A Modern Class Explanation of the Industrial Revolution

According to American Heritage Dictionary, capitalism, also called: free enterprise or private enterprise an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions. These competitive conditions likewise carry with them the competition for a higher spot in the society and a race to the top. The present explanation of class originates from the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, Karl Marx utilized class as the fundamental idea for clarifying social organization as far as understanding the possession, means, and control of work courses.

He asserted that social orders comprised of two fundamental classes: the bourgeoisie, who possessed and controlled the plants, mines, and processing plants, and the proletariat, laborers with just their work capacity to sell.

For Marx, the connection between these two classes is simply unequal and exploitative. The regular workers produce surplus revenue yet don’t benefit from it as much as they would in light of the fact that the bourgeoisie excessively appropriates and gathers it.

Get quality help now

Prof. Finch

Verified writer

Proficient in: Capitalism

4.7 (346)

“ This writer never make an mistake for me always deliver long before due date. Am telling you man this writer is absolutely the best. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

He views all social life as set apart by the hardship and clashes over the generation and circulation of revenue and the status joined to it. The cultural change was just conceivable when laborers created class cognizance about the sources of exploitation: a feeling of a mutual circumstance, attention to the entrepreneur class as their shared adversary, and an acknowledgment of their shared power and predetermination. An adjustment in our thoughts regarding the pride of individuals laid the basis for the structural changes in an economic association known as the appearance of free enterprise and the Industrial revolution the industrial revolution additionally changed human behavior by developing further the ethics that sustained it.

In his play ‘’The Hairy Ape’’, Eugene O’Neill dissects this change in human behavior in an industrialized and capitalist society, comparing and contrasting different classes capitalism brings on in a successful attempt on a commentary about the society at the time. In the play, ''The Hairy Ape'' Eugene Oneill is enticing the crowd to take a gander at the Industrial Revolution as a relapse in human improvement, the sending of a class framework in the public eye and man's failure to feel like he has a place in any class other than his own. All through ''The Hairy Ape'' O'Neill delineates the decrease or relapse of the character Yank. He exhibits that the industrialization of America makes Yank relapse into an animalistic state. He utilizes Yank as a microcosm of the impact on men in the common laborers by mechanical headway and industrialization, almost akin to Pavlov's hound as laborers change into machines since they are turned on and off here and there by a whistle at work.

On the steamship, despite the fact that Yank and different stokers may feel an incredible feeling of trust in their own physical quality, they don't claim the furnaces they feed, not to mention the whole transoceanic liner. Hence, they are needy upon the entrepreneurs so as to have the option to have work by any stretch of the imagination. Since the capitalist organization is built upon inequality between the working class and the employers and the system is completely solidified in the society as the norm, the cycle of inequality and the structure of the system still stands as it forces the victims of the system to put blame on themselves and feel inadequate for failing to match the high demands the newly found industry asks for. In ‘’The Hairy Ape’’, we see Yank accusing the other stoker of ‘’going weak’’ because they dare to criticise the system that makes them modern slaves.

Here, Yank thinks that the entrepreneur class is not the ones who have power over their work on the basis that they could not achieve what Yank and his fellow workers could. He mistakenly sees physical power as the ultimate one, once again inforcing the system that wrongs them, by playing into that very system. This portrays to the audience the idea that if a revolt against the forces that bring upon the inequality unites the weak and exploited, a change can be seen. ‘’The Hairy Ape’’ does not fail to show how class division in the industrial capitalist society not only dehumanises the working class in seeing them just as machines without a right to gain wealth and no possibility of an upward class progression, it also shapes people into puzzle pieces in differing sizes that fit only one place on the board. O’Neill shows that when the job that is given to a class is taken, the workers are at a loss in the society that they also exist in, with nowhere to go and no system to please, the working class has no identity and place in society.