Class Dynamics of Development

Jonathan Pattenden, Liam Campling, Satoshi Miyamura, Benjamin Selwyn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138733077
• eBook ISBN: 9781351740296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. It does so via a transdisciplinary approach that draws on case studies from Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors illustrate and explain the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity as part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences.

Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. By illuminating the diversity of social formations, this book illustrates the depth and complexity present in Marx's method.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Class dynamics of development: a methodological note

Liam Campling^a, Satoshi Miyamura^b, Jonathan Pattenden^c and Benjamin Selwyn^d

^aSchool of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, UK; ^bDepartment of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK; ^cSchool of International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; ^dDepartment of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

ABSTRACT

This article argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. The article illustrates and explains the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences.

Introduction: researching class

This special issue argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. In doing so it illustrates and explains the diversity of class relations in contemporary world development, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences.

This article serves as a methodological introduction to the issue, where we outline our approach to conducting class analysis. This consists of the mediated application of class-relational concepts and categories to explain real-world development processes. The article is organised as follows. In the remainder of this section we introduce our overall approach to class analysis. The next section outlines how our class-relational approach to development is rooted in the identification of capitalism’s core dynamic as the (re)production of surplus value. The third section discusses how, and considers the analytical implications of the recognition that, class relations exist within and between classes in a variety of forms. Section four argues, in distinction to so much of contemporary development literature, that class dynamics are at the heart of developmental processes, whether micro or macro in scale. The fifth section focuses in particular on class struggles and their variety of forms. These last two sections close the article by identifying ways in which contemporary historical processes can be interpreted as, in essence, the class dynamics of development.

The authors of the eight papers included in this special issue have all been part of the Historical Materialism and World Development Research Seminar (HMWDRS).¹ We initially established the HMWDRS to deal collectively with the very real problems of working with and mediating abstract categories in a diversity of social contexts, and the intellectual isolation of working on a PhD. Through nearly a decade of collective academic engagement we have developed a shared understanding of class rooted in historical materialism, which has been explored through our individual study of a variety of historical and geographical cases. This shared theoretical foundation has allowed researchers based institutionally in a variety of disciplines – including anthropology, business and management, development studies, economics, geography, history and politics – to work together. We also share a commitment to careful empirical work in a wide range of regions, time periods and sectors. In analysing the class dynamics of development in historically and socially specific situations, either through fieldwork or archival research, members of the HMWDRS have faced the common challenge of operationalising a class-analytical methodology.

Our frame of reference is Marx’s method, which he described as one ‘of rising from the abstract to the concrete’, and the understanding that the ‘concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’.² The identification of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ does not denote ‘theory’ vs ‘empirical’. It signifies, rather, the importance of utilising general concepts and categories (‘capitalism’, ‘class’, ‘surplus value’) to identify and analyse particular social forms (for example, the corporation, processes of local class formation, the nature of the Brazilian and Indian states, and so on). Put slightly differently, by ‘concrete’ we do not mean the empirical but a greater level of conceptual specification that reflects the diverse phenomenal forms of social relations.³ In a similar way, the logic of this introduction reflects Marx’s method of moving between abstractions and the ‘real and concrete’, and attempting to conceptualise the whole as a ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’.⁴

Here we start from concepts at higher levels of abstraction and add additional complexities as we move toward section 5.

The general and the particular are not discrete: in terms of method, the abstract and the concrete are always in interplay. In this way we do not expect the same ‘logic’ of laws of motion – eg the exploitation of labour to extract surplus-value by capitals in competition – to take the same form in different times and places, although we do think that the global system of capitalist competition has ‘gravitational tendencies’ that organise and shape diverse social relations around the profit motive.⁵ The rest of this section outlines our analytical approach through four core interrelated points, which we elaborate further through the rest of this introductory article. These are: (1) that class relations, while extending beyond the production process, are rooted in exploitative social relations of production; (2) that class is a relational and multidimensional concept; (3) that classes have agency, which is unevenly constrained and/or facilitated by the social structures with which it is mutually constituted; and (4) that class is understood world-historically.

First, classes are conceived here as arising out of the exploitative social relations of production of commodity-producing societies in a world dominated by capitalism. As Jairus Banaji points out, Marx used the phrase social ‘relations of production’ as the summary expression for all economic relationships in the whole circuit of capital. These social relations are not, therefore, reducible to the literal point of production in the factories and fields.⁶ From our class-relational perspective production is not merely a technical relationship between inputs and outputs; rather it is a conflictual process in which work is directed and controlled by the capitalist to ensure that the capacity to labour is realised.⁷ Exploitation is central to class relations and in capitalist society it takes place, in essence, between capital and wage-labour.⁸ This occurs when surplus-value is extracted from labour during ‘surplus labour time’, which is that part of the working day when the labourer no longer works for her own reproduction.

At this level of abstraction, exploitation presupposes the existence of generalised commodity production, the social division of labour, capitalist competition and, crucially, social reproduction. For example, unpaid work performed largely in the domestic sphere, including the nurturing of children, the refuelling of labouring bodies and caring for sick workers, is integral to the process of exploitation.⁹ Class antagonism finds expression in a wide range of formal and informal social relations, institutions and practices, including, but not limited to: recruitment, retaining and redundancy of labour; education and training; consumption; housing; transport; trade; finance; logistics; and advertising. These are all actual and potential sites for accumulation through privatisation, financialisation and redistribution ('neoliberal' in form or otherwise).¹⁰ Further, these processes, which are simultaneously economic, social, political and historical, take specific ideological and cultural expressions, including subjective perceptions about status and positions – what Bourdieu may refer to as cultural, symbolic and social capital.¹¹ Class, in other words, is a complex concept constituted by ‘many determinations’ within the whole array of social relations.¹²

Our class-relational approach stands in contrast to stratification-oriented perspectives, which are based primarily on the measurement and comparison of the material conditions of labour in isolation from the process of exploitation.¹³ Our approach also differs from a ‘semi-relational’ Weberian approach to class. Our core distinction is that Weber, for all that he contributed in his wide-ranging analyses,¹⁴ was more concerned with how control over productive assets shaped life chances than with how they ‘structure patterns of exploitation and domination’.¹⁵ While, like Marx, Weber saw the distribution of property as a fundamental determinant of class relations, he maintained that ‘class situation’ was ‘ultimately market situation’, and was internally differentiated by asset levels and skills, rather than exploitative social relations.¹⁶

Stratification-orientated perspectives on class are currently popular in trying to assess developmental transformations under contemporary global capitalism. For example, an influential body of work has emerged from across the political spectrum, which uses income-based definitions of class position to claim to identify an emergent middle class in the developing world.¹⁷ From this perspective work effort, combined with firm-level productivity, is presented as the main determinant of income, and hence class position (and mobility). This overlooks relations between classes and their global determinations, and does not consider, for example, how members of one class are able to determine how members of another socially reproduce themselves. Nor do they consider world-historical determinants of these classes’ existence.¹⁸

Second, we understand class as relational and multifaceted.¹⁹ As EP Thompson put it:

class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – class is not this interest or that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise…Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationships with other classes.²⁰

The multi-faceted character of classes is formed in and through processes of competitive capital accumulation,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction – Class dynamics of development: a methodological note
• 2 Global value chains and human development: a class-relational framework
• 3 Class dynamics in contract farming: the case of tobacco production in Mozambique
• 4 Working at the margins of global production networks: local labour control regimes and rural-based labourers in South India
• 5 New forms of wage labour and struggle in the informal sector: the case of waste pickers in Turkey
• 6 Evo Morales and the political economy of passive revolution in Bolivia, 2006–15
• 7 Class, gender and the sweatshop: on the nexus between labour commodification and exploitation
• 8 War, the state and the formation of the North Korean industrial working class, 1931–60
• 9 Diverse trajectories of industrial restructuring and labour organising in India
• Index