Pauperism
Pauperismus (from latin pauper "arm") refers to the impoverishment of large parts of the population just prior to industrialization and still unexplained for the former elite phenomenon of increasing depletion of the working layer ( English Laboring Poor ).
General
The name came about after Adam Smith's economic optimism ("invisible hand of the free market") did not work at a time of catastrophic crisis years (crop failures, famine, advanced industrialization efforts) in England at the end of the 18th century. In Germany the term refers to the social crisis of the Vormärz .
“The pauper of the early 19th century is a figure who in some ways resembles the beggar and vagabond of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a product of social insecurity and at the same time it embodies the phantasm of a ruling elite whose security feels threatened. According to the theory, it should not exist at all and apparently populates the cities and communities. "
Karl Marx referred with the "original accumulation" to exactly this time with regard to the enclosure movement in England and tried an explanation:
“Historically epoch-making in the history of original accumulation are all upheavals that serve as leverage for the emerging capitalist class; But above all the moments when large crowds are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and thrown onto the labor market as outlawed proletarians. The expropriation of the rural producer, the farmer, of the land forms the basis of the whole process. […] Rather, in the most defiant opposition to kingship and parliament, the great feudal lord created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry off the land whereupon they had the same feudal legal title as himself, and by usurping their common land. The immediate impetus for this in England was the flourishing of the Flemish wool manufacture and the corresponding rise in wool prices. The old feudal nobility had been swallowed up by the great feudal wars, the new one was a child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. The transformation of farmland into sheep pasture was his solution. Harrison, in his' Description of England. Prefxed to Holinshed's Chronicles' describes how the expropriation of the small farmers is ruining the land. 'What care our great incroachers!' (What do our great usurpers ask about it?) The houses of the peasants and the cottages of the workers were forcibly torn down or doomed to decay. "
Today there is no consensus on the origin of this increasing mass poverty, a monocausal explanation. Rather, a multitude of factors are responsible, which ultimately lead to the fact that a large section of the population was no longer able to provide for their own livelihood. This miserable situation was accompanied by signs of social disintegration such as riots, epidemics and neglect among those affected (→ social question ).
Pre-industrial population growth
From around 1750 the population in Germany increased rapidly; from around 16–18 to 22–24 million people in 1800. The rural lower class in particular increased. The population growth was initially made possible by an expansion of the food space, by the expansion of cultivation areas and improved management methods in agriculture , it was enforced during the mercantilist period by the pro-natalist population policy of the absolutist rulers. The introduction of the potato in particular made it possible to provide the rural masses with basic supplies; it provided 3.6 times the nutritional energy compared to grain with the same cultivated area . Furthermore, new jobs and thus livelihood opportunities were created, especially in the house industry . Manorial ties and thus marriage restrictions also fell away. The inheritance practice of real division prevailing in parts of Germany , in which the existing property was evenly distributed among the male heirs, enabled all sons to have a livelihood, albeit at a lower level. So more and more people found a livelihood for themselves and their families (albeit often only at the limit of the subsistence level). This development was accompanied (subsequently) by a decrease in the mortality rate , due to a. improved nutrition, and medicine. Mass emigration z. B. in the USA also reduced the economic competitive pressure on those who remained. In the 19th century this growth expanded into a real population explosion.
The population growth had enormous social consequences, as initially the productivity of the economy could not keep up with the increased demands. Many people now sought their livelihood in trade, especially in domestic industry and handicrafts.
Origin of the wage labor force
With the development of the house industry from the late Middle Ages onwards , significant sections of the population had in fact become dependent wage laborers in some areas : A publisher supplied the producers in their place of residence with raw materials and then bought the finished product. Due to the strong division of labor in production, the necessary work processes were easy to learn; thus the workers were easily replaceable. The overstaffing created pressure on prices, which the homeworkers tried to compensate for with extra work. This made the situation worse and worse.
Another rural branch of trade in which wage laborers worked was the manufacture . This was a mostly centralized large enterprise in which dependent craftsmen were employed, but also inmates of compulsory institutions .
With the liberation of the peasants were also from the former in the manorial often independently economizing farmers agricultural wage earners: Although they were now legally free, freedom, however, they had to buy from the landlords only expensive. This forced many to offer themselves to the gentleman as wage laborers. In the East Elbe areas in particular , this process was actively promoted by the landowners, as they had a strong interest in a class of agricultural workers who, in contrast to the farm-dependent farmers, did not have to care for.
Many groups of wage workers also emerged in the cities, for example in the new factories . The loosening of the guild barriers and the overstaffing of the handicrafts also meant that many artisans also only found employment as wage laborers. In addition, they were now in competition with industrial and domestic production.
All of these wage labor groups mentioned were withdrawn from the traditional security system, for example in manorial power or guilds . They were easily replaceable and apart from their labor they had no way of securing a livelihood. This made their livelihoods extremely vulnerable to economic crises and abuse / exploitation .
Attempts to explain
Origin of the term
The terms pauper and pauperism appear in the English language at the beginning of the 19th century, denoting a new form of poverty : not an individualized poverty or one that is associated with extraordinary circumstances such as e.g. B. is coupled with poor harvests, but a mass poverty that was carried from rural areas into the cities, where it formed one of the foundations of industrialization and its negative side effect remained. A French observer uses the following formulation: "Pauperism is, if one wants to define it by a single word, the epidemic of poverty" (Émile Laurent, 1865).
In his great work De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840), Eugène Buret asserts that “the expression of pauperism borrowed from England embraces the totality of all phenomena of poverty. This English word should mean misery for us in the sense of social plague, public misery. "
The question asked by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques about the causes of poverty was taken up by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and placed in the title of his Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère (1846).
The word “pauperism” gradually fell out of use.
Friedrich Engels
In his study of the situation of the English factory workers, Friedrich Engels made the early industrialization with the conversion from manual labor to machines responsible for the mass poverty. It may only serve to sharpen the contrast to the misery of the industrial proletariat in order to support Engels' political demands. In fact, contemporaries noticed that industry not only creates poverty, as Engels claimed, but also attracts it. Pauperism had its worst effects where there was no industry, for example with the Silesian weavers, who were no longer able to cope with industrial competition due to outdated production methods (home work).
Wilhelm Abel
The agricultural historian Wilhelm Abel later put forward a completely different thesis than Engels . In his view, pauperism was merely the offshoot of the old pre-industrial poverty, exacerbated by rapid population growth and still low productivity growth. In contrast to Engels, he saw industrialization as salvation from the pauperism crisis.
Pauperism as a result of the Prussian reforms
Furthermore, there is the thought that pauperism was the result of the Prussian reforms which lifted marriage restrictions and allowed freedom of movement. This created population pressure and pushed the small farmers down into the agricultural workers' proletariat. The introduction of freedom of trade and the abolition of the guild system , which originated in the Middle Ages, not only eliminated protectionist rules in favor of their members, which could also enable less effective companies to survive. The social help organized by the guilds for their members and family members in need was also dropped. This loss only affected the part of the economy organized through the guilds.
Pauperism and revolt
Even if the history of the labor movement usually only begins with the first organizational founding in the 1830s, some historians such as Ahlrich Meyer see the population's strategies against pauperism as a root not only of the proletariat, but also of the labor movement. These strategies included appropriations that were often only subsequently redefined as “thefts” - such as collecting wood in manorial forests. But riots and the first strikes were also part of the Pauper's resistance. In doing so, they defended themselves on the one hand against existential need and hunger, on the other hand against the previously unknown compulsion to capitalist factory discipline, which was also enforced by the state through institutions such as workhouses at the beginning of the 19th century.
Pauperism as a result of various developments
Today there is broad consensus in research that there is no monocausal explanation for pauperism. Rather, it was the rapid population growth with stagnating productivity growth that allowed a significant part of the population to live on the subsistence level. When an agricultural crisis with bad harvests (grain, potatoes) combined with the first new type of macroeconomic recession, the actual pauperism crisis arose. The cause was therefore the meeting of the old, pre-industrial style and the emerging industrialization - the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous . In addition, due to special circumstances, poverty crises could worsen regionally and sectorally, although there was an overall improvement in the material supply situation. Examples are the Great Famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1852, which was mainly caused by the potato rot with simultaneous great dependence on this food, or the Silesian Weavers' Uprising in 1844, which was mainly caused by the loss of competitiveness against industrial competition from England .
Religious pauperism in the Middle Ages
At the end of the 12th century, “voluntary” poverty movements arose in Europe as a protest against the increasing wealth of the church. The idea behind these movements is also called pauperism, but in this case it means a political idea and not a sociological phenomenon. Medieval pauperism saw the poverty of Jesus Christ as a desirable ideal. By renouncing personal possessions, the followers of these movements wanted to be close to their Jesus in a very special way. With their lifestyle they provoked many powerful people in the church and were therefore sometimes bloody persecuted ( Waldensians ). The best-known representative of pauperism is Francis of Assisi .
Reactions
State and society reacted to these social developments both repressively and with offers of help. The workhouse represented a hybrid form in which the unemployed and the homeless were looked after, but forced to work hard. Often the focus of the motivational situation was not on help, but on the prevention of criminal offenses. At the local level, however, other initiatives were also formed. For example, the city of Cologne had a total of 20,700 so-called bread pennies minted in 1739/40 , with which the needy Cologne residents were subsidized for the bread price, which had risen sharply due to poor harvests . The Elberfeld Kornverein , which was initiated and co-founded by Elberfeld's mayor and banker Jakob Aders in 1816, but only existed for a short time, was intended to cushion the consequences of poor harvests for the population through the formation of grain reserves and was a pioneer of the Elberfeld system of poor relief .
Apart from war and post-war periods, pauperism in Western Europe ended with a further increase in productivity in the 19th century and the possibility, with the help of improved transport options, to transport surplus food in a region more easily to regions with supply bottlenecks. The introduction of savings banks , with which the formation of small and interest-bearing cash reserves were made possible, and the introduction of social security systems were also essential for the reduction of poverty . The Bismarck social insurance schemes after the establishment of the Reich were also exemplary for other states.
See also
literature
- Karl Bosl : Potens and Pauper. Conceptual historical studies on social differentiation in the early Middle Ages and on “pauperism” in the High Middle Ages. In: Karl Bosl: Early Forms of Society in Medieval Europe: Selected Contributions to a Structural Analysis of the Medieval World. Oldenbourg, Munich 1964, DNB 450568512 , pp. 106-134.
- Fritz Dross: Pauperism. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , pp. 1116-1118.
- Wolfram Fischer : Poverty in History. Forms and attempts to solve the “social question” in Europe since the Middle Ages . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1982, ISBN 3-525-33465-6 .
- Carl Jantke , Dietrich Hilger (ed.): The propertyless: The German pauperism and the emancipation crisis in representations and interpretations of contemporary literature. Freiburg / Munich, 1966, DNB 451070097 (= Orbis Academicus, 2nd history of political ideas in documents and representations. Volume 7).
- Ralf Hoffrogge : Socialism and Labor Movement in Germany - From the Beginnings to 1914. Butterfly, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-89657-655-2 .
- Ahlrich Meyer : The logic of revolts - studies on social history 1789-1848. Black cracks, Rote Straße, Berlin / Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-924737-42-8 .
- Christoph Sachße , Florian Tennstedt : History of poor relief in Germany . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1998, Volume 1: From the late Middle Ages to World War I , ISBN 3-17-015290-4 .
- Alexis de Tocqueville : The Misery of Poverty: About Pauperism . Avinus, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-930064-75-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Fritz Dross: Pauperism. P. 1116 f.
- ^ Matthias Bohlender: Social (in) security. In: Herfried Münkler, Matthias Bohlender, Sabine Meurer (eds.): Security and risk: About dealing with danger in the 21st century. Transcript, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-8376-1229-5 , p. 109 ff.
- ^ Fritz Dross: Pauperism. P. 1117.
- ↑ Social (in) security. In: Security and Risk. On dealing with danger in the 21st century. Bielefeld 2010, p. 110 f.
- ↑ Karl Marx: Das Kapital , Vol. 1, Chapter twenty-fourth: The so-called original accumulation .
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↑ See also: Volker Kruse : Sociology and "Contemporary Crisis": Franz Oppenheimer's and Alfred Weber's diagnoses of the times. Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1990, ISBN 978-3-8244-4057-3 , p. 91 f.
Gerhard K. Schäfer: History of poverty in the occidental culture. In: Ernst-Ulrich Huster, Jürgen Boeckh, Hildegard Mogge-Grotjahn (Ed.): Handbook of poverty and social exclusion. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2nd edition, 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-19256-7 , p. 274. -
↑ Pauperism and its fight through better regulation of employment relationships. In: German quarterly journal. 1844, no. 3, p. 315 ff. , Archived from the original on September 4, 2012 ; accessed on September 22, 2015 (reproduced in the “virtual history booklet for teaching at the municipal Louise-Schroeder-Gymnasium in Munich”). Hans Holger Lorenz: Effects of the Prussian reforms for liberation from serfdom in Germany in the 19th century. In: bauernkriege.de. Archived from the original on July 24, 2012 ; Retrieved on September 22, 2015 (causes of the “economic crisis”: e.g. so-called “peasant liberation”, lifting of the Napoleonic continental barrier, etc.).
- ^ Ralf Hoffrogge : Socialism and the workers' movement in Germany. P. 29 ff.
- ↑ François-Xavier Merrien: pauperism. In: Dictionary of Social Policy. Archived from the original on March 24, 2013 ; accessed on August 21, 2020 .
- ↑ Ahlrich Meyer : The logic of revolts. P. 108.
- ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: The logic of revolts.
- ^ Pietro Massa: Francis of Assisi A man of peace, shaped by the liturgy. In: 30giorni.it. September 2005, accessed August 20, 2020 .
- ↑ Stefan Gorißen: From trading house to company. Social history of the Harkort company in the age of proto-industry (1720-1820) , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, p. 92.