What is social class and what does it effect in society?

[Arslan]

I need to write an essay on social class and the introduction to be one page. I have written one paragraph. Can you tell me a few ideas that I could use to fill up the page ?

[David]

I'll give a short history of social classes.

Classes in society arose around the time of the agricultural revolution, when humans moved from hunter gathers to farming. Agriculture and animal husbandry enabled a greater surplus of food to be produced, thus creating the possibility of classes forming. The first social classes probably arose in Babylon in 1867bc. A growing surplus meant it had to become the permanent job of certain people to store the surplus and to account for it (i.e. the first accountants), over time these became a nobility and they claimed a god given right to the surplus.

A growing surplus meant the possibility of armies and also of slaves.

A slave is entirely unfree and is owned, and has to produce for who ever owns him/her. Their produce is taken off them, and part is returned in the form of food and shelter to sustain the slave.
The Roman Empire and Ancient Greece were slave societies.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire a new economic system slowly formed. Feudalism. In this system a peasant (or a serf who was like a slave) worked on their own land, but they had to do a certain amount of days labour for the Lord. The Lord would also take a certain percentage of what they produced. The Lords functioned like a Mafia protection racket, they would use the money they got from the peasants to create armies to enable them to get more produce of other peasants, obviously when they ran out of places to rob they would run into conflict with other Lords etc.

Serfdom was abolished across Europe with the French Revolution. Free labour began to take its place, the birth of the working class begins, with the industrial revolution in England and Holland. Many peasants (in England) were thrown off the land by Lords when they enclosed common land to take it for themselves.(14th, 15th and 16th centuries). They moved from crop farming to sheep farming because of the increasing demand for wool. Lords and large farmers in England began to demolish the cottages on their land to avoid having to pay the poor rate to their parish.

Thus many villages in England in the 1700's became "closed" villages, i.e. not very many lived there, in effect they weren't villages, but sort of empty for show villages because the only people who lived their worked for the Lord. Where possible peasants became farm-labourers, the rest went to the city to become paupers.

After the French and English revolutions the town Guilds were either abolished or swamped by the influx of new labour coming into the towns and cities. The Guilds were organisations that controlled labour, i.e. the clock makers guild, the bell makers guild etc.

With the collapse of the guilds merchants could now hire labour, which they were previously forbidden to do.

Also many of the Lords and aristocrats began to hire out their land to tenant farmers. These tenant farmers hired farm-laborers to do the work (often living in squalor) and they used new improved agricultural techniques.

Many people got rich from this process and also from the slave trade. This process also created a home market, because previously everyone produced butter and milk and other foods for themselves. Now they couldn't because they were dispossessed of their little bit of land.

The new wealth now found that there was a class of people that they could hire out to do productive work. Thus the capitalist and the working class were formed.

The worker produces a certain amount of stuff. Some of that stuff is paid back in the form of wages and some is reinvested and some taken by the capitalist. The trick to this new method of production was that the worker had to work for some or other capitalist in order to survive, because they had been dispossessed of their means of subsistence.

And thus, that is how the modern social classes we see around us developed.