City Upon Cities
British is actually an country which has appearance level division in society. People live different area which could represent their material standard. This phenomenon is definitely exist in each countries, but it does more serious in London.
Class struggle was not fresh since some revolutions in about 1840. People want to get more fair class in society, so they want to execute capitalists and rich man by violent force as the method of protest had been failure. Why people and society against capitalism in that context? If we review the process of capitalism development, we see capitalist must get original means, which could be money, resource, labour force. In this process of collection, the value of mean changed, and the class of person changed. After the completion of collection of original means, the structure of class in society would not change easily, because people who have more means will use their energy to grab more worth over and over again.When they can’t get anymore from nature, they begin invade and rob other people’s. Today, in advanced society, capitalism can support most people to share this worth and profits, but the class division still exist, as exploitation as well, though the target have been changed, they began to grab means from other countries.
Our city was built upon other cities, towns or countrysides. We can’t say it is unfair, it seems is necessary during the social expand. We can see this progress as the combination of groups. Individuals concentrate as groups, but can groups concentrate as bigger group? What’s the relationship between each groups.
class in a city
In EP&IV project, I used Web to build a city. To show the class division, I stacked multiple platform to represent different class in a city.
The first floor is represent capitalism and money, which means our life could be led by money and materials. Simply say, we are both desire better life, and the standard of life generally be symbolised by physical means. So people work for higher salaries, company developed for larger market, and government promoted new policy for sustainable sustainable profits. Materials are definitely influence our life. Second floor is politics, and third floor is represent religion. As social creature, human must concentrate together and convert into a part of group. The social structure today, basically is vertical, which means it has strong division on class, the person who controlled politics and religion, he has more right and influences.
why I think about class
The people have more power and right are easily ignore the people live in base, and they might even don’t understand or imagine what the situation of poor people live in. Though we can think other’s life doesn’t be relative with us, and it doesn’t matter about own, but is it true? If we review the early period of capitalism development, we see the collection of means is selfish, violent even brutal. The first group of capitalists earned money by exploiting. Until today, many companies force staff work over time without extra salary, some factories decrease profits of staff to save cost. In advanced countries, they send manufacture to developing countries because the people live in poor region generally need more less salary. In China, even the high-tech industry like IT, medicine, has serious problem on labour exploitation. 996 is a popular word which be focused recently in Internet in China. The meaning of 996 is, begin work at 9am, finish at 9pm, 6 days a week. This work model is high-stress for staff, they can’t get fair pay after they work over time. Even the leader of company like ALIBABA, JINGDONG, said this model is valuable, profitable for staff, and they exchange the concept of working overtime, they equal overtime to hard-working and struggle. It is really bad, the capitalists even try to lie and blame staff, like say, you are not hardworking because you not work overtime. It definitely is exploitation in contemporary society, in capitalism. The horrible thing is, IT workers are richer and basically have higher education, so they generally have larger voice in society. Even this, they were exploited. How does poor person, who know their suffering? How they pour out, who can listen them? It is horrible, if we don’t care base people. Our current life, material could be earned from a poor person, who was exploited. We can’t change the structure of society, but we should care more about these people poor than us, because we could live on their stress.