Tuesday 9 September 2014

Emma Arogundade

Theme: Social class, inequality with a Marxist emphasis

SOC2004S RACE, CLASS AND GENDER

Practicalities Introductions Course outline Pragmatics

Lecture Outline1. Part 3 - Introductions2. Stratification and its outcomes

(understanding class)3. Inequality4. Karl Marx and social class

(Giddens and McLellan)5. In the South African context –

class & race (Wolpe)

Reference points “How has our present been constituted in ways that seem natural and undisputable to us, but are only the effects of certain historical, social, cultural, political and economic configurations? By revealing this contingency, we become freer to imagine other ways of being.” (Tamboukou, 2009:102)

Reference points

Always asking: ‘Who produced this knowledge, in what context, to what end?’

All theories are in essence models which cannot encompass the whole of reality, they are just useful tools for making sense of it

“There is no such thing as a true and immutable fact” – Trin Min-Ha

My own opinions are informed by my structural identity, experiences etc.

Some starting questions

1. What is class? 2. How do you ‘classify’

people when you see them?

3. Why does class matter?

Discussion1. What class would you say your

guardians/parents/primary caregivers currently are part of? What about their guardians/parents/caregiversA. Upper classB. Middle classC. Working classD. Lower class

2. What class are you in, or will you be part of?

3. Why do we not have a classless world, despite having had numerous revolutions of the proletariat?

4. What ideologies keep class in place?

Systems of social stratification Caste (Hindu societies) Age/ wealth/ induction (Yoruba societies)

Class Largely understood as something that passes from generation to generation

If just wealth is used, this allows for more ‘mobility’ though also reflects the myth of meritocracy

Class Class etymologically comes from the Latin Classis used by Roman census takers to classify people according to their wealth so they could determine who should provide military services

Different people understand and define it differently

System of social stratification, system of inclusion and exclusion (us & them)

Mostly understood in economic terms (perhaps Marx’s influence)

Most often we use the terms middle class, upper class, working class, unemployed (unemployable?)

Processes in social stratification and inequality - Iris Marion Young (1990)

1. Social exclusion and marginalisation: ‘a whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life’ (p. 53)

2. Exploitation: ‘transfer of the results of the labour of one social group to benefit the other’ (p. 49)

3. Powerlessness: absence of authority, status and sense of self (p. 57)

4. Cultural imperialism: ‘universalisation of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm’ (p. 59)

5. Violence: directed at members of a group qua group (p. 62)

Why inequality matters

The greater the inequality the:1. Greater the stress – resulting in

health problems2. The less cooperation, and greater the

competition3. Community cohesion and social

solidarity decrease4. Top 1% in society immune – “sleep

better”5. Taxation and redistribution regimes

need to be improved6. Current capitalism booms negate the

cost of bio-sustainability

The cost of inequality 1. Community life and social relations2. Mental health and drug use3. Physical health and life expectancy4. Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists5. Educational performance6. Teenage births: recycling deprivation7. Violence: gaining respect8. Imprisonment and punishment9. Social mobility: unequal opportunities

(The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Wilkinson and Picket, 2009 )

The World’s 100 largest economies

What are the implications of a connected world? And for social class?

Inequality in the US – Relationship between government and corporate power

Share of income

1928 1976 2008Richest

1%23.5% 9% 24%

Poorest 50%

-- 17% 12%

Roosevelt's New Deal –

Social Democrat approach

Reagan/Bush, neo

liberalismTerreblanche, S. (2012). Lost in transformation. Johannesburg: KMM Review Publishing. (p. 113).

Occupy Wall Street

Kim Kardashian?? “Whether she is instagramming her butt or spending $827,000 on gold plated toilets for her new mansion, or in her latest exploit, posing nude on silver sheets for GQ, Kim Kardashian has the American media in a fawning frenzy of non-stop headlines”

“Kardashian represents the pinnacle values of late-stage American style Capitalism: opportunism, effortless celebrity, obsession with wealth and image, narcissism, and above all, making a fortune doing nothing at all”

“The American economy is at a stage where most people are not getting what we need, much less what we want. As we become more alienated and work harder and harder for our neo-feudal overlords, our dreams are constricted and our futures foreclosed. Celebrities are the Gods we create to distract ourself from our own incompleteness, from the hunger for things we cannot have.” http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/2124

Karl Marx - Biography

Born 1818 in Trier, Germany

Jewish extraction Studied philosophy and economics in Berlin

Married Jenny von Westphalen

Earned his living (badly) as a journalist

Died 1883 in London having only written 3 of the planned 8 volumes of Das Kapital.

The Great Money Trick Volunteers (enact extract from ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist)

Marx’s version of stratification systemsStratification: A relatively fixed, hierarchical arrangement in society by which groups have different access to resources, power, and perceived social worth. 1. Slavery – ownership, property;

contemporary forms - forced labour, servile marriage, prostitution, debt bondage

2. Estate - Elite owns property and has control over resources, interlocking hierarchy of rights and obligations

3. Caste - rigid hierarchy of classes, duty and discipline, in agrarian societies especially.

4. Class - status achieved, some potential for movement between classes, unequal distribution of wealth, power and prestige.

‘Subordinate gradations’ Ancient Rome: Patricians, Knights, Plebeians, Slaves

Middle Ages: Feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeyman, apprentices, serfsExamples: Britain, Japan, Imperial Chinese and pre-Columbian Incan societies as 'tributary.'

Capitalism – division of labour subordinates

Revolution occurs among workers – not ‘Lumpenproletariat’ (‘underclasses’)

Marx conflict model of social changeMarcionis and Plummer, p. 104

Marxist thought1. Marxism is a way of understanding and

analysing the organisation and structure of society. It is also a way of understanding how societies develop and change.

2. Communism - a political philosophy - people should have equal rights to wealth, not access as inherited social privilege

3. “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” Marx, Communist Manifesto

4. Human needs are mediated through society5. Conditions for revolution – one class

comes to see its own interests as the interests of society as a whole

6. Class only existed when it became conscious of itself; implied hostility to another group – an oppressed class

7. Operates on a dialectic of dependence and conflict

8. Criteria for defining a class: relation to means of production, group consciousness of itself as a class, political organisation

9. Economic domination tied to political domination (Giddens, p. 28)

10. Capitalist class owns the means of production; Working class sells their labor for wages.

11. Theory of surplus value: the exploitation of wage labour is the source of capitalist profit.

12. Workers put up with this inequality because:

They are oppressed wage slaves and cannot fight the system

They are indoctrinated by ideology and religion into believing what they are told by the powerful.

13. Not opposed to differentiated rewards for labour (Giddens, p. 24)… rewards based on talent and capacity (p. 25)

Marx on Class (varies)Relation to means of production

Source of revenue

Bourgeoisie LANDOWNERS Owner; non producer

Rent

Petit bourgeoisie CAPITALISTS Owner ProfitDoctors and civil servants

Wages

‘Intellectual classes’

Intelligentsia Wages

‘Parasitic classes’

Bankers; Service and technology workers

Wages

Peasant landowner Owner Not a class – not politically organised

Proletariat LABOURER Selling wage labour; producer

Wages

Lumpenproletariat‘dangerous classes’

Unemployed None

Peasant farmers

None Subsistence

UK – Distinguishing work by type CAPITALISTS1. Higher managerial and professional

(Lawyers, accountants, lecturers, surgeons)

2. Managerial and technical (Managers, teachers, nurses)

3. Skilled non manual (Estate agents, secretaries, sales clerks)

4. Skilled manual/craft (Bricklayers, electricians, drivers)

5. Partly skilled manual (Post workers, bar staff, waitrons)

6. Unskilled manual (Cleaners, labourers) UNEMPLOYED

Criteria for class placement of ‘work’1. Prestige2. Money3. Job security4. Promotion opportunity5. Independence6. Skills required7. Education required8. What else?

Social Mobility1. Nobility moves to bourgeois2. Bourgeoisie to proletariat especially bourgeoisie

ideologists (intelligentsia)3. Difficult/impossible for proletariat to move up

with struggle and revolution4. Anticipated increasing inequality over time

-----5. Social mobility is a person’s movement over time

from one class to another. 6. Social mobility can be up or down, although the

‘American dream’ emphasizes upward movement. 7. Mobility can also be either intergenerational,

occurring between generations; or intragenerational, occurring within a generation.

Marx on Revolution1. Marx predicted that

wealth would belong to fewer and fewer people.

2. The workers would eventually realise their position and overthrow the bourgeoisie

3. There would be an armed revolution.

4. The predicted revolution never occurred in the form he said it would.

‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas… the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control … over the means of mental production’ (Marx in McLennan, p. 158)

‘Individuals … find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class… This… can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labour itself’ (Marx in McLennan, p. 159)

‘The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class’ (Marx in McLennan, p. 160)

2 primary classes – bourgeouise and proletariat “But this two-class model is not Marx’s only use of the word ‘class’. He uses the term of other economic groups, and particularly of the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasants. These groups seem to render the neat division of the Communist Manifesto inapplicable, for these two groups obviously merge into bourgeoisie and the proletariat according to how many workers they employ or how much land they own. Marx even foresaw, with the increased use of machinery and the multiplication of service industries, the advent of a new middle class, and criticised Ricardo for forgetting ‘the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other’” – McLellan - 158

“A second intermediate group that Marx found difficult to classify was the one he himself belonged to – the intelligentsia. He often referred to them as the ‘ideological representatives and spokesmen of the bourgeoisie”

The fact that Marx often referred to intellectuals as the ‘ideological classes’ shows that he sometimes used the expression without particular reference to the position of a group in the mode of production. Marx spoke, for example, of a ‘lower middle class’ as consisting of ‘the small tradespeople, shopkeepers…in Britain Marx talked of the ‘ruling classes’, and he even went so far as to say that finance capitalists and industrial capitalists ‘form two distinct classes’. Mclellan - 154

“Nevertheless two general points can be made; firstly, the tri-partate division of society into capitalists, proletariat and land-owners is the most usual one in Marx. He did not consider himself to be analysing a static society and many of the groups he sometimes referred to as ‘classes’ were in fact rapidly disappearing…Secondly Marx also had a dynamic or subjective elemtn in his definition of class: a class only existed when it was conscious of itself as such, and this always implied common hostility to another social group” Mclellan - 155

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.

(Marx in McLennan, p. 153)

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex…

Marx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)

“If the proletariat …organize[s] itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will… have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place… we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx 1848).

How a classless society is to be achieved

CommunismWhat is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor....

Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)

How capitalism alienates workers(Marcionis and Plummer, p. 105)1. From the act of working –

repetition, no say, turns people into machines

2. From the products of work – no ownership, more investment = greater loss

3. From other workers – from cooperative venture into competition, no longer human community

4. From human potential - denial of potential, physical exhaustion, mental debasement

Alienation results in social fabric disintegration

Marx on his own contribution

1. Existence of classes bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production

2. Class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat

3. This dictatorship itself is only a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society