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- "When monks are righteous, rajahs are righteous. When ministers are righteous, brahmins and householders are righteous. Thus townsfolk and villagers are righteous."
– The Book of Gradual Sayings
Social Class is an Exploration Age civic in Civilization VII.
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Class consciousness is an awareness that one’s interests are influenced by one’s labor. Social theorists of the 19th century pointed to a few basic divisions of class: feudal subjects might be serfs who were bonded to a particular plot of land, a lord could be the owner of that land and those serfs, and an artisan was free with the right to engage in certain kinds of labor. With some important variations, similar divisions held for the Indian varna (caste), East Asian social class, Southeast Asian sakdina systems, and the like. Industrialization bred a new consciousness as the serf and farmer classes flocked to cities to work in factories. In the city, classes had clear divisions: aristocrats who had titles and land and did not labor; bourgeoisie who owned factories, machines, and other tools; the petit bourgeoisie (shopkeepers and the like) who were free and could own property on a smaller scale; and the proletariat, the masses with nothing to their name but their capacity to work.
For Karl Marx, and other social theorists, this was a vital split: the bourgeoisie had to legitimate their ability to generate profit without actually having to work, and the proletariat needed to remain deluded enough to accept these terms. This model was not based on organic systems of harmony and stasis (as we might find in feudal or Confucian models); rather, it was a system with inherent conflict. At the end of feudalism, the bourgeoisie would wake up to the notion that aristocratic titles were meaningless and unprofitable. Similarly, at the end of capitalism, the proletariat would wake up to the notion that factory owners contributed nothing to production but extracted value from their workers' labor. Marx drew from examples from the French and American revolutions (as examples of the bourgeois revolt against feudal systems) as well as the revolutions of 1848, where social class entered the picture in a dramatic fashion. However, he did not live to see the later revolutions carried out under his name (indeed, who knows what he would have thought of these).
| Civilization VII Civics [edit] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Antiquity | Standard | |
| Unique | ||
| Exploration | Standard | |
| Theological | ||
| Unique | ||
| Modern | Standard | |
| Ideological | ||
| Unique | ||
| 1 Requires DLC | ||
