I have often said blogs are a device for thinking aloud, for me at least. This one is an exemplar for that agenda.
I would not hesitate to argue that financialised capitalism is characterised by a deepening class division and class struggle amounting to class warfare. But what does class mean in this context. It is one thing to proclaim a Marxian analysis, another to articulate what this means in terms of objective and subjective class membership and identity. I will not traverse old territory here. Sufficient merely to reiterate my views: (a) that Marx’s analysis has retained its bite in the 21st century; (b) that class remains the dominant structural force; (c) that sociologists and others have neglected the causal role of the capitalist executive/capital monopolists in bending governments and policy to their will and advantage; (d) that this neglect is in part a function of the absence of the capital executive and capital monopolists from putative class schema like NS-SEC;
(e) that while objective class relations have grown more salient, subjective class relations, that is, the impact of objective class relations on identity formation, have diminished; and (f) that while class solidarity and mobilisation are still vital for meaningful social transformation, (e) makes their realisation problematic.
What follows is a series of personal ruminations committed to print while hopping from one café to another (not to mention an occasional bar).
An autobiographical comment. When I took and passed the 11+ exam in 1959 there was perhaps a clearer subjective sense of class than now. My dad had been in line for a directorship in a shipping company before WW2, but because his company specialised in German shipping it went bust after the war: no ships! He retrained as a schoolteacher and found employment on the south coast in what became a secondary modern school. We lived in a council house and often struggled with the rent. My mum, whose family of origin had enjoyed a more comfortable lifestyle, didn’t do paid work outside the home, which was normal, at least in middle-class families. So I was brought up in a middle-class home by parents who might both have considered themselves downwardly mobile. But we were it seemed unambiguously middle class, structurally and culturally.
That we were not working class was affirmed by the Registrar General’s Classification of Occupations, then largely unrivalled as a research instrument (for all its glaring faults). The conventional divide within this schema was that between non-manual workers (middle class) and manual workers (working class). The split was then in the region of one-third middle class, two thirds working class. Failure in the 11+ meant people were all but destined to do manual work and therefore to be in working-class jobs (and the 11+ pass rate was a calculated and pre- planned with the ‘requirements of the economy’ in view).
As this is all by way of a prolegomenon I will hurry on, foregoing further sociological comment. Much has changed since 1959, with far fewer manual or working-class jobs and many more non-manual, service-sector or middle-class jobs. (Drawing on the recent excellent research of Bukodi and Goldthorpe, I have discussed this change in the workforce in detail in two blogs in my ‘sociological autobiography’ series. Interestingly, upward social mobility has stalled in the UK essentially through the failure to create more middle-class jobs.). So does the non-manual/middle class, manual/working class, binary still hold some, or any, water?
What follows is a series of loosely formed hypotheses, proffered with more than a hint of humility and in a spirit of enquiry.
- There is plenty of analytic and theoretical life left in the Marxian thesis that those who must sell their labour to live constitute the working class.
- Class remains the prepotent dimension of social stratification in capitalist social formations, up to and including the present. It should be distinguished from the likes of gender and ethnicity in this respect (without in any way diminishing their salience for sociology). Gender and ethnic relations long preceded the advent of capitalism; capitalism ‘inherited’ and has ‘effortlessly and unreflexively’ run along gender and ethnic tracks.
- Measures like NS-SEC have a role in sociological research (eg on social mobility), but over-reliance on them is a hindrance: the core owners of capital are ‘absented’. Research on ‘wealth elites’ is useful, but no substitute for class analysis.
- It is a significant backward step to conflate class as structure with class as culture, as in the Great British Class Survey. It is important to be able to examine empirically the impact of structure on culture and vice versa.
- This class qua structure/class qua culture dynamic has shifted over the last generation, not least because of a widespread cultural disorientation, and comprises a vital area of research.
- People have retained the conviction that we inhabit a society divided by class, but class qua structure no longer translates readily into, or fuels, class qua culture. Cultural disorientation now mediates between objective or structural class relations and identity formation.
- The advent of a post-structural ‘identity politics’ has encouraged a focus on individualised identity formation and presentation of self for self and for others.
- Sociology has been caught up in these shifts, and notably in the phenomenon of cultural disorientation. Recognition and belonging too have come to the fore. This has resulted in a greater emphasis on self-presentation and authenticity, as in: ‘I’m authentically working class, you’re not’. This includes and excludes. The exclusions can be far-reaching, extending beyond class to embrace gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, dis-ability and so on. On a personal note I have been regularly told on social media that as a middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual, white male I should maintain a respectful silence on issues of which I can/ought to know nothing, to which I have invariably replied: I hear what you say, but sod that. On a linked, second personal note, I must and do acknowledge that I actually have no ‘experiential knowledge’ of what it is to be working class, young, LGBT, black or dis-abled, and that this demands continual and updated reflexive awareness. I may and do insist on analysing and commenting on whatever I want, but I take on board too the confines of my sociological insight.
- A key issue for sociologists is: how does the evolving (and culturally complex/’obscure’) interplay between class as structure and class as culture play out in relation to mobilising for change?
- Ironically, and unacceptably in my view, classism, unlike sexism and racism, has attracted a paucity of sociological attention. This has emerged as an urgent issue within as well as without sociology: to what extent and how are working-class students and academics disadvantaged and/or discriminated against? Within the restricted and restrictive domain or field of sociology, has classism shaped the discipline, as sexism and racism, long since exposed by feminists and post-colonial theorists, clearly have?
- If some, even a few, of these hypotheses have a decent weight-bearing capacity, then the discipline of sociology – if it has any point, orientated to, as I have long argued, a lifeworld rationalisation necessarily and morally directed at the betterment of society – faces a challenge or three. Does ‘our’ discipline have to embrace what I have called foresight and action sociologies in order to undergird/warrant a last-ditch, intrusive, or maybe even survivalist, penetration into the post-1970s, global, financialised and increasingly corrupt financial capitalism?
Responses welcome.