The main emphasis of my own contributions on the theory and ‘measurement’ of social class have been on that fraction of the 1% that can and does deploy capital to sway state policy and practice. In the process I have often reiterated two linked points: first, the causal role of class as a social structure or relation is typically neglected, and second, the quantitative empirical literature typically overlooks the fraction of the 1% that I have focused on in my own writings.
I will expand on both in a sentence or two. For all that there is now a growing research literature on the super-rich and the material and social correlates of their rampant prosperity, this is rarely presented as a causal product of class. Often it is the concept of a ‘wealth elite’ that is invoked. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this – elites are an important phenomenon worthy of study in their own right – but elite theory and research has here displaced considerations of class. To tack on another point, fields of cultural/identity politics – also important in their own right – represent and function as a related form of displacement.
All this bears on my second point. Quantitative researchers are typically dependent – or choose for their own reasons to be dependent – on the secondary analysis of large data sets (‘big data’ can be seductive). These almost invariably deploy measures of class using occupation-based SEGs. This procedure, to use one of Bhaskar’s dialectical concepts, ‘absents’ consideration of the fraction of the 1% that I think so salient. In an otherwise informative study on social class in Europe, Hugree, Penissat and Spire (Social Class in Europe: New Inequalities in the Old World, published in English translation this year), the authors openly admit as much on p.93. The super-rich disappear (that is, are absented or disappeared) in their SEG-based notion of the ‘dominant class’ in European countries, which comprises no less that 19% of the population (ie. chief executive officers, senior managers, engineers and specialists in science, engineering and information technology, doctors and healthcare specialists, managers in administration, finance and business, and lawyers, judges, journalists ansd artists). To repeat myself, this does not invalidate their useful study or compromise their cautious conclusions, but it does let my fraction of the 1%, known technically as ‘greedy bastards’, off the hook. Seduction by data set can lead to an abandonment of sociological agency, a succumbing to questions pre-decided by the data set itself.
Moving on, this blog was encouraged by another new read, Organising the 1%: How Corporate Power Works by Carroll and Sapinski and published in 2018. There is a strong match between my own work and theorising and theirs (I was already familiar with Carroll’s previous studies); and this is an obvious source of attraction for me. I borrowed and adapted the idea of the capitalist executive from Clement and Miles, arguing that we are subject to a ruthless capital accumulation on the part of its members. Developing this, I pointed a causal finger at a particular subgroup of the capital executive, comprising what I called the capital monopolists. This fraction of the 1% are the hard hitters at the core of the capital executive: the major stakeholders, CEOs, financiers and so on who operate on the global stage and have won the power in post-1970s financialised or rentier capitalism to buy policies from nation states to further their interests. Hence my notion of a new ‘class/command dynamic’. I would add only that these capital monopolists (as Gill has shown in the USA) are now sitting in UK cabinets exercising rather than buying the power they lust after (see my ‘greedy bastards’ blogs).
Back to Carroll and Sapinski’s book. What they have done is offer a different, and I think appealing, frame for grasping what is happening sociologically. Their focus in on the situation in Canada but has a striking relevence to the UK as well. I can offer only a broad outline of their contribution here.
Looking at the transition from ‘settler capitalism’ to ‘Keynesian’, ‘organised’ or ‘corporate capitalism’ in Canada, the authors stress three main elements of the latter:
- Concentration and centralisation, meaning fewer, and larger, companies coming to dominate the economy;
- Integration of large-scale industrial and financial capital;
- Full development of the corporate form of business organisation, including groups of associated capitalists.
Then came post-1970s capitalism and the project of neoliberal globalisation. Corporate capital became transnational.
Carroll and Sapinski concentrate on the concept of contemporary ‘corporate power, emphasising that it is ‘Janus-faced’, its two faces being the economic and the cultural/political, but insisting – I think rightly – that ‘ultimately it is rooted in the economy’. They argue that there are three modalities of corporate economic power:
- Operational power means control of the labour processes within firms that produce and distribute commodities. This is the power of management, operating through a chain of command in which the scope of decision-making is narrowed as we move from top-management to the shop floor (as I have maintained, allies and co-optees necessarily exist through the range of social classes). Operational power also involves subcontracting the economic activity along commodity chains, from sourcing raw materials to selling finished products. (We might recall Wallerstein’s proposition here, namely, that capitalism seeks the ‘commodification of everything’.)
- Strategic power involves control of the corporation itself, often by owning the largest bloc of shares. This is the power to set business strategies for the company, or for a set of companies assembled under common control as an enterprise. ‘This power is rooted in the non-democratic character of corporate capital. Directors are ‘elected’, but by shareholders only.’ In practice it is the ‘wealthy few’ who own large concentrations of corporate shares.
- Allocative power stems from the control of credit, the money-capital on which large corporations feed. Prime among the wielders of allocative power are the suppliers of financing, such as banks.
Carroll and Sapinksi elaborate on this in their study, but my modest purpose here is to suggest that their concepts are important and salient for any examination of how relations of class are playing out in this contemporary – even possibly terminal – phase of capitalism.