SOC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Sociocultural Evolution, Proletariat, Bourgeoisie
11 Feb 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
UNIT 03
Society
Technology and Development
• The Lenskis model
▪ An evolutionary model
▪ Focuses on how material culture mediates humans to their environment, their non-
material culture and their social arrangements (i.e., social organization).
▪ Indicates how societies themselves become more complex as technology and
production become more sophisticated and complex.
• The ‘differentiation’ of social organization that develops simply means that the social
institutions (in this sense, “institution” means the social structures that meet human needs
[e.g., family, economy, education, religion, politics], not the concrete structures (e.g.,
University of Guelph, that house them) became more specialized.
• Three classical theorists took different approaches to evolution or social change.
▪ Karl Marx
o A materialist (how humans produce [infrastructure] determines how they
relate to one another [social structure/organization] and their world view
[superstructure])
o Clearly considered the technological, thus economic, changes over human
history that were the focus of the Lenskis.
o Focused on conflicts over scarce resources as the key to social and cultural
alterations.
o Argued that this economic strategy was beset with contradictions that
would usher in the next stage of sociocultural evolution – the communist
utopia that would be generated by a revolution of the proletariat (wage
laborers, producers) which would unseat the bourgeoisie (owners of
production) and end the misery of the early industrial revolution.
o This revolution would require both organization and a change in
worldview; specifically, the development of a class consciousness (i.e., the
proletariat had to become conscious of themselves as a class/category of
people with common interests), and this required recognizing that their
worldview (consciousness) was false, that how they saw the world had
been promoted by the bourgeoisie to maintain their dominance over the
proletariat.
o The basis of this dominance = ownership
o The bourgeoisie owned production, including the producers (the
proletariat). They could own the producers by converting the producers
themselves into commodities (things that could be bought).
o They converted and bought these human ‘things’ by making it necessary
for the proletariat to sell themselves on the labor market for wages in order
to survive. This was also the cause of the alienation of the workers: they
were alienated from their deadening, repetitive work (it was not their
