The physics of poverty: why social class resists economic mobility

“ Many English migrated to London. There were ambitious young men and women hopeful of betterment through employment, apprenticeship, higher wages, or successful marriage. On the other hand, there were subsistence migrants forced to leave their homes for food, work, or somewhere to live. There was much social mobility. For instance, between 1551 and 1553, of 881 persons admitted as freemen of London, 46 were the sons of gentlemen, 136 the sons of yeomen, and 289 the sons of farm workers. London grew in population about twice as fast as the nation. The fortunes of landowners varied ”

“ How can limited government and fiscal restraint be equated with lack of compassion for the poor? How can a tax break that puts a little more money in the weekly paychecks of working people be seen as an attack on the needy?
Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes— one rich, one poor — both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? ”

“ It greatly confuses the issue to assume, as the orthodox Marxist so often does (see for instance Mr Alec Brown’s in some ways interesting book, The Fate of the Middle Classes) , that social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. ”

“ Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical students, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes is mainly 257in unimportant things—in polish, in manner, in superficialities of accent and vocabulary and social habit—and that their minds, in range and power, are very much on a level. With an invincibly aristocratic tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leader class adequate to modern needs. ”

“ We write solely for the benefit of the superior classes, that is to say, of the Nobility, Gentry, Clergy, and so many of the Public in general as will condescend to patronise our work. These individuals, if we may so call them, inhabiting a different sphere from that of the Mobility, are not (with the exception, of course, of the Magistracy and the Clergy,) in the habit of meeting them ”

“ After all these thousands of years that we have been subject to the influence of the family and of religion, can it be possible that we are unable to arouse the people’s conscience except by—O ye silent and exalted witnesses, who hear without answering and see without reflecting what you see, why don’t you show me how to reach the upward road? For in the midst of all this misery there is no road that leads upward—nothing but an endless circling around the same spot, by which I perish! ”

“ We know better; capitalists and wageworkers have antagonistic economic interests; capitalists buy 230and workers sell labor power, the one as cheaply and the other as dearly as possible; they are locked in a life-and-death class-struggle; there can be no identity of interests between masters and slaves—between exploiters and exploited—and there can be no peace until the working class is triumphant in this struggle and the wage system is forever wiped from the earth. ”

“ I became a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States, and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. ”

“ Never in the history of society was the working-class so free from all traces of property as to-day." [218] "There are in reality but two classes, those who live by labour and those who live upon those who labour, the two classes of exploiter and exploited." [219] "Society has been divided mainly into two economic classes, a relatively small class of capitalists who own tools in the form of great machines they did not make and cannot use, and a great body of many millions of workers who did make these tools and who do use them, and whose very lives depend upon them, yet who do not own them." ”

“ The Socialist view of the evolution of society is that the central fact of history is this struggle of classes for political and economic power. The governing class of any society or period, Marx taught, consists of the economic exploiters, the governed class of the economically exploited. The governing class becomes more and more firmly established in power, until it begins to stagnate, but the machinery of [Pg 280] production continues to evolve, and falls gradually into the hands of some exploited element which is able to use this economic advantage as a means for overthrowing its rulers. ”

“ Since human life, however, is the life of man in society, individual existence moves within the framework of the social structure and is modified by it. What the conditions of maintenance are to the individual, the similar relations of production and consumption are to the community. To economic causes, therefore, must be traced in the last instance those transformations in the structure of society which themselves condition the relations of social classes and the various manifestations of social life." The Economic Interpretation of History, p. ”

“ All over the world the fact stands undisputed that the political is based upon and is but the reflex of the economic system, & hence, we find that whatever the political form of the government - whether monarchical or Republican, the average social status of the wage-worker is in every country identical.
The class struggle of the past century is history repeating itself; it is the evolutionary growth preceding the revolutionary denouement. Though liberty is a growth, it is also a birth, and while it is yet to be, it is also about to be born. ”

“ But if we now see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletarian, have their distinctive ethical systems, we can [128] only conclude therefrom that mankind consciously or unconsciously shapes its moral views in accordance with the material facts upon which in the last instance the class existence is based—upon the economic conditions under which production and exchange are carried on. ”

“ When we declare the abolition of private property in the means of production to be unavoidable, we do not mean that some fine morning the exploited classes will find that, without their help, some good fairy has brought about the revolution. We consider the breakdown of the present social system to be unavoidable, because we know that the economic evolution inevitably brings on conditions that will compel the exploited classes to rise against this system of private ownership. ”

“ It is a concerted movement, based on the recognition of a common evil and seeking a common good. So with the labor movement. It is not alone that the individual laborer is a better educated, more highly developed man than the stolid peasant of earlier days, but also that with this keener personal consciousness has come the wider social consciousness, without which no class can better its conditions. The traits incident to our sexuo-economic relation have developed till they forbid the continuance of that relation. ”

“ The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children, is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly pursuits. Because of a presumed superiority and scarcity of the gifts and attainments that characterize their life, these classes are by convention subsumed under a higher social grade than their pecuniary grade should warrant. ”

“ The general run of professional men and the more prosperous manufacturers or wholesale merchants formed a social class, less fixed in personnel, but quite distinct from the retail traders whose name over their shops kept them on a definitely lower social level, though their incomes and education were hardly distinguishable from the professional strata. ”

“ And virtue, the most important distinction of all, is independent alike of wealth, calling and culture. The real upper class, that which is doing the most for the onward movement of human life, is not to be discerned by any visible sign. The more inward or spiritual a trait is, the less it is dependent upon what are ordinarily understood as class distinctions. ”

“ The Children of the Mobility are not, in early infancy, interesting creatures; they are invested with none of those angelic attributes so peculiar to the aristocratic babe. It will be well, therefore, to pass over this period of their lives, and to consider them as they exhibit themselves, at a somewhat more advanced age, in the streets.
Those talented artists who have so laudably devoted their lofty energies to the delineation of the youthful forms of the Children of the Nobility, have correctly represented them as replete, in all their actions, with elegance. ”

“ Now hoops, then kites are all the rage. There is one species of recreation, however, which is practised among them at all times, denominated "overing a post;" for which Charity Boys are especially renowned; a certain peculiarity of their singular attire, combined with the remarkable lightness of their limbs and bodies, rendering them particularly adroit at this feat.
In connection with the genus of the Children of the Mobility now under consideration, we beg to call attention to their habit of hopping alternately from side to side during a conversation. ”

“ Master Patrick Donovan has just obtained possession of a herring—probably on Social principles, and is conveying it, with the kettle, which the fire of some neighbouring Socialist has warmed, homewards for breakfast. He is a youth of a lively turn, and the jest that hangs on his lip is called forth by the contemplative look,— (oh that such eyes should rest on such an object!) with which Miss Margaret Flinn is regarding his finny prize. He is facetiously inquiring whether she would like a soldier; that term being, in the language of the Mobility, applied to the delicacy in question. ”

“ PLATE II. Master Jim Curtis, Master Mike Waters, and Master Bill Sims. Youths in full, such prolixity being, among the Order of Mobility to which they belong, a thing entirely unknown. The group last described, we might have represented as taken from the genus, "Ragamuffin;" this, in like manner, we may consider as pertaining to the tribe, "Varlet." Masters Curtis, Waters, and Sims, are members of that numerous republic of boys frequenting, like the canine race, (indeed it is not unusual to hear them described as "young dogs,") all manner of public walks, squares, streets, and alleys. ”

“ His habits, manners, education, language, and dress, clearly warrant us in so disposing of him; although, on the one hand, we have placed him where his company may be scarcely considered an honour; and, on the other, his peculiar connexions, though celebrated, in one sense of the word, for taking everybody in, are reputed to be of an exclusive character.
Those who know any thing of the Mobility are aware, that one very frequent expression of theirs, indicating a desire to occupy the station of such and such a person, is, "I wish I was in his shoes." ”

“ The middle class worker has as his goal the social class just ahead of him. He is following a standard he did not establish, but he must go with the current or drift back. One cannot long stand still.
In the last chapter was discussed a class of workers who have little, if any, freedom in the choice of a plane of living. ”

“ Leaving our readers, according to their medical opinions, to calculate the damage, or estimate the good which the patients of Messieurs Graves and Slaymore derived from the amusements of their young subsidiaries, we shall now conclude our notice of those personages, and therewith, our labours. We hope that we have acquitted ourselves in a satisfactory manner; but in criticising the foregoing pages, let the fact be borne in mind, that it is very difficult to render the children of the Mobility interesting. It is easy to make a silk purse out of a proper material ”

“ There are derelict churches in the Strand, and dingy, blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there are slums hard by.
There are thieves in the Strand, and prowling vagrants, and gaunt hawkers, and touts, and gamblers, and loitering failures, with tragic eyes and wilted garments; and prostitutes plying for hire.
And east and west, and north and south of the Strand, there is London. Is there a man amongst all London’s millions brave enough to tell the naked truth about the vice and crime, the misery and meanness, the hypocrisies and shames of the great, rich, heathen city? ”

“ Where is London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles, and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? ”

“ This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle and lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary grade does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. ”

“ The individual has access to any class so far as his economic resources and leisure permit. Hence a free play of the imitative faculty, which often takes the form of a blind imitation of the recognized superior in invidious distinction—the accepting of standards from the class above irrespective of their merits. ”

“ Such is human nature that the unwillingness to give up something to which one is accustomed is a far stronger spur to action than the ambition to get something to which one is not accustomed; and a social rank once attained is not surrendered without a struggle. A tenacious maintenance of status is the motive which figures most prominently in controlling the growth of population and the increase of capital. The rich maintain the status of the family by means of invested wealth, the poor do it by education, and members of the middle class do it by a combination of the two. ”

“ To lower one’s economic and social status, even when prompted to do so by high ideals and motives, receives little commendation from an enlightened community and its “How could she?” savors more of contempt than admiration.
Among the higher social classes—although the same tendency is showing itself in all classes—there is a growing consciousness of the individual’s importance as a social unit, rather than his importance as a part of the family unit. His ties to society are growing at the expense of family ties. ”

“ For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social fundamental of Labor.
There is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South Africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed and desolated social order together again, that I perceived these familiar phrases represented [Pg 120] something—something stupendously real. ”