Inequality in Capitalist Societies

Surinder S. Jodhka, Boike Rehbein, Jessé Souza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367350697
• eBook ISBN: 9781134837991
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Inequality is one of the most discussed topics of our times. Yet, we still do not know how to tackle the issue effectively. The book argues that this is due to the lack of understanding the structures responsible for the persistence of social inequality. It enquires into the mechanisms that produce and reproduce invisible dividing lines in society. Based on original case studies of Brazil, Germany, India and Laos comprising thousands of interviews, the authors argue that invisible classes emerge in capitalist societies, both reproducing and transforming precapitalist hierarchies. At the same time, locally particular forms of inequality persist. Social inequality in the contemporary world has to be understood as a specific combination of precapitalist inequalities, capitalist transformation and a particular class structure, which seems to emerge in all capitalist societies. The book links the configurations to an interpretation of global domination as well as to symbolic classification.

1
Understanding social inequality

This chapter introduces the core concepts and the general approach of the following chapters. This is necessary since we cannot draw on an existing theory of inequality. All major theories of inequality have been constructed on the basis of Northatlantic societies or have remained restricted to the case of one nation-state. As we propose to compare four radically different societies, we need a theoretical framework that can be applied to the four cases without losing all of its explanatory power.

Our research showed social class to be much more relevant for the understanding of inequality than is assumed by most studies of contemporary societies. In order to study social class, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of capital and habitus. These notions are more relevant for the study of a country with a long capitalist past, such as Germany, than for the study of Laos and India. In these cases, precapitalist structures are at least as relevant for contemporary inequality. We deal with them under the heading of socioculture. Finally, we argue that the symbolic dimension of inequality has been underestimated by most research on the topic. In terms of production and of legitimation of inequality, symbolic classification of groups of people plays a key role.

This chapter first offers a brief critique of the mainstream perspective on inequality. Then, it turns to the neglected historical and symbolic dimensions in the study of inequality. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the construction of a framework integrating the notions of class, socioculture and symbolic classification. The notion of class is introduced with reference to Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus and then expanded to meet the criteria generated by our empirical research.

The conventional view of inequality

In academia and everyday life, we tend to think of society in the Western liberal tradition. According to this view, which we call symbolic liberalism, society consists of formally and naturally equal individuals, inequality results from regulated competition between them and any type of privilege is therefore based on individual merit. This means that inequality between the individuals supposedly results from differences in achievement. As the individuals are regarded as biologically equal and socially endowed with equal rights at birth, symbolic liberalism supposes them to have the same opportunities. This is the main assumption of symbolic liberalism from Hobbes (1968) to Locke (1967) to Friedman (1962). It also informs the constitution of most democracies. Whoever is poor or humiliated has to bear at least part of the blame. Whoever is rich or respected has achieved something as an individual.

This view of inequality is corroborated by everyday observations. Even if we deny that we are all equal from birth and before the law, we seem to be individuals who have to come to terms with reality and find our own way through the social world as individuals. We are individualized, disciplined to perform a particular, increasingly individualized function in the division of labor. In this function, we contribute to the “wealth of nations” (Smith 1998). Each job and each remuneration is subject to competition between several individuals. This competition results in inequality: some win and some lose. There are rich proletarians and poor aristocrats, anyone can win the lottery and a talented, ambitious and smart person can become a football player, an actress or an entrepreneur. All of us can think of examples proving this point and thereby supporting symbolic liberalism.

In this book, we argue that social inequality is not a result of competition but a consequence of structures that have their roots in precapitalist society. Theories of social inequality as well as the political discourse and common sense have assumed that the transformation of society toward capitalism produces a complete rupture with the past. Right with the transformation, the population was supposed to be individualized into free and equal citizens, either instantaneously on the basis of a constitution or in a process of reform and revolution. This presumably brings about a shift from a closed system of inequality and hierarchies to an open system of differential rewards based on individual achievement, ability and distinction. According to this view, inequality results from engagement in a market, which is about the increase of capital. Supposedly, capitalism is the highest form of the evolution of society, either absolutely or until being replaced by a more equal society, and is embodied in Northatlantic societies. Liberal and Marxist interpretations merely disagree in their assessment of the unequal distribution of capital.

From this perspective, one cannot see that inequality in capitalist societies is a continuation of earlier structures of inequality. Early symbolic liberalism and the first capitalist democracies considered only the citizens to be free and equal, while the majority of social groups (such as slaves, women, nonwhites and laborers) were excluded from the community of citizens and therefore unequal. The lower ranks of precapitalist society as well as colonized peoples were excluded from capitalist society. When these groups were included into the community of equals and accepted as citizens, they remained underprivileged and unequal, because they always had to start from a less favorable position as latecomers.

What is more relevant to our argument is that these groups have never been able to acquire the symbolic characteristics of equal citizens. Up to this day, there is a distrust regarding blacks, women, lower classes or people from the global South taking important positions in society. They simply do not have what it takes, in terms of symbolic classification and in terms of habitus, because they have inherited less valuable social traits. Even under conditions of complete equality of opportunities, these groups would not compete on a level playing field as they retain negative symbolic characteristics on the basis of earlier historical inequalities.

Symbolic inequality

While the game of competition rules the visible world, privileges are passed on from generation to generation invisibly. These privileges include not only all kinds of capital but also the symbolic distinctions between social groups and their evaluation. All groups share the symbolic universe of capitalism characterized by meritocracy and the hierarchy of social classification, which makes some classes virtuous on the basis of their inherited symbolic characteristics, which we will discuss in more detail in the following chapters. Those groups who do not inherit a sufficient degree of the valued social characteristics are regarded as inferior and will never compete on a level playing field.

The symbolic inequality between the classes has to be expressed in a manner that makes it appear natural instead of socially constructed and socially inherited. Otherwise, it would not be legitimate. This is the purpose of symbolic liberalism and the meritocratic myth. It is specific for contemporary capitalist societies that inequality is at once naturalized and invisibilized. According to symbolic liberalism, inequality results from the competition of equal individuals on free but legally regulated markets. As success on these markets is supposed to be the outcome of merit but actually reflects the order of domination, it includes both a legitimation of social inequality and an expression of class structure. It includes a declassation and humiliation of entire groups of human beings – namely the lower classes, the global South and other groups – who are perceived to be at once less virtuous and less successful. We refer to this declassation as symbolic racism.

The relevance of symbolic evaluations and dividing lines in society has not been acknowledged properly by mainstream theories of inequality. This is partly due to the focus on the economy. If inequality is only about the distribution of economic entities, especially money, the symbolic dimension becomes rather irrelevant. However, the disregard for the symbolic dimension has deeper philosophical roots. It is partly based on the dichotomy of mind and body established by Descartes and picked up by Hobbes, Locke and Smith. Against this background, the study of society has become a quest for eternal laws governing the movement of social entities. This quest is even reflected in Marxism.

We reject the distinctions between being and consciousness, mind and body, economy and ideology and functional system and life-world. Instead, we interpret society entirely as meaningful practice. From this perspective, the symbolic mediation of power is the structural root of inequality. This is domination. Power is understood as the impersonal possibility of influencing the social definition and practice of life. Symbol is understood as comprising all perceivable forms of meaning (Cassirer 1997), from signs to art to language. We argue that human practice is always symbolically mediated and that the understanding of this process is the key to understanding society. Inequality is about domination, not about money or business. Even capitalism has to be understood as a symbolically mediated practice. We agree with those interpretations of capitalism that regard it as a largely unconscious practice but we deny that it is “material” or guided by natural laws. It is not even about material things but about symbolically mediated things. Machines, capital, money, exchange value and labor are all something completely different without symbolic mediation. Socially, they would be nothing in this case. A bank note that is not recognized as money is a sheet of paper and a stock exchange that is not understood in its meaning ceases to exist.

The core of our approach consists in the integration of the symbolic universe into the study of social structures, capitalism and the distribution of capital, labor, privileges and power. Later in this chapter and extensively in Chapters 4 and 5, we will demonstrate the relevance of the symbolic dimension for the study of inequality. We argue that without classification, symbolic racism, invisible dividing lines and legitimation, social inequality would not be possible – especially once material goods have been redistributed. We will also show how these symbolic inequalities are continuations and transformations of precapitalist hierarchies. Therefore, a historical and comparative perspective is absolutely necessary to understand social inequality.

Capitalist transformation

Social structures, cultures and practices are subject to constant changes and sometimes even revolutions. New institutions appear, old ones are done away with, new discourses emerge, economic crises erupt or oil is discovered. Some of these changes are so radical that they produce a new configuration and a new social hierarchy. We refer to these radical changes as transformations. Transformations are closely related to revolutions but often do not occur in the wake of a revolution. Wars, changes in the social organization and political interventions seem to be more frequent cases of transformations than revolutions. Even though these changes are radical, they are only transformations and not new creations because they build on earlier structures. Social structures are relatively persistent. Aristocracy or working class, the value of a PhD or the reputation of a doctor do not disappear overnight. They lose part of their value or are reassessed in a new framework but they are not simply done away with. This is true for the entire system of structures, cultures and practices. We refer to these systems as sociocultures. Any contemporary practice has a long history, which it partly incorporates. Its current form blends transformed and persisting elements with new elements. This is true for society at large as well. We can think of society as a mountain consisting of layers of rocks and sediment.

It is important to acknowledge the continuities in spite of the radical nature of capitalist transformation. First, capitalist transformation only modified pre-capitalist structures but does not erase them. Second, precapitalist inequalities persisted because of the unequal integration of precapitalist ranks. The same process took place in Europe and the Americas. At first, capitalist society only comprised a few privileged groups and successively integrated the entire population, mainly due to protests and revolutions. Capitalism does bring about a social and economic transformation through differentiation. New occupations and social categories (such as middle class) come into being, but this does not necessarily do away with older standards of evaluation. The old and new coexist, and often reinforce each other. The excluded groups are integrated unequally but in the symbolic universe, all citizens are equal because they have the same rights. Even though socioeconomic mobility is minimal in Northatlantic societies (cf. Chapter 2), the few cases of stars or entrepreneurs coming from unequally integrated groups serve as examples to sustain symbolic liberalism.

In many former colonies of Asia and Africa, however, the entire population was declared equal citizens upon gaining independence. The preceding structures of inequality were immediately transformed into capitalist classes. Linked to revolutionary struggles, there was more socioeconomic mobility in the newly independent states than would have been possible at any moment in the history of Northatlantic societies. At the same time, persisting inequalities were rendered invisible much faster because underprivileged groups were formally equal right from the start and were open to some socioeconomic mobility. This process still continues in parts of the global South.

The transformation does not significantly reshuffle the conditions for participating in capitalism and democracy. The distribution of resources has remained the same. A few revolutionaries and a couple of entrepreneurs have moved up into the ruling class but in general, the peasants have remained poor, uneducated, peripheral, despised and powerless while the aristocrats have kept their castles and their prestige. Formally, these structures have been abolished in almost all capitalist societies. This made their reproduction even more efficient because they are invisible and, within the symbolic universe, even inexistent.

Along with the specific relation between symbolic universe and social structures, capitalism creates a few novelties which are relevant to the understanding of inequality. These novelties have transformed society. With the capitalist transformation, the social position is no longer equivalent to the type of activities one performs. Social structure and division of labor become detached from each other, while the population seems to be transformed into a mass of equal and disciplined individuals. The focus on the division of labor makes society more productive. We can observe the commodification of everything in a country like Laos in real time. Land, human bodies, water, the products of nature are commodified and used as means of production. People are trained in workshops organized by international organizations to behave like economic agents in competitive markets (see Rehbein 2007). Then, they are trained to develop capabilities that are competitive in the labor market. All of this is entirely new to the majority of the rural population – and to any precapitalist society.

Another novelty introduced by capitalism is that political order, division of labor and virtually every capitalist society is based on science. Before capitalism, there has neither been a scientific legitimation of political order nor a scientific organization of the division of labor. This is something one can witness presently emerging in Laos as well. Of course, the European development of science and its link to capitalism are well known. We are also aware of the role of science in the legitimation of social action, from laws to political measures to investment decisions. This is entirely unknown to a noncapitalist society.

The capitalist transformation certainly first took place in Europe, even if Europe’s rise had to rely on the existing world-system dominated by Asia with its relatively more developed industry and trade (Abu-Lughod 1989) and in connection with colonialism (Frank 1998). Most of the apparent novelties that European capitalism created had existed before in Asia, often in a more “developed” form (Hobson 2004). However, symbolic liberalism as the dominant symbolic universe is a European creation as well as the link between an increasing division of labor and science.

The capitalist transformation creates a similar surface everywhere but meets different historical conditions and takes place in different historical processes and periods. Histories, precapitalist structures and therefore sociocultures vary between societies and nation states. This also means that they differ in their configurations of inequality (Rehbein 2011). The most important factor is the role of colonialism. In this regard, we can distinguish between three types of capitalist states. The states in which a bourgeois revolution introduced capitalism and democracy have transformed precapitalist structures by successively integrating the lower ranks. In contrast, some of the former colonies were dominated by descendants of the former colonizers who formed the ruling classes of the now independent states, especially in the Americas. The native peoples were partly killed and partly integrated as lower classes along with the former slaves. The third type are former colonies that transformed the precolonial and colonial structures directly into unequal democracies, especially in Asia.

The prehistory of a capitalist nation-state makes a difference to its structural inequality, as we will demonstrate in the subsequent chapters. The most important differences are the relation to colonialism and the integration of previously underprivileged groups into the nation-state. However, the particular types of precapitalist hierarchies also matter, as they persist underneath the capitalist surface. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand the capitalist surface as well. For this purpose, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of inequality.

Habitus and capital

The core concept of Bourdieu’s sociology is that of habitus. The concept is based on the assumption that a human being has the tendency to act in the way in which he or she has learned to act (Bourdieu 1990). It is a kind of psychosomatic memory. Behavior from prior interactions is put to use again once a similar situation arises. In a mostly stable environment, a common practice is acquired and is then incorporated as an enduring and stable pattern. With learning, one adopts a pattern which can be applied in a corresponding situation. Through multiple repetitions, the pattern becomes imprinted on the person; this pattern becomes habitualized. That implies a standardization with regards to scenarios of use and a somatization of segments of actions. Bourdieu referred to these internalized schemata as dispositions. He emphasized the unconscious character of dispositions, because these dispositions are always somaticized.

In this regard, Bourdieu’s argument follows that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964). According to Merleau-Ponty, we do not have a body; rather, we are a body. We do not see with an eye; rather, we are among things in a seeing way. We do not control the hand; rather, the hand has its own somatized memory and practice. As humans, we are bodies which move in the world, and this practical world is concrete, meaningful and socialized. Social organization is really an organization of the body and its conduct (Bourdieu 1990), and it is expressed, for example, in a prideful person’s upright gait and in the cowering of the dominated. The social world imprints a proper and correct program, a character in the truest sense of the word, on a body, just as how a message is engraved with a pen on a writing tablet. Similar to a writing tablet, the body is also a kind of mnemonic device – both for the actor and for the observer. Bourdieu develops this argument like Merleau-Ponty: what the body learns, one does not possess but that is what one is.

According to Bourdieu, all of the activities a person performs are similar to one another. The habitus establishes something like a style (Bourdieu 1984). At the same time, behavior represents a structuring of existence, an element of a life-form and a social resource. Because social structures are imprinted on the habitus, it tends to reproduce these structures, especially in those cases where the present social environment and the conditions from which the habitus arose are identical. If one grew up in “small town U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding social inequality
• 2 Classes and habitus in Germany
• 3 The capitalist transformation in Laos
• 4 Understanding the class struggle in Brazil
• 5 The Indian story of inequality
• 6 Capitalism and inequality on a global scale
• Conclusion
• References
• Index