Class, Inequality and Community Development

Shaw, Mae, Mayo, Marjorie

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781447322498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book, the second title in the Rethinking Community Development series, starts from concern about increasing inequality worldwide and the re-emergence of community development in public policy debates. It argues for the centrality of class analysis and its associated divisions of power to any discussion of the potential benefits of community development. It proposes that, without such an analysis, community development can simply mask the underlying causes of structural inequality. It may even exacerbate divisions between groups competing for dwindling public resources in the context of neoliberal globalisation. Reflecting on their own contexts, a wide range of contributors from across the global north and south explore how an understanding of social class can offer ways forward in the face of increasing social polarisation. The book considers class as a dynamic and contested concept and examines its application in policies and practices past and present. These include local/global and rural/urban alliances, community organising, ecology, gender and education.

PART 1

Contested concepts of class, past and present

ONE

Class, inequality and community development: editorial introduction

Mae Shaw and Marjorie Mayo

Introduction

Inequality has become a matter of increasing concern worldwide and across a range of interests and actors. Even the powerful World Economic Forum in Davos in 2015 warned of the ‘inherent dangers of neglecting inequality’, including ‘[weakening] social cohesion and security’ (World Economic Forum, 2015). This broad consensus on the evils of inequality has occurred just as community development has re-emerged in global public policy debates. Such convergence is hardly coincidental or, indeed, unexpected. In contexts across the world, community development is being rediscovered as a supposedly cost-effective intervention for dealing with the social consequences of global economic restructuring that has gradually taken place over the last half century.

Of course, community development has a plurality of meanings and usages, which can generate considerable confusion and contestation (Meade et al, 2015). Historically, it has been deployed to both address inequality and to mask its causes. We have therefore decided to approach the term in as open and inclusive a way as possible. As the book’s contributions from different parts of the globe attest, there is a variety of pressures, processes and practices that are involved when people act together to influence change in their communities, whether those communities are centred on place, shared interest or identity. This book asks what might be missing in assessments of the likely contribution of community development in the contemporary context in the absence of the explanatory, albeit contested, concept of class. It argues that a critical understanding of class is central to an analysis of inequality and the ways in which it is framed by community development strategies, both within and between countries. Without such a critical understanding, community development risks obscuring the underlying structural causes of inequality or even reinforcing potential divisions between different groups in the competition for dwindling public resources brought about by global processes of neoliberalisation.

Some of these concerns are not new; in 1978, for example, a group of academics and practitioners in the UK produced a book entitled Community or class struggle? (Cowley, 1978), which directly addressed these same questions. That book sought to convey a number of things: that ‘the community solution’ was potentially a masking ideology for concealing the unequal class relations that created the very conditions that community development was deployed to address; that the construction in policy of ‘disadvantage’ or ‘deprivation’ as ways of explaining inequality could actually be what might now be called ‘misrecognitions’ of class (Mooney, 2010); that the social reproduction of power necessary for the continuing operation of capital was conducted through a range of social formations and practices that included the construction of such deficit categories; and that community development could itself be complicit in creating, or at least reinforcing, unequal relations of power by perpetuating such discourses and practices. What contributors to that book were particularly concerned with was whether it was possible, within the conditions of late capitalism, to reconfigure community development’s wider educational role in such a way as to take account of this, essentially structuralist, analysis.

Over time, the possibilities and limitations of this model have been the focus of sustained critique from several sources (for example, Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Bryson and Mowbray, 2005; De Fillipis et al, 2010; Harvey, 2012; Jha, 2015) including feminist concerns about reductionist definitions of class (for example, Campbell, 1993; Green, 1992). What interests us here is the extent to which those arguments still have relevance for addressing the changes and continuities in policy and practice. For, whilst the binary choice posed by the 1978 publication may be regarded as too simplistic to take account of contemporary complexities, it nonetheless poses a set of challenges which remain relevant. Not least, it underscores community development as an intrinsically contested political practice within the wider politics of the state. A central theme of this book relates therefore to what might be gained by renewing class analysis in light of subsequent developments in social theory and the shifting realities of current political and ideological contexts. The local consequences of neoliberal globalisation, in particular, stalk the pages of this book.

Clearly, neoliberalism cannot be considered a monolithic process in any simple sense. In reality it is fluid, multidimensional, hybridised and extraordinarily versatile in working with the social, cultural and institutional grain of diverse contexts in order to enact and reproduce itself (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Nevertheless, it can also be understood as an ideological project, ‘born of struggle and collaboration in three worlds: intellectual, bureaucratic and political’ (Mudge, 2008, p.703), which has been extraordinarily pervasive across the globe. It is important to consider, therefore, the extent to which the multiscalar reach and penetration of neoliberal strategies and processes that have sustained massive global inequality may also have created an unexpected sense of common cause and solidarity, as ‘neoliberal political economy becomes exposed and questioned’ (De Fillipis et al, 2010, p.7). An important preliminary task is to recognise this ‘context of contexts’ and to reassert the significance of prevailing economic and material conditions for understanding the politics of community development, and the role of the market in particular (Peck and Tickell, 2002).

In his discussion of what he characterises as the global development crisis brought about by neoliberalisation, Selwyn (2014, p.3) points out that ‘economic thought that understands markets as non-political arenas of exchange logically precludes political economy analysis, as “politics” are externalised from market activities’. By extension, we would argue that analyses of community development that preclude economic analysis externalise and thereby depoliticise the market as a key (f)actor in determining people’s material conditions and the choices available to them. In addition, sundering the economic from the political has a decisive impact on the parameters of democratic participation. As Ruth Levitas (2000, p.190) warns:

When the economic dimension is missing, ignored or denied, the demand for community tends to become ideological in the strict sense of the word. That is, it masks the real economic relationships and conflicts that exist – or itself becomes the subject of conflict.

Of particular significance for an adequate understanding of the politics of contemporary community development, is the way in which democratic debate about values and purposes has been largely ‘reduced to problem-solving and teambuilding’ and ‘human selves are reduced to human capital’ (Brown, in Lears, 2015, p29). This charge has particular resonance for those practitioners who find themselves the instruments of such stealth tactics, ‘delivering democracy’ through managerial regimes which actually undermine democracy as a social and political process of contest and negotiation (Shaw, 2011). It also raises perennial questions about the legitimacy of ‘the community’ as determined by policy, on the one hand, and those community organisations which potentially challenge state policy, on the other. In this context ‘unauthorised’ community groups and activists may come under intense scrutiny, their validity questioned or denied. The politics of solidarity – which collectivities are or are not regarded as legitimate and on whose terms – inevitably play a central role in addressing the choices and dilemmas of community development practice in its various guises, as evidenced by a number of chapters in this book.

We will return to the potentially divisive dimensions of community in due course, but turn now to a consideration of the contested concept of social class itself. What might be the implications of differing theoretical perspectives for those concerned with community development? And how might these contribute to practitioners’ understandings of the ways in which the composition of social classes and class identity has been changing over time?

Class, identity and difference

While the concept of ‘class’ has become somewhat marginalised in theoretical debates over the past decades, there is some indication of renewed interest in more recent times, with increasing concern about widening inequalities more generally. Certainly, a range of internationally influential texts has reasserted the continuing salience of class and economic-based inequality (for example, Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009; Dorling, 2010, 2014; Savage, 2010; Piketty, 2014; Marmot, 2015). Nonetheless, until quite recently there was a tendency for the very notion of social class to be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevance – ‘we are all middle class now’ – while the term ‘working class’ has all too often been used pejoratively to refer to a ‘moral underclass’ that resides below or beyond society in a state of ‘advanced marginalisation’ (Wacquant et al, 2014, p.1270). As Savage (2010, p.235) argues, the educated middle classes have been constructed as ‘the quintessential autonomous and reflexive individuals of contemporary capitalism’, a construct that has served to mask continuing relationships of privilege and power. With increasing awareness of the global and local growth of social inequality, however, the idea that class has become irrelevant becomes ever less convincing.

But how are social classes to be conceptualised in the 21st century? In everyday terminology, social classes tend to be defined in terms of people’s occupations, along with their educational qualifications (or lack of such qualifications), social status and power: usages that are broadly compatible with the sociologist Max Weber’s writings on social stratification (Weber, 1964). Such meanings have normative value as well as providing the basis for empirical quantification, including the compilation of official statistics and the commissioning of market research. However, whilst this way of conceptualizing class may facilitate those interventions, including community development, designed to ameliorate the effects of inequality, Weberian approaches lack sufficient explanatory scope to address the wider relations of exploitation, domination and unequal divisions of power (Wright, 2009).

This brings us to the important and necessary distinction between class as gradation in the Weberian sense, and class as relation in the Marxist sense. Marxist perspectives start from an analysis of capitalism as a socio-economic system; in particular the dialectical relation between those who own the means of production, and those who sell their labour power. This directs attention towards the underlying causes of social inequalities. As the super-wealthy become even wealthier and the poor become even poorer – ‘In developed and developing countries alike, the poorest half of the population often controls less than 10% of its wealth’ (World Economic Forum, 2015) – this analysis has particular relevance for those concerned to reverse the dynamics of inequality.

Whilst Marxist perspectives emphasise the underlying structures of social division, there is also a recognition that people’s own perceptions of their class position may be quite different. Clearly, class as a subjective cultural identity differs from class as an objective economic position, although there are critical connections to be made between economic and cultural dimensions (Moran, 2015). As subsequent chapters illustrate, people can and often do seek to differentiate themselves from those with objectively similar interests. Skilled workers have often defined themselves against unskilled or unemployed workers, just as members of the ‘respectable’ working class may define themselves against the ‘undeserving’ poor, and ‘hardworking families’ may internalise prevalent images of themselves as superior to ‘benefit fraudsters’ – or, indeed, ‘migrants’. These kinds of divisions have increasingly international dimensions too, as workers are forced to compete with each other for production jobs in the global economy. It is also important to acknowledge that instances of symbolic (and sometimes real) ‘horizontal violence’ are constructed in language, culture and behaviour as much as in social institutions or political processes (Bourdieu, 1985).

Such divisions within social classes reflect long-running strands in social and political history. But the forms that they have taken have varied, just as occupational structures themselves have varied, over time. For instance, recent research on the ways in which precarious employment is becoming the new normality in globalised labour markets raises new questions for and about class analysis. There have been debates as to whether those engaged in informal, insecure forms of employment (from ‘zero-hours contracts’ in shopping malls to ‘volunteering’ as unpaid interns) are beginning to constitute a new class: ‘the precariat’ (Standing, 2011). At the same time, writers like Hardt and Negri (2000) have critiqued what they see as the reductionism of the traditional Marxist focus on the industrial working class to the exclusion of peasants, women and sans papiers (the multitude), who begin to constitute a new global proletariat. And their approach has been contested in its turn.

Meanwhile, feminists and other social movement activists have raised questions of their own, challenging theoretical perspectives that fail to explore the interconnections between social class and other forms of discrimination and oppression including gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and disability (Oliver, 1990; Anthias, 2001, Dominelli, 2006; Craig, 2012). As second-wave feminists pointed out, official statistics (largely based upon Weberian notions) have focussed upon women’s social class in relation to their fathers’ and/or husbands’ occupations, reflecting assumptions that ‘husband and wife are always social equals’, self-evidently not always the case (Davis, in Garnsey, 1982, p.426). Women were – and are – subjected to oppression and discrimination within the home as well as within the workplace and the community. Garnsey (1982, p.443) concludes that ‘the division of labour between men and women and the inequalities associated with it provide an insight into some of the basic causes of change in occupational and class structure’.

In other words, social class and changes in class structure can only be understood by taking account of women’s exploitation and oppression: challenges that feminists continue to raise. As Dominelli (2006, p.31) points out, ‘Feminists now accept that women’s experiences of gender oppression are differentiated by a range of social divisions such as ethnicity, class, disability and sexual orientation’. These differentiations have represented challenges not only to Weberian notions of social class: as Marxist feminists also recognise, they constitute ‘vital areas of social reality which Marxists (including Marx) have simply not addressed’ (Davis, 1998, p.75). Black feminists have further challenged the ways in which white women fail to take account of the oppression and discrimination that they, as Black women, experience. In particular, they focus upon white feminists’ emphasis on the roots of women’s oppression within the patriarchal family, rather ‘seeing the family as a site of safety for black men and women living in white racist societies’ (Dominelli, 2016, pp.30-1). Racial discrimination has been a longstanding challenge for feminist politics as well as for class-based politics more generally (hooks, 1990; James, 2012).

The development of the concept of intersectionality has been critically important in addressing the multidimensional nature not only of inequality but also of injustice more generally (for example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Skeggs, 2004; Emejulu and Bronstein, 2011). According to Dhaliwal and Yuval-Davis (2014, p.35) intersectional politics start from the assumption that ‘people’s concrete social locations are constructed along multiple (and both shifting and contingent) axes of difference, stage in the life cycle, sexuality, ability and so on’, which are also constitutive of each other. In other words, ‘Class … cannot be experienced or lived outside of “race”, “gender” or “sexuality” and the same is true of other categories’. These intersections and interconnections form a continuing theme, running through subsequent chapters in thi...