Class issues and the rise of the superstructure in The Giver and The City of Ember Since the start of agriculture, man's evolution has gone from a hunter-gatherer to modern day capitalistic societies. Using a lot of energy in order to hunt was no longer necessary. By leveraging the division of labor, grains could be stored for human consumption. Consequently, population grew which meant that some people had to, for example, harvest the food, whereas others could be “thinkers” and create a better world in terms of science and effective infrastructures. Over time resources have been used and exploited in to order to sustain societies and the ever increasing population: It has become a scarcity. (Harris 12) Philosophers such as Karl Marx wrote about this scarcity and how it creates classes in societies, as in Das Kapital, the Critique of Political Economy:

In social productions of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society.... With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of| production...(Marx 143)

What is important to note with this passage is the distinction between two elements: base and superstructure, i.e. they are analogous to classes – or class structure. The passage also focus on production in which a superstructure is transformed in capitalist societies. With this in mind, this essays will address the rise of superstructures in The Giver and The City of Ember, although, not in the same