Social stratification

“ And if the social distinctions which managed to form themselves within primitive society were kept within narrow limits, now the class distinctions, which can form themselves, have practically no limit. They can grow on the one side through the technical progress which increases the surplus of the product of the social labour over the amount necessary to the simple maintenance of society; on the other hand, through the expansion of the community, while the number of the exploiters remains the same or even decreases, the number of those working and producing surplus for each exploiter grows. ”

“ The basis of this theoretical contradiction, just as the practical antagonism in social life, lies in the unequal development of the various classes of humanity, in the relations between the dominant and subservient races and classes, in the division of material and intellectual labor, and in the acquisitions resulting from this division. This inequality of development, advancing with the progress of civilization, was the rock upon which ancient society foundered. ”

“ Chiefly, however, we have to note that, while the higher political evolution of large social aggregates tends to break down the divisions of rank which grew up in the small component social aggregate, by substituting other divisions, these original divisions are still more broken down by growing industrialism. Generating a wealth that is not connected with rank, this initiates a competing power ”

“ When, for instance, the preservation of a group is very closely bound up with maintenance of a particular stratum in its existence and peculiarities—for example, the highest, the broadest, or the middle stratum—the first two cases demand more rigidity of the social-life form, the last more elasticity. Aristocracies are in general conservative. If they are in reality what the name asserts, they are the most adequate expression of the actual inequality between men. ”

“ While the complicated economic structure remains, however, the problem will be one of co-relating the activities of vast numbers of economic units, and of prevailing on them to function with less friction and greater harmony.
Like every social structure, the economic system will be built up of lesser social groups, beginning with the simplest local body of farmers, miners or mill workers, and continuing on, by successive stages of organization to the largest and most highly complex groups in the community. ”

“ The maintenance of the social system—that is, of the segregation of power and prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty—depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. ”

“ A transmutation of social classes takes place; the urban population grows rapidly, the country districts are depopulated: out of the revolutionary process the outlines of two classes become more and more distinct: Capitalist and Proletarian. ”

“ In its deepest aspect, consequently, the social problem is the problem of preventing such divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter—of keeping such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole. ”

“ But if this cause of incompleteness be duly borne in mind, social segregations will be seen to conform entirely to the same principle as all other segregations. Analysis will show that either by external incident forces, or by what we may in a sense regard as mutual polarity, there are ever being produced in society integrations of those units which have either a natural likeness or a likeness generated by training. ”

“ Now, by the great social organization the whole civilized body (and soon we shall say the whole human race) keeps up a combined assault on Nature for the means of subsistence. Civilized society may be said to be maintained in an [59] unnatural position, at an elevation above the earth, or above the natural state of human society. It can be maintained there only by an efficient organization of the social effort and by capital. At its elevation it supports far greater numbers than it could support on any lower stage. ”

“ If that large portion of the community did not spin and weave for the four quarters of the globe, the subsistence and happiness of millions of our population would be destroyed. That competition went on day by day, and year by year, increasing in force and intelligence, and formed the great social question of our times. If adequate provision were not made for that class of the population, there must be danger. ”

“ Well, may we not trace a parallel step in social progress? Between the governing and the governed, there at first [286] exists no intermediate class; and even in some societies that have reached considerable sizes, there are scarcely any but the nobles and their kindred on the one hand, and the serfs on the other: the social structure being such that transfer of commodities takes place directly from slaves to their masters. But in societies of a higher type, there grows up, between these two primitive classes, another—the trading or middle class. ”

“ One sees these surplus forces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable concentrations of population, to centralisation of government, to migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction, and then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return after the burning of a common. ”

“ At the same time, the socialist-communist variant of the bourgeois state pattern is providing the framework within which the institutions and practices needed for the transition from civilization to a newer and more universal social order are being matured. At the next stage in the birth process, the institutions and practices necessary for upbuilding the social order that will replace civilization are being worked out in theory and embodied in experimental practice. ”

“ Accordingly, any increase in the complexity of social functions—political, religious, military or industrial—such as necessarily accompanies the enlargement of a social system, may have a caste tendency, because it separates the population into groups corresponding to the several functions ”

“ A tribe of hunters can never be more than a small horde, because the simple, monotonous savage economy permits no concentration of population, no division of labor except that between the sexes, and hence no evolution of classes. The common economic level of all is reflected in the simple social organization,91 which necessarily has little cohesion, because the group must be prepared to break up and scatter in smaller divisions, when its members increase or its savage supplies decrease even a little. ”

“ And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution, at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, has become an obsolete anachronism....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. ”

“ Under such conditions, the social motives, the moral feelings, the subordination of the individual to the whole, must have developed to the utmost. With the further development of society, the tribes are dissolved and their places are taken by new unions, by towns and peoples. New formations step into the place of the old ones, and the members of these groups carry on the struggle for existence in common against other peoples. In equal ratio with economic development, the size of these unions increases, the struggle of each against the other decreases, and social feelings spread. ”

“ It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereas totemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the very greatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight into the meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the village community up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of social structure obtains throughout. ”

“ The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these social conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the theory of classes, the genesis of which is in the manner of the different occupations, granted the distribution of labor, that is to say, granted the relations which co-ordinate and bind men together in a definite form of production. ”

“ Without a social capital, with twenty or more communities divided by distance and political barriers, her people, who are really more homogenous than any other of the same numbers in the world perhaps, possess no standard for opinion, manners, social maxims, or even language. ”

“ That the difficulty of modifying social phenomena increases as progress is made from the higher toward the lower; e. g., it is far easier to alter political forms than to effect changes in economic systems.
⁠3. These phenomena and other phenomena of social contact which are not clearly included in the hierarchy, are apportioned among certain social sciences. Any attempt at distribution must be merely general. The division of labor is still so unorganized that wide differences of opinion exist. ”

“ At the opposite pole of the social scale to that about which shareholding is most apparent, is a [Pg 79] second necessary and quite inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. ”

“ The social separation reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern state — the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions. ”

“ Indeed, the highest or ruling class nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.
The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies, even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability, discover it, and reward it by social promotion. ”

“ Just as we have seen that larger social aggregates become coherent by the cooperation of their members in conflict with neighboring like aggregates, so with this smallest social aggregate constituted by the nomadic family. Of the differentiations that simultaneously arise, the same may be said. As the government of a larger society is evolved during its struggles with other such societies, so is the government of this smallest society. ”

“ These classes have been formed and are maintained by the operation of social and economic competition; they have long been, and are still, perpetually recruited in each generation from the lower strata, by the rise into them of the abler members of the lower strata. Hence, economic selection, under our present social system, seems to be working strongly for the mental deterioration of the most highly civilised peoples ”

“ This growing independence and self-sufficiency in the trades, the professions, and social intercourse leads35 inevitably, as he pointed out, to a form of natural segregation based upon economic needs and social preferences, and in conformity to the laws of nature, which is a very different matter from the artificial and arbitrary segregation forced upon unwilling people by the laws of men. ”

“ Throughout the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights. Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization, government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear under different and differently distributed forms ”

“ One needs but examine a tinted population map to realise that. The other concentrations are provincial and subordinate; they have the same relation to the main axis that Glasgow or Cardiff have to London in the British scheme.
334 § 4 When I speak of this vast multitude, these eighty millions of the United States of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-ised and common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not intend to convey that the American community is as a whole traditionless. ”

“ Omitting those small wandering assemblages which are so incoherent that their component parts are ever changing their relations to one another and to the environment we see that, wherever there is some coherence and some permanence of relation among the parts, there begin to arise political divisions. Relative superiority of power, first causing a differentiation at once domestic and social, between the activities and positions of the sexes, presently begins to cause a differentiation among males, shown in the bondage of captives; a master-class and a slave-class are formed. ”

“ Many ancestral homesteads have been deserted for promising "fresh woods and pastures new" in the commercial world. This centralization of population is evidently a violation of economic laws, and when carried too far results in business depression, in the multiplication of tramps, and in the origination and development of industrial and social troubles. ”