The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain

British society is split into hierarchical categories with “higher” “middle” and “lower working” class. The British class structure is shaped like a pyramid cut into three

Karl Marx on Class and Class Conflict. According to Karl Marx, society is stratified into classes. The classes comprise the bourgeoisies, land-owners and the proletariat. The propertied-upper-class is the minority, while the proletariats are the majority. Wood (2004) notes Marx’s dissection of the dominant features of each of these classes in most of his works. For example, the bourgeoisies own the means of production. This is due to the huge investments they have made into factories and machines in the industries. The land owners have rent as their primary source of income. The proletariats are owners of cheap labor which they offer in exchange for wages that they use for their basic subsistence (Collins & Sanderson, 2008).

In this paper of his, Marx tackles many Enlightenment ideals but also challenges many with his analysis on class struggle (bourgeoisie vs. working class), capitalism, and the development of society as a result of these struggles. Marx’s main proposal in The Communist Manifesto is that of ‘historical materialism’, which is basically self divided into two parts: historically and materialistic. Historically, Marx defines history as a change from the past to present in which the present relies on analysis of the past to ensure progress. Furthermore, Marx regards that “relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions”.7 The analysis of the past is consequent with the present as it is dependent with progress. Without analyzing the past, Marx is stating that society in general will not learn from the class struggles that so aptly occupied society during that time. The materialistic aspect of this, is prominent through Marx’s explanation that the economy of a society does not necessarily lead to distress and chaos in society, furthermore the economy of a society is not to blame. In many ways Marx says that following every historical period, “the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up […]”.8

Designed over two hundred years ago, Karl Marx’s philosophy defines specific characteristics known today as the Marxist approach. In this critical approach, whomever holds the power and controls the factories or means of production, consequently controls the whole society. Marx’s opinion states that the laborers running the factories and thus holding the means of production should be the ones holding the power. However, this idea rarely holds true in practical society. Frequently, Marx notes, powerful people hire others to carry out the labor. This division of power reflects current culture. Two main classes or categories of people exist, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie is the powerful, or those who are in charge of

Karl Marx was a communist researcher and coordinator, a key character in the historical locale of economic and hypothetical idea, and an awesome societal prophet. But it is as a sociological theorist that he commands our interest. Society, according to Marx, involved a moving equalization of contradictory powers that create social change by their strain and battle. Marx's vision depended on a transformative purpose of flight. For him, battle instead of quiet development was the motor of advance; strife was the father of all things, and social conflict the principal of historic process. This reasoning was in opposition with the greater part of the teachings of his eighteenth century antecedents, however tweaked in to much nineteenth century thought. To Marx the propelling power in history was the way in which men classify each other in their consistent battle to seize their work from nature. "The first historical act is . . . the production of material life itself. This is indeed a historical act, a fundamental condition of all history" (Bancroft and Rogers, 2010). A communist state would have the laborers possess the methods for generation and all would share the benefits similarly. The laborers would be working for themselves, not for the advantage of the business people. All types of government would gradually vanish, as the laborers comprehended the advantage of working for the benefit of each other. When this model situation happened, his optimal society that he called

“A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment” is an article written by Savage et. Al (2013), shows analysis of two surveys which results in a new way of mapping the social class in the UK. Savage et. Al. explains in his article the five steps of analysis that led to the division of the seven classes, and the explains the seven classes, and the economic, social, and cultural capital.

Marx's ideas on labor value are very much alive for many organizations working for social change. In addition, it is apparent that the gap between the rich and poor is widening on a consistent basis. According to Marx, the course of human history takes a very specific form which is class struggle. The engine of change in history is class opposition. Historical epochs are defined by the relationship between different classes at different points in time. It is this model that Marx fleshes out in his account of feudalism's passing in favor of bourgeois capitalism and his prognostication of bourgeois capitalism's passing in favor of proletarian rule. These changes are not the reliant results of random social, economic, and political events; each follows the other in predictable succession. Marx responds to a lot of criticism from an imagined bourgeois interlocutor. He considers the charge that by wishing to abolish private property, the communist is destroying the "ground work of all personal freedom, activity, and independence". Marx responds by saying that wage labor does not properly create any property for the laborer. It only creates capital, a property which works only to augment the exploitation of the worker. This property, this capital, is based on class antagonism. Having linked private property to class hostility, Marx

The Victorian era society was divided into three class's upper, middle, and working class. The upper class was made of aristocrats, noble's dukes, and other wealthy families that worked in the court system. They held the most powerful positions that gave them authority, better living conditions, and other facilities. The upper class of society had rules such as the proper forms of address, what to wear that would be appropriate it was something crucial to get right. Many aristocrats did not work as for centuries together their families had been gathering enough money for each generation to live life in luxurious. The upper class was broken down into three subdivisions which were the royal class, upper middle class, and lower upper class. Middle class put pressures on the upper classes for representation which resulted in series of reform acts giving commoners increased representation in parliament.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Mark 344). This is the famous sentence with which Karl Marx begins the first chapter of Manifesto of the Communist Party, by using the word class this would imply ordering people into societal groups. Karl Marx was referring to economic class, however, society can be grouped into many different classes, such as, economic standing, gender, or race. Each provides an interesting view on how different values have shaped history as is currently viewed. If viewed through the struggles of economic oppression, similar to how Karl Marx did, the major conflict is centralized within the relationship of each class to the means of production. However, Kate Millett and Charles Mills would argue that economic class is meaningless in political society, as Mills would argue that race is the most important, while Millett would say that gender is important. Regardless of the viewpoint that history is taken through Marx, Mills, and Millett would concur that the various classes need to be broken down in order to create a peaceful society. While divisions amongst the various societal classes creates oppression, it is in this oppression that society through the introduction of laws or the evolution of a society’s values, and these changes can be witnessed from where society was when Marx wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, and Mills and Millett’s writings towards the end of the twentieth century.

Fourthly, class is a complex issue, when looking at the history of the U.K. This concept being used since the nineteenth century describing differences between social groupings and how society in Britain operates. Conversely, within the ‘Making Lives Strand’ Bauman argues “People are preoccupied now not with Class, but with personal taste and individuality” Bauman, Z, (1988) cited in Hetherington K, and Havard C. (2014 pg. 139). Yet systematic patterns of class can still be seen today, being used to judge and label people as in our industrial past. As Arnold, M. (1869) cited in ‘Institute for policy studies’ (2016) is quoted, “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class” with class seen as a process of social stratification, based upon differences in occupations, income, wealth and power and one

Human societies have been class based in some way and the class factor has been the most basic dividing or differentiating factor between broad social groups. In the economic sphere that Marx’s theory focuses on, there is a class that own and control means of economic production which could be referred to as the upper class, and there is the class that maybe own nothing, but their ability to sell their labor power in return for wages which could be referred to as the middle or low class. From that understanding, and based on the conflict theory, one might argue that unequal distribution of resources and access

Karl Marx describes “Society as a whole [as being] more and more [split] up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other-bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Marx 124).  As Marx made his distinction between upper class, bourgeoisie, and lower class, proletariats, it is important to keep in mind the societal structure at the time.  To understand how classes were created and the disparity between the rich and poor, or, bourgeoisie and proletariat, it is necessary to examine how people came to be rich and poor.  Exploring a time before money existed will help us to process and understand reasons why the binary between rich and poor exists and how it is reflective of low and high art distinctions.

The decline of aristocracy in The Communist Manifesto began with Karl Marx’s statement, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”1 Marx recognized the ideals of the social rank, which has influenced every society throughout history. The two social classes described by Marx were the Bourgeoisie, or the upper class, and the Proletariats, or the lower class. Before the Bourgeoisie came to social power, landowners and corporate organizations ran the society. Marx believed that the severe separation of the two classes greatly troubled society and that the two classes must coexist as one with each other.2

Although the United States was a British Colony in the early 1700s, the differences between the two were definitely noticeable, especially in the socioeconomic fields, mostly due to the fact that slavery played a much larger role in the United States.

Though Marx views the communist revolution as an unavoidable outcome of capitalism, his theory stipulates that the proletariat must first develop class consciousness, or an understanding of its place within the economic superstructure. If this universal character of the proletariat does not take shape, then the revolution cannot be accomplished (1846: 192). This necessary condition does not pose a problem within Marx’s theoretical framework, as the formation of class consciousness is inevitable in Marx’s model of society. His writings focus on the idea that economic production determines the social and political structure (1846, 1859). For Marx, social class represents a person’s relation to the means of production, a relation that he believes is independent of