Working class

Budapest between the two World Wars was a vibrant, cultnred city with excellent theaters, concert halls, opera house, and museums. The city consisted of ten districts. The working-class industrial outskirts of Pest had their row-houses, whereas the middle-class inner city had quite imposing apartment buildings. The upper classes and aristocracy lived in their villas in the hills of Buda. 

Fortunately for a poor, would-be chemist like Leblanc, France s aristocratic passion for the physical sciences crossed economic, social, and political borders. Intellectuals such as Rousseau and Diderot cultivated the sciences with enthusiasm and compiled encyclopedias and dictionaries of natural substances. Local academies and institutes in the far-flung provinces sponsored chemical studies. Crowds flocked to hear chemists lecture and to watch their flashy laboratory demonstrations. Even the future revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, experimented with fire, electricity, and light and tried—in vain—to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In America, Benjamin Franklin abandoned his printing and publishing business for physics, and in England his friend Jane Marcet wrote Mrs Marcet s Conversations in Chemistry for women and working-class men. 

In chapter 20 of Capital, volume 2, Marx sets out the task of establishing how the total social capital can reproduce itself. A renewal is required of all elements of means of production such as raw materials and machinery that are used up in the production process. In addition, both the working class and the capitalist class have to be maintained such that the required amount of consumption goods is produced each year. Marx writes ... 

Marx argues that it is at least clear that the consumption of the entire capitalist class and the unproductive persons dependent on it keeps even pace with that of the working class (Marx 1978 407). The simulation that follows will show that by making Kalecki s empirical assumptions capitalist consumption does roughly keep pace with variable capital. 

Quoted in Carey McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin [1942] (Boston Little Brown, 1946), pp. 4, 301. See also Gary Gerstle, The Working Class Goes to War, Mid-America, Oct. 1993, pp. 316-319. 

Naison, Communists in Harlem, pp. 17-19,45-47 Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York Free Press, 1994) p. 109 Sitkoff, New Deal, pp. 142-143, 139-168 James Smethurst, The New Red Negro (New York Oxford, forthcoming), chapter 1. 

James Barrett and David Roediger, Inbetween Peoples Race, Nationality, and the New Immigrant Working Class, Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997) Robert Orsi, The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990, American Quarterly 44 (Sept. 1992). 

In the mid-1930s, George Orwell visited working-class communities in northern England and wrote about the conditions that he witnessed. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier. He describes a visit to a coalmine the section devoted to the walk from the mineshaft to the coalface is presented here. It makes it very clear why the energy expenditure involved in these activities is very high. 

It is well established that overcrowding, poor nutrition, stress and general poor health increase the risk of contracting tuberculosis. The conditions of the poor in the large cities during the industrial revolution in Britain were ideal for development of tuberculosis, as recorded by Friedrich Engels in his book Conditions of the British Working Classes. 

Income, class, education inherited wealth, professional and managerial, average middle class, working class, working poor, welfare. 

Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success. Severe pollution was an indication of a prosperous economy. The more successful industrial operations were, the higher the standard of living for at least some of the nation s population—certainly the upper class, who owned the factories, and often the new and growing middle class. If successful factories also released excessive amounts of hazardous waste products into rivers and lakes and the air, that was perhaps unfortunate, especially for members of the working class, but it seemed to be an unpreventahle by-product of a nation s overall economic success. 

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