en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class
Anthropologists, historians and sociologists identify class as universal, although what determines class will vary widely from one society to another. Even within a society, different people or groups may have very different ideas about what makes one "high" or "low" in the hierarchy.
gender would improve one's social status so long as it occurred alongside opposite-gender marriage. Also a minority sexual orientation and, to a far lesser degree, minority ethnicity have often been faked, hidden, or discreetly ignored if the person in question otherwise attained the requirements to be high class.
middle class For most of human history, societies have been agricultural and have existed with essentially two classes- those who owned productive agricultural land, and those who worked for them, with the landowning class arranging itself into a sometimes elaborate hierarchy based on the criteria listed in the previous section, but without ever changing the essential power relationship of owner and worker. About the 1770s, when the term "social class" first entered the English lexicon, the concept of a "middle class" within that structure was also becoming very important.
liberal arts knowledge was making workers question and rebel against the privileges and religious assumptions of the leisure class. Today, most talk of social class assumes three general categories: an upper class of powerful owners, a middle class of people who may not exert power over others but do control their own destiny to a certain extent through commerce or land ownership, and a lower class of people who do not own property nor stock in the corporate system and who rely on wages from above for their livelihood.
Indian caste system is one of the oldest and most important systems of social class with peculiar rigidity (in the sense it is a watertight class, with absence of upward or downward mobility,in caste hierarchy). It divided (and still divides) society based on heredity.
Ati-shudra laborers and members of the present OBC's and SC's, ie, constitutional terms for Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes groups, who were restricted to occupations deemed low and unclean by the religious establishment.
Despite being notorious for its rigidity, the caste system has in modern times been frequently inverted, and at least one president of India has come from the SC castes.
edit Chinese Traditional Chinese society divided workers based on the perceived usefulness of their work and was somewhat more fluid than the Indian caste system.
Confucian model is notably different from the modern Eurocentric view of social class, since merchants could attain great wealth without reaching the social status accorded to a poor farmer.
Possibly through Chinese influence, and possibly springing from a lack of arable land, the Japanese class structure also ranked farmers above merchants and other bourgeois workers.
Dharmic religion, who had to work in concert with the land. But the protection of landowners' leisure through military force or religious guilt remained constant.
Qajar dynasty of Iran, the class structure was set up as follows: * the permanent hereditary class of Qajar princes * an upper class of "nobles and notables" * religious leaders and students of theology * merchants (note the difference from east Asian models) * agricultural landowners * master artisans and shopkeepers As in many official class structures, the laborers who made up the majority of the population, but owned no land and relied on wages, were not even considered part of the structure at all.
The First Estate consisted of the highborn sons of great families who had devoted themselves to religion (compare to the Indian Brahmins, Confucian scholars, and Qajar theology students). The Second Estate was highborn sons who were devoted to war (compare to the Indian Ksatriyas and Japanese daimyos, but contrast with the low status given to soldiers in China).
House of Commons technically representing everyone else. Due to the electoral rules, however, the House of Commons historically (until the late 19th, early 20th centuries) represented the Landed classes.
Thomas Carlyle equated the Queen to France's First Estate of clergy, the House of Lords to France's Second Estate of hereditary aristocracy, and the House of Commons to France's Third Estate of rich bourgeoisie.
Industrial Revolution (similar to the pamphleteers before and during the French Revolution) held powerful sway over public opinion, making them equally important players in the political arena. The political role of the media has become ever more important as technology has blossomed in the 20th and 21st centuries, but few academic models today set aside the media as a specific class.
White collar workers such nurses and school teachers who are still among the 27% of the population who have a college degree, but often lack graduate degrees and high personal incomes are members of this class.
Sometimes used as a synonym for Working class, this particular class consists largely of pink collar and clerical workers who lack a college degree but may have some college education.
proletariat which had previously been relegated to an unimportant compartment at the bottom of most hierarchies, or ignored completely, became Marx's focal point.
ruling class ("We rule you"), supported by the religious ("We fool you") and military ("We shoot at you") lites, but the French Revolution had already shown that these classes could be removed.
Vladimir Lenin has defined classes as "large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.
edit Proletarianisation The most important transformation of society for Marxists has been the massive and rapid growth of the proletariat in the world population during the last two hundred and fifty years.
proletarianisation, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the "first world."
The destruction of the peasantry, and its conversion into a rural proletariat, is largely a result of the general proletarianisation of all work. This process is today largely complete, although it was arguably incomplete in the 1960s and 1970s.
edit Dialectics, or historical materialism, in Marxist class Marx saw class categories as defined by continuing historical processes. Classes, in Marxism, are not static entities, but are regenerated daily through the productive process. Marxism views classes as human social relationships which change over time, with historical commonality created through shared productive processes. A 17th century farm labourer who worked for day wages shares a similar relationship to production as an average office worker of the 21st century. In this example, it is the shared structure of wage labour that makes both of these individuals "working class."
subjective factors (ie the conscious organization of class members). While most Marxism analyses people's class based on objective factors (class structure), major Marxist trends have made greater use of subjective factors in understanding the history of the working class.
EP Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is a definitive example of this "subjective" Marxist trend. Thompson analyses the English working class as a group of people with shared material conditions coming to a positive self-consciousness of their social position.
It is seen as the process of a "class in itself" moving in the direction of a "class for itself," a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process.
three-component theory of stratification, with class, status and party (or politics) as subordinate to the ownership of the means of production, but for Weber how they interact is a contingent question and one that will vary from societ...
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