Ständischer Verfall und industrielle Mobilisierung. Die Arbeiter*innenschaft in Wiener Neustadt und dem Viertel unter dem Wienerwald

Abstract

The Decline of the Estates and Industrial Mobilization. Workers in Wiener Neustadt and the Quarter below the Vienna Woods. Industrialization is a multi-dimensional historical process that put the lives of many people under enormous pressure to change. At the centre of this process stood the development of relationships of capitalist production and the emergence of supraregional and national markets. The result was an intensification of a process of commodification, a marketing of human work. As wage labour gradually became the central element of production, large groups of different manual workers and marginalized social groups lost their non-capitalist subsistence base and were exposed to this transformation process. This forced them into new working and living conditions. Associated with this was a new social stratification and formation of society for which the term “class” became a central element in the description of the new economic conditions and social positions within them. This chapter describes the emergence of the “working class” as a new social class using the example of the Viertel unter dem Wienerwald, a centre of industrialization in the Habsburg Monarchy.