessities, such as health care and housing—among low-wage workers deepened. Meanwhile, women and minorities continued to be disproportionately represented among the lowest wage earners. The 1990s poverty rate of 13 percent—which incorporated a short-term decline in poverty among minorities—was misleading because it was calculated on the cost of food. While food prices remained more or less stagnant between the 1960s and 2000, rent and health care costs far outpaced inflation, market wage increases, and governmental adjustments in the minimum wage. Even after modest wage growth for low-wage workers during the 1990s, many American workers lived on 1973 wages at 1999 prices. A disproportionate percentage of the working-class poor were nonwhites and the working class remained divided by race, even after the civil rights movement had run its full course. The southern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had tended to address race but not class dynamics within the black community. For all its dramatic successes in expanding democracy in the United States, the urban rebellions of the 1960s could be understood as stemming from the failure of the movement to win effective solutions to economic inequalities. The 1992 rebellion in working-class black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King, made plain the depth of continuing frustration in the black working class.
A second feature of the new class formation was the official labor movement's efforts to moderate—not revolutionize—globalization and the race and gender disparities and divisions within the American class system. Unions declared a renewed interest in organizing the unorganized, democratic internal governance, international labor coalitions, antiracism and antisexism efforts, and the mobilization of workers to resist globalization on corporate terms. Alongside church, environmental, and student activists, unions supported local anti-sweatshop and living wage campaigns across the country. A Teamsters strike at the United Parcel Service in 1997 seemed to many to announce a newly assertive working class. And the thousands of union members who protested against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 alongside thousands of students and environmentalists seemed to herald a new activist, militant, mass, and global working-class agenda. The challenge seemed likely to rest in how well the labor movement could address both globalization, with its formation of industrial classes in undeveloped nation-states primarily in the Global South, and the persistent race and gender divisions within the American working class—divisions of wage scales, privileges, and opportunities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Brody, David. In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Levine, Bruce et al. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 2: From the Gilded Age to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.
Marx, Karl. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." In The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1978.
Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Morris, Richard B., ed. A History of the American Worker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.
Vanneman, Reeve, and Lyn Weber Cannon. The American Perception of Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1976. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
James O'NeilSpady
See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Civil Rights Movement ; Discrimination: Race ; Gender and Gender Roles ; Indentured Servants ; Industrial Revolution ; Knights of Labor ; Race Relations ; Slavery ; Trade Unions ; andvol. 9:The Theory of the Leisure Class .
Class and Community
Class and Community
Class Distinctions. One of the first qualities European visitors to antebellum America noticed was the natives’ fierce belief in democracy and equality. Another was that most Americans were constantly on the move: the English writer Harriet Martineau commented that asking the average American about the state of his well-being was likely to produce the answer “moving, Sir.” It is true that, by comparison to Europe, America was a relatively egalitarian society: there were no aristocratic titles, and the idea of the “self-made man” was a cherished one. Everyone, it was widely held, could achieve prosperity with the application of sufficient effort and “Yankee shrewdness.” The American public was enchanted with Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories, which were published throughout the period. But the truth is a bit more complex. By the eve of the Civil War inequalities in wealth had become pronounced in American society, and by the end of Reconstruction, class differences were firmly entrenched. Class distinctions varied widely from region to region, and even from state to state; in addition, the differences between urban and rural life contributed to the way in which people experienced their relative levels of wealth. It can, however, be said that most white Americans saw themselves as the equals of even the wealthiest, at least at the ballot box and under the law. Further, most believed fervently in the possibility of upward mobility, and many of them acted on the belief by pulling up stakes and moving west or to a nearby town. Thus, upward mobility translated roughly into geographic mobility.
Sectional Differences. From colonial times, northerners had become used to a diversified economic life based on independent farming, manufacturing, artisan crafts, and shipping. After the Industrial Revolution began, large cities drew both natives and immigrants, who formed a cheap source of labor. In the West, the gold rush and the pioneer movement brought a rough equality: few gold miners became rich, and most of the farmers who made the westward trek had to work hard to eke out
a meager living. The South had the most stratified society, consisting of wealthy white plantation owners, poor white farmers, and black slaves. Deference on the part of the lower-class whites toward those of the upper class combined paradoxically with a stubborn individualism, as well as a perennial hope of joining the wealthy class by obtaining slaves.
Urban Poverty. By 1860 there were more than five million immigrants, crowded into unimaginably dirty and dangerous slums, in the big northeastern cities. Even the most hopeful reformer could hardly conceive of a social program that could cope with the massive influx of poor, unskilled workers who flooded into the port cities of Boston and New York, willing to take almost any job at almost any wage. Housing shortages made overcrowding a serious problem; three or four families would share a tenement apartment in some of the worst slums, such as Boston’s notorious Half Moon District, where more than a hundred people used one filthy outhouse. An observer in the early 1850s claimed that “There has never been so deplorable an exhibition of mendicancy in our streets as may be witnessed daily at this time . . . hundreds of destitute men and scores of women . . . little girls are to be found in front of the city saloons at all hours of the day, going through their graceless performances.” While there was little chance of any of these families acquiring great fortunes, such as those of the As-tors or the Vanderbilts, over the next few generations many of them did improve their lot in life.
From Artisan to Skilled Laborer. Experiencing a significant decline during this period was the artisan class—shoemakers, carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths. Once the head of a thriving workshop, the master oversaw the work of journeymen and apprentices. This little group formed a kind of “family,” in which the master craftsman bore the moral as well as professional responsibility for the workers under his supervision. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the increased demand of a growing market, it became necessary to divide tasks into ever smaller components. This process was particularly evident in the shoemaking industry. In the past, master craftsmen fitted, cut, stitched, and finished one pair of shoes at a time. After the advent of the factory system, workers could be trained to perform smaller portions of the original task, such as stitching the same seam on hundreds of pairs of similar shoes. The workshops gave way to larger concerns, and smaller groups who lived, prayed, and drank whiskey with their master dissolved into larger groups of workers, answerable to the factory manager. Although this process took several generations to complete, the status of formerly skilled artisans declined after the Civil War.
Protests. Antebellum workers did protest unfair working conditions and mounted strikes. Such demonstrations were usually aimed at improving specific conditions. Factory owners and workers alike had faith in the Jacksonian-era “self-made man” and held fast to Victorian ideas of self-reliance. They believed that everyone had to pull himself up by his bootstraps, and that industry, energy, and “Yankee shrewdness” would result in a successful life. By 1860 one-fourth of all native New Englanders had moved to different states. Naturally, this philosophy applied mainly to native-born white Americans, not to immigrant workers and certainly not to slaves.
THE AGE OF SHODDY
An editorial in the 6 October 1863 issue of the New York Herald denounced unscrupulous northern manufacturers and financiers who made immense fortunes during the war, often at the expense of the war effort. These men included such notable businessmen as railroad magnates Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, and meatpacker Philip Armour. The term shoddy is the name for the poor-quality, reused wool that was used to make uniforms for soldiers. These uniforms (as well as poorly made boots, blankets, and other supplies) did not hold up well in the field, and the term came to refer to any inferior product with pretensions of being better than it really is:
The world has seen its iron age, its silver age, its golden age and its brazen age. This is the age of shoddy. The new brown stone palaces on Fifth Avenue, the new equipages [carriages] at the Park, the new diamonds which dazzle unaccustomed eyes, the new silks and satins which rustle over loudly, as if to demand attention, the new people who live in the palaces and ride in the carriages and wear the diamonds and silks—all are shoddy. From devil’s dust they sprang, and unto devil’s dust they shall return. They live in shoddy houses. They ride in shoddy carriages, drawn by shoddy horses, and driven by shoddy coachmen who wear shoddy liveries. They lie upon shoddy beds which have just come from the upholsterers and still smell of shoddy varnish. They wear shoddy clothes purchased from shoddy merchants who have erected mammoth stores, which appear to be marble, but are really shoddy. They set or follow the shoddy fashions, and fondly imagine themselves à la mode de Paris when they are only à la mode de shoddy. Their professions and occupations are pure shoddy. They are shoddy brokers in Wall Street or shoddy manufacturers of shoddy goods, or shoddy contractors for shoddy articles for a shoddy government. Six days in the week they are shoddy business men. On the seventh they are shoddy Christians. . . .
Source: New York Herald, 6 October 1863.
The Emerging Middle Class. Most antebellum Americans considered themselves to be of the “middling” classes. This meant that they were part of the largest group in the nation—people who were self-sufficient, making their own living on farms or in workshops. Most middling Americans, then, were skilled artisans or independent farmers. The average American, during this period, still lived on an independent, self-sufficient farm and was relatively cash-poor. But the era of the Civil War saw a significant change; a new class was emerging. Now husbands left the home in the morning to go to work; wives stayed home to take care of the housework and children; and a new fluidity of spending money made it possible (and even important) to acquire the symbols of comfort and wealth. Perhaps the single most important status symbol was the parlor piano, which naturally included piano lessons for the daughter of the house. The increasing growth of markets, the availability of cheap consumer goods (however poorly produced), and the gradual increase in spending money allowed the growth of the new middle class. This class would not become firmly entrenched until after Reconstruction in the late 1870s. Meanwhile, the increased industrialization of the wartime economy helped shape the future of the American family.
Merchants and Manufacturers. Perhaps the most upwardly mobile group in northern society were those men who recognized the possibilities of making a profit in the newer manufacturing processes. Although extensive mechanization did not set in until after the Civil War, the new way of breaking up processes allowed greater control, increased speed, and far more productivity. Naturally, these changes took their toll on workers. At the same time, in the years before the Civil War, bankruptcies destroyed many of these budding fortunes. Still, most entrepreneurs simply picked up and moved on, or else began a new business, many of which failed again. Other professionals who tended to earn at least a comfortable income, if not extreme wealth, were attorneys, bank and corporate officers, and physicians.
The Very Rich. In 1860, 5 percent of American families owned half the nation’s wealth. Among southern planters and northern industrialists, the disparity in wealth was particularly pronounced. In addition it is among the very wealthiest Americans that we find the greatest refutation of the “self-made man” myth. The very rich inherited their wealth, and married within their own social circles. Family connections counted for a great deal in mid-nineteenth-century courtships, and vast fortunes were often enhanced and increased through prudent marriages. This was an exclusive club in-deed;Horatio Alger’s congenial myths notwithstanding, very few poor men ever entered this exalted company. The great American fortunes, furthermore, were roughly comparable to the great European ones; lavish country estates, great houses on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, and immense plantations all testified to the enormous wealth of America’s richest families. In comparing the wealthiest individuals in the United States and England, one historian has found that although American wealth originated in business, and English wealth was largely derived from landed estates, the respective fortunes were about equal. John Jacob Astor’s immense fortune could be compared favorably with that of the Duke of Bedford, or Nathan Mayer Rothschild of France, generally regarded as the richest man in Europe.
Southern Planters. The wealthiest class in the antebellum South were those families owning more than one hundred slaves. Fewer than one-half of 1 percent of southern families belonged to this elite group. Some of the richest families lived deceptively simple lives. The fabled white plantation houses were rare. Most of them had sunk all their capital into slaves and next year’s crop and could not afford to build fancy homes or furnish them with European imports. Still, sharp class distinctions were respected. Independent yeoman farmers deferred to their social betters and hoped one day to join them. The one sure way of moving upward in the southern social scale was to purchase slaves. Even successful professionals did not feel that they had “arrived” in southern society until they owned slaves. All whites enjoyed political equality and democracy before the law. Still, the poorest southern whites, the “clay eaters” who were not given the same respect as their betters, suffered the most during the Civil War.
SOUTHERN SLAVE-OWNING FAMILIES IN 1850
| No. of Families | No. of Slaves | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976). | ||
| 1,733 | 100 or more | .49 |
| 6,196 | 50-99 | 1.7 |
| 29,733 | 20-49 | 8.5 |
| 54,595 | 10-19 | 15.7 |
| 80,765 | 5-9 | 23.3 |
| 105,683 | 2-4 | 30.4 |
| 68,820 | 1 | 19.8 |
| 6,120,825 southern whites (75 percent of the population) owned no slaves. | ||
The Civil War. During the Civil War, however, some underlying class tensions broke through—visible in the South as well as in the North. The protest of “a poor man’s blood for a rich man’s war” was heard on both fronts. When the U.S. government enacted a draft in 1863, many poor laborers took to the streets in protest. They were outraged by the commutation clause, which provided that a drafted man could pay $300 for a substitute. Naturally, poorer men could not buy their way out of military service. Although fewer southerners “bought” substitutes, the Confederate government did make allowances for white men on plantations with more than twenty slaves. Since most Union and Confederate soldiers were from the independent farmer class, they felt that such provisions were unfair and clearly favored the wealthy.
The Ruined South. After the devastation of the Civil War, some of the extremes of wealth along with slavery disappeared. But the old distinctions died hard. The military titles of “major” and “colonel” remained in usage to honor former officers who served during the conflict. Perhaps most poignantly, black people remained on the bottom of the social ladder. After the enactment of the Black Codes and the rigorous enforcement of segregation laws, their status seemed irremediably fixed in southern society.
Sources
Paul Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981);
Mathewjosephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934);
Edward Pessen, Riches, Class and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973);
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986);
Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Class
CLASS
The Great Depression had a significant impact on class relations in the United States. Although the Depression did not create class divisions, it did help to magnify the divisions that already existed. The working class, the group most likely to criticize capitalism as immoral, was joined by growing ranks of middle-class Americans who not only sympathized with those in the working class but also began to question the system that had caused so much grief. These class divisions became a battle over values. As historian Robert S. McElvaine explains in his book The Great Depression (1984), the working class and middle class valued the ideals embodied in cooperative individualism, calling for more equity, cooperation, ethics, and justice in the economic system, while elite Americans remained wedded to the ideal of acquisitive individualism, which was generally amoral, self-interested, and competitive.
While motion pictures certainly provided an opportunity for people to escape from the economic and emotional hardships of the Depression, many of the films also offered critical windows on to that very world. Many of the most popular gangster films of the era, including Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931), offered critiques of unbridled acquisitive individualism. Other films, including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Dead End (1937), offered more explicitly stinging critiques of the amoral marketplace that had ravaged the lives of millions of moviegoers. One sign of the growing influence of the state in society is the fact that films in the post-1933 era increasingly portrayed the federal government as a moral institution capable of addressing real questions of inequity and injustice.
While President Roosevelt proved adept at using class rhetoric to forge his New Deal coalition, he also found himself pushed further to the left by grassroots militancy on the streets and in the voting booths. In 1934, workers in San Francisco and Minneapolis engaged in successful general strikes with a great deal of support from the middle class. The 1934 congressional elections were a victory not only for Democrats but for those who were politically much further to the left than Roosevelt himself. Moreover, the popularity of governors Floyd Olson of Minnesota, who was elected on the Farmer-Labor Party ticket in 1930, and Philip La Follette of Wisconsin, who helped to bring that state's Socialist and Progressive parties together in 1935, was a clear sign that many working-class and middle-class Americans were willing to consider radical alternatives. And perhaps most important, the phenomenal popularity of Louisiana senator Huey Long and "Radio Priest" Charles Coughlin, both of whom gathered a great deal of support from millions of lower-middle-class Americans tenaciously trying to hold on to their status, was a clear sign that the early New Deal alone could not satiate the appetite of an increasingly discontented, vocal, and class-conscious (albeit not necessarily in the Marxist sense) populace.
The growing influence of working-class Americans who questioned the morality of the market helped to convince Roosevelt that his political future lay with meeting their demands legislatively and not just rhetorically. The fruits of this influence were apparent in the most significant legislation of the second New Deal, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the legal right to bargain collectively and offered government oversight with the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. Congress also passed the Social Security Act in 1935, which provided unemployment insurance and old-age pensions to workers and their dependents. And finally, in 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established minimum wages, maximum working hours, and child labor laws. All of these acts, although not completely supported by organized labor, insured that questions of equity would become a part of the emerging welfare state. In other words, the state would no longer simply protect property; rather, it would recognize class differences and attempt to broker those differences.
One of the most significant developments regarding class relations during the Great Depression was the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later called the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO) in 1935. While United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis became the organization's first leader, it is clear that the impetus for industrial unions arose from below, among the ranks of industrial workers who had been excluded from the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). Although the CIO is best remembered for organizing mass production workers, it is also important to remember that it represented not just an organizational shift, but an ideological one as well. Unlike the AFL, which often excluded racial and ethnic minorities, the CIO unions confronted racism and segregation by inviting African Americans, eastern and southern European immigrants, and other ethnic Americans into their organizations. The CIO also pioneered in the use of new tactics, including sit-down and slowdown strikes, which paved the way for unionization in some of the nation's most powerful industries, including most famously General Motors. However, the CIO grew increasingly conservative by the end of the decade by helping to contain grassroots militancy within the parameters set up by the state for union organizing and bargaining.
Although the Great Depression exacerbated class differences between the working and elite classes, it also helped to remake the working class itself. As historian Lizabeth Cohen argues in her book Making a New Deal (1990), thousands of immigrant and ethnic Americans who had previously identified primarily with their ethnic communities came to see themselves in class terms. Certainly this process had begun before the decade of the Depression, as thousands of immigrants participated in a burgeoning national consumer culture and experienced the homogenizing influences of welfare capitalism during the 1920s. However, during the Depression, thousands of immigrant and ethnic Americans were disappointed by the inability of their own communities—from churches to ethnic banks to mutual aid societies—to meet the needs of their members. Increasingly, ethnic Americans, many of whom had joined CIO unions and had begun voting for the first time, began to look toward their unions and the state to address their needs.
Social scientists, who had largely ignored class as a conceptual tool to explain society before 1929, grew increasingly interested in analyzing American society in class terms during the Great Depression. In their 1929 study Middletown, sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd played a pioneering role in developing the concept of class. Although they relied largely on a notion of class that revolved around income and occupation, they also paid close attention to social behavior, individual expectations, and consumption patterns. In Muncie, Indiana, they identified two main classes—a business class and a working class. In a later study, Middletown in Transition (1937), they further refined their definition of class by identifying six main classes. Based on these studies, the Lynds warned that either American democracy would transform the economy or that the economy, as represented by big business, would overwhelm and take over American democracy.
Though less well known than the Lynds, social scientist W. Lloyd Warner also played an important role in creating new conceptions of class to explain American society. After taking part as a consultant in a study of industrial fatigue among workers at the Western Electric Plant in Hawthorn, Illinois, Warner began his own investigation into class relations in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Like the Lynds, Warner identified six classes; however, he focused more on the cultural and social components of class by highlighting the important role that housing, neighborhoods, source of income, social contacts, and voluntary activity played in creating class divisions. While Warner largely accepted the necessity of class divisions because of the complex division of labor in modern industrial society, he nonetheless asserted that opportunity and mobility remained essential to maintaining a democratic nation and ideals.
See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); CASTE AND CLASS; CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); SOCIAL SCIENCE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernstein, Irving. A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression. 1985.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. 1990.
Fox, Richard Wightman. "Epitaph for Middletown: Robert S. Lynd and the Analysis of Consumer Culture." In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, edited by Richard W. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. 1983.
Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. 1989.
Gilkeson, John S., Jr. "American Social Scientists and the Domestication of 'Class' 1929–1955." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 31 (1995): 331–346.
Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935. 1994.
Jacobs, Meg. "'Democracy's Third Estate': New Deal Politics and the Construction of a 'Consuming Public.'" International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (1999): 27–51.
Kelley, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. 1990.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. 2001.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941, rev. edition. 1993.
Vittoz, Stanley. New Deal Labor Policy and the American Industrial Economy. 1987.
Kathy Mapes
Class
CLASS
Social inequalities are ancient, but the concept of class evolved only in the nineteenth century with the increasing division of labor accompanying industrialization. Karl Marx (1818–1883) sometimes wrote as if there were just two distinct, inherently antagonistic classes—the bourgeoisie owning the means of production, and the proletariat working for them. Class structures actually were more complex than that even in prerevolutionary Europe, and are all the more so in a global technological civilization. Class is thus a special form of inequality tied to the development of modern science and technology; it is of ethical significance because the costs and benefits of innovation tend to be distributed along class lines.
Sociology of Class
Sociologists studying class tend to categorize households by the male breadwinner's occupation. John H. Goldthorpe (1987) uses eleven categories ranging from professionals, administrators, and corporate managers at the top, to small proprietors, farmers, and personal service workers in the middle, to unskilled manual and agricultural workers near the bottom. Using this and other measures, it becomes apparent that there is substantial variation in distribution of what Max Weber called life chances: The United States has much greater income inequality than most other affluent nations, and low-income American families have worse access to health care, education, and other desired social outcomes (Lareau 2003, Hofrichter 2003). Intergenerational social mobility turns out to be poor just about everywhere, however, with the odds of a middle-class child remaining in that class as an adult about fifteen times greater than the chances of a working-class child moving into the middle class (Marshall et al. 1997).
Increasing participation of women in the workforce means that spouses may work in different job categories, which makes the above classification scheme harder to apply. Two-income households can afford different lifestyles than single-income households, moreover, so categorizing by occupation has become less meaningful. Parents' education may matter more than their occupations in determining a family's Internet usage, leisure activities, nutrition and health, and aspirations for children's futures. More fundamentally, conventional depictions of social class capture rather poorly the creative destruction that technological innovation brings, creating new types of careers while undermining older occupations. The winners celebrate, but several hundred million worldwide have been displaced from farms, factories, and other workplaces in the past generation at considerable personal and social cost.
Likewise being reconstructed over time are the everyday lives of various social strata. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the affluent enjoy transportation, communication, medical care, food, and leisure opportunities superior to what has previously been available to anyone. Even persons of comparatively modest means have access to television, refrigeration, T-shirts, plastic bags, and other manufactured artifacts. Their shared participation in a consumer class may be a more salient social fact than their occupational or even income differences. Because people's realities are substantially structured in relationship with material things, class warfare arguably has become less a conflict among classes than one between the consumer class and the planet.
International Dimensions
Older understandings of class are challenged as well by international stratification. Most of the affluent live in the northern hemisphere, and a working-class household in Europe or Japan is well above average for the world as a whole—and may include a comfortable dwelling, reliable electricity, convenient mass transit or automobile, and government-funded medical care. Peasant farmers and stably employed urban dwellers in poor countries have far less access to technological benefits, and yet they are well above the billion or more persons living in absolute poverty.
Possibly on the lowest rung of the ladder are those who speak one of the 3,000 languages likely to become extinct in the twenty-first century. For example, in 2003 the Danish Supreme Court turned down the final appeal of 150,000 indigenous peoples forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands in northern Greenland during the Cold War to make way for a U.S. missile base. "The Inuit will, in all likelihood, join other indigenous peoples globally whose language, culture, and presence are no longer with us" (Lynge 2002, p. 103).
Thus conventional depictions of social class are too nice, and fail to convey the raw power and powerlessness that often accompany technologies deployed in contexts of socioeconomic inequality. Large dams that flooded villages while failing to deliver the promised irrigation benefits displaced millions. Millions more have been dislocated, maimed, or killed in civil wars fought with helicopter gun ships and automatic weapons. Subsistence farming was undermined by the imposition of export-oriented monocultures and European and North American scientific agricultural methods. International financial markets enabled by computerized data processing have caused ruinous fluctuations in local currencies. Toxic wastes and environmentally hazardous manufacturing processes have been transferred to poor countries (Clapp 2001).
Even within affluent societies, technological bads tend to follow class lines. As environmental justice advocates point out, those with less capacity to buy their way out or to organize politically often get stuck living near noisy factories, polluted waterways, traffic noise and exhaust fumes, hazardous waste dumps, landfills, and other noxious facilities (Bullard 2000). Those with less power in the labor market often find themselves disadvantaged by technological changes in the workplace (Wyatt et al. 2000)
The Future of Class
In sum, an adequate understanding of social class requires dealing with the ugly realities of power, gross international inequalities, post-industrial socioeconomic issues going well beyond occupational stratification, consumers as a new kind of class, and upheavals in work roles and lifestyles associated with technological innovation. The technoscientists' predicament is that their findings and innovations enter a highly stratified world; although few technologists might be comfortable acknowledging it, in effect they work for some social classes much more than for others. Class consciousness has long been weak in the United States, and has diminished even in European social democracies; many social observers speak as if inequality were unimportant. Yet the pervasive, harmful effects of inequalities are well documented, and one need not return to simplistic notions of a ruling class in order to think that ethically charged questions about who gets what deserve the same careful attention accorded to technical aspects of innovation.
E. J. WOODHOUSE
SEE ALSO Affluence;Citizenship;Marxism;Money;Race;Work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bullard, Robert D. (2000). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Clapp, Jennifer. (2001). Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K.; Stephen A. Resnick; and Richard D. Wolff, eds. (2000). Class and Its Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. A feminist, cultural studies approach to the subject of class.
Goldthorpe, John H. (1987). Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hofrichter, Richard, ed. (2003). Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lareau, Annette. (2003). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lynge, Aqqaluk. (2002). The Right to Return: 50 Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland. Nuuk, Greenland: Forgalet Atuagkat.
Marshall, Gordon; Adam Swift; and Stephen Roberts. (1997). Against the Odds?: Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wyatt, Sally; Flis Henwood; Nod Miller; and Peter Senker, eds. (2000). Technology and In/equality: Questioning the Information Society. New York: Routledge.
Class System
CLASS SYSTEM
When the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, they did so in the name of Russia's proletariat and to a lesser extent the "toiling masses" of peasants who made up the vast majority of the population. The Bolsheviks' aim—to overthrow the rule of capital (the bourgeoisie) and establish a socialist society—was to be achieved via a "dictatorship of the proletariat." The dictatorship was enshrined in the first Soviet Constitution of 1918, which disenfranchised large property owners, the clergy, and former tsarist officials and gave urban-based voters the advantage over peasants in elections to all-Russian soviet congresses. Ironically, during the civil war, much of Soviet society was declassed: the old privileged classes were expropriated, industrial workers returned to the countryside or were recruited into the Red Army, and millions of other citizens were uprooted and lost their social moorings.
In the course of the 1920s, during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), social structures began to resolidify as industrial production and trade expanded. Those whose occupation defined them as workers, and those who could authenticate their social origins in the working class, received privileged access to housing, higher education, health and pension benefits, and perhaps most important of all, party membership. But the upheavals of the First Five-Year Plan years (1928–1932) uprooted millions once again, as whole classes (socalled NEPmen, kulaks, and remnants of the urban bourgeoisie) were "liquidated." Cities and construction sites were overwhelmed with peasant migrants fleeing collectivization, and hundreds of thousands of others were resettled in remote regions of the country or sent to labor camps.
The social structure that emerged from these upheavals was officially characterized as consisting of two classes: one of workers (essentially industrial wage earners and state farm workers) and collective farmers, the other a "stratum" consisting of the intelligentsia. This putative class system remained virtually unchanged throughout the remaining decades of the Soviet Union's existence. In reality, a complex hierarchy, reminiscent of tsarist Russia's estate (soslovie ) system, developed, involving highly differentiated access to the state's goods and services. At the top of the Soviet pecking order stood the party elite and other recipients of the Kremlin emolument (kremlovka). Next came those who appeared on the party's nomenklatura: high military and state officials, People's Artists, Stalin-prize-winning scientists, academicians, writers, and other members of the cultural, scientific-technical, and managerial elites. Lower-level officials—the police, teachers, junior military officers, engineers, and state and collective farm bureaucracies—enjoyed certain privileges, as did outstanding workers (Stakhanovites in the 1930s and 1940s, innovators, and "advanced workers" from the 1950s onward). Collective farmers, who were denied the right to internal passports until the mid-1970s, occupied perhaps the lowest rung in the class hierarchy, with the obvious exception of prisoners and inmates of labor camps and colonies.
Cutting across this system were such factors as political geography (capital cities vs. provincial towns; towns vs. villages) and the strategic significance of the enterprise or institute to which one was attached. Scientists living in such closed facilities as Dubna and Akademgorodok enjoyed a particularly high standard of living. The entire structure was mitigated by petitioning, but also by informal connections based on kinship or friendship, exchanges of favors, and other semi-legal transactions that were very much a part of quotidian reality during the Soviet Union's "mature" stage.
See also: five-year plans; intelligentsia; new economic policy; soslovie
bibliography
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press.
Matthews, Mervyn. (1972). Class and Society in Soviet Russia. London: Allen Lane.
Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Class
Class
In one sense, smoking is a habit that overrides all distinctions of class. Since the seventeenth century it has been an item of mass consumption across Europe and America and in the twenty-first century cigarettes are smoked across all sections of society all over the world. However, significant class differences have always existed in tobacco consumption patterns. In the eighteenth century, snuff was associated with Europe's aristocratic elites, resulting in such fascinating historical quirks as the pockets of Frederick the Great of Prussia, specially enlarged to accommodate his prolific consumption. In southern Europe, the great state-owned tobacco factories of Cadiz and Seville ensured the popular appeal of the cigar, though one result of the Peninsular Wars (1808–1814) was to lead to its spread among the officer classes of England.
Although the virtues of smoking have been praised in prose and verse ever since its introduction into Europe, the late nineteenth century witnessed a particularly bourgeois celebration of the pipe and the cigar, promoting a culture based on liberal individualism. The periodical press brought the "art" of the connoisseur to a rapidly expanding pipe and cigar-smoking middle class. Numerous hack journalists of the kind parodied in English novelist George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) churned out countless and highly derivative pieces which, importantly, enabled male consumers to escape the passive and feminine associations of consumption and the marketplace. Instead, their everyday, private, and self-indulgent purchasing acts were transformed into an activity in accord with the perceived male role in life. Men were taught how to appreciate a cigar, how to choose a pipe, how to develop their personal tastes and settle on their own personal tobacco mixture, all to ensure that they became the masters, not the victims, of commerce; not mere consumers, but "ardent votaries," worshippers, disciples, aficionados, and true friends of "the divine lady nicotine."
Historians and scholars know less about working-class smoking attitudes and practices. Undoubtedly, distinctions existed across states, regions, towns, and occupations. Visitors to Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently commented on the sight of entire communities smoking, their habits following those of their northern European counterparts as the majority used pipes, the great exception being the popularity of chewing tobacco. This required no special preparation since users merely bit off the hard manufactured tobaccos of twist and plug that were sold both for pipes and for grating into snuff. But the differences are too many to recount. In nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, Welsh miners were known to prefer strong shag tobaccos (coarsely cut leaf) and rolls (tied tightly into a type of rope), dock laborers were associated with thick twists, cabmen for Irish roll, while the better paid and London workers preferred the lighter and more finely cut Virginian flake tobaccos that were ready to smoke.
These differences were to some extent overshadowed by the rise of the cheap cigarette, an item much more of mass—as opposed to class—consumption. Popularized in wartime and on the cinema screen, and promoted by enormous tobacco combines and monopolies, some of the first global brands emerged in the cigarette market. Class differences have persisted, especially with regard to the prices of types of cigarettes, and advertisers have sought to appeal to people's sense of individuality; however, by the mid-twentieth century smoking was almost a classless pleasure.
However, since the smoking and health controversy of the 1950s, public health campaigns have had much greater impact upon affluent, professional males, making smoking today a health problem increasingly associated with poverty. The issue is also overlaid with questions of gender and ethnicity, as smoking rates among women have not decreased to the same extent and tobacco companies have been further criticized for targeting poor ethnic minorities in the United States. Outside the affluent West, tobacco companies have also entered new less-regulated markets in Africa and the East, raising the potential for new distinctions of class as educated elites show far greater awareness of the dangers of smoking.
▌ MATTHEW HILTON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hilton, Matthew. Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Kiernan, V. G. Tobacco: A History. London: Hutchinson, 1991.
Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. London: Picador, 1995.
Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes. New York: Vintage, 1997.
snuff a form of powdered tobacco, usually flavored, either sniffed into the nose or "dipped," packed between cheek and gum. Snuff was popular in the eighteenth century but had faded to obscurity by the twentieth century.
individualism an independence of spirit; the belief that self-interest is (or should be) the goal of all human actions.
plug a small, compressed cake of flavored tobacco usually cut into pieces for chewing.