This blog again draws on the excellent work of Erik Olin Wright, this time directly on concepts of social class. In his essay on ‘working class power, capitalist class interests’ in his Understanding Class, Wright acknowledges that class – together with related concepts like class structure, class struggle, class formation and class compromise – can be analysed at various levels of abstraction (there are ‘horses for courses’, as I’ve often myself remarked). He goes on to cite his own work on the ‘middle class’ and ‘contradictory locations within class structures’ as an example of the need on occasion to deploy a complex set of different concrete locations within class structures. For some purposes, he continues, it is necessary to use ‘a much more abstract, simplified class concept, revolving around the central polarised class relation of capitalism: capitalists and workers’. Most of my own studies hitherto have relied on just such an ‘abstract, simplified class concept’, which I have argued has been unjustly neglected with serious consequences for macro-sociology.
I should quote Wright at some length here:
In a styalised Marxian manner, I define capitalists as those people who own and control the capital used in production and workers as all employees exclused from such ownership and control. In this abstract analysis of class structure I assume that these are mutually exclusive categories. There is thus no middle class as such. No workers own any stock. Executives, managers, and professionals in firms are either amalgamated into the capitalist class by virtue of their ownership of stock and command of production, or they are simply part of the ‘working class’ as employees. This is of course unrealistic. My claim, however, is that this sort of abstract, polarised description of class relations in capitalism can still be useful to clarify real mechanisms that actual actors face …’.
Wright is in fact concerned here with constructing a theory of class compromise; but his point has wider relevance.
I have over a year or more ‘experimented’ with a putative classification of social class in a fashion that mirrors Wright’s ‘abstract, simplified class concept’; in other words, one that emphasises the capitalist/worker dichotomy. In Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account, I spelled this out. I initially distinguished 15 social classes, split between: (i) the capitalist executive, (ii) the new middle class, (iii) the old middle class, (iv) the working class, and (v) displaced workers.
I came up with this ‘unoriginal’ schema for a number of reasons. Most important, I wanted to highlight the salience of the transnational capital executive in general, and the capital monopolists (that hard core of capital-owners who are ‘players’) within it in particular, for the nature and form of financialised capitalism in Britain. If it bears repetition, and in the proverbial nutshell, I argued that this small minority of capitalists have been able to buy more power to make policy in their interests than in the previous phase of welfare state capitalism. The kernel of my thesis was that ALL orthodox classifications of occupational/social class employed in empirical research – principally, the RG, NS-SEC and the GBCS – absent the capital executive, thereby granting empirical anonymity to its members. This, I contended, was and is an abrogation of sociological responsibility amounting to a capitulation to power.
Whatever the limitations of my neophyte classification, in addition to its focus on the absenting of a pivotal class it recognised two other crucial factors. The first is that the key players in the capital executive are supported by ‘co-optees’ from ALL classes barring that of displaced workers. In other words, it buys much of the support/acquiescence it requires, for legitimacy as well as for profit, from across the board (ranging from union leaders to butlers). The second concerns Standing’s notion of the ‘precariat’ (about which I have blogged elsewhere). The precariat is not a class in- or for-itself, I argued; rather, precarity is a novel cross-class phenomenon that extends deep into the new and old middle classes.
A final important point of clarification is required. It is not just – as Wright’s notion of contradictory locations bears witness – that numerous middle-class locations are ‘betwixt and between’. It is more that within any, but especially old and new middle-class, occupation-based categories there is often considerable heterogeneity of interests, aspirations, assets and loyalties. A lawyer can work as a rural solicitor committed to helping those threatened by transfer to Universal Credit, or for the DWP, or for a transnational corporation. A teacher can play the share market. A working-class union official can be ‘bought off’, directly (by perks) or indirectly (via bureaucratisation). And this applies for jobs across class locations, for all the undoubted special salience of middle-class occupations and occupational clusters. I had always intended to somehow catch this is an umbrella idea of co-optation, but I have perhaps not been clear enough in articulating it. The point is slightly different from Wright’s. More work to be done, and Erik Olin Wright is of inestimable help.