The Class Matrix

Social Theory after the Cultural Turn

Vivek Chibber

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674269842
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialtheorie

"A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn't clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is."—Chris Wright, CounterPunch "Chibber…has developed a sophisticated, elegant, and readable defense of the sociological significance of class structure in understanding and addressing the key problems inherent in capitalism."— Choice "[A] clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we're to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms."— Jacobin Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, theorists argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival.Chibber accommodates the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework, showing how one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. He vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain, while also showing that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors. The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called "the dull compulsion of economic relations."

1

Class Structure

Capitalism is an economic system that is identified with a specific class structure. While there are many social divisions within the system, as there are in any complex economy, there is one specific division taken by nearly every framework to be essential to it—the one between those who control society’s productive assets and those who have none. To put it more directly, the defining characteristic of capitalism is a class structure with asset-owning capitalists on one side and a class of asset-poor workers on the other. That structure is described as fundamental to capitalism because the system’s historically distinctive macro properties derive from it.

In all materialist accounts of this class structure, it is theorized as a set of social positions that assign a certain role to the people located within them. Hence, anyone described as a “capitalist” is taken to be a person in this social position, whose actions in the economy can be assumed to be directed toward specific goals. And someone designated a “wage laborer” can similarly be described as following the goals and constraints attached to that position. The economic strategies associated with the class position are taken to derive from the position, not the personal or cultural qualities of the person inhabiting it. Thus, an economic theory will predict that a capitalist will pursue a profit-maximizing strategy regardless of his personality and a wage laborer will seek to sell his labor power whatever his personal preferences happen to be. These are somewhat stylized assumptions, of course. In reality, there are employers who sometimes settle for a break-even approach as long as they can get away with it and wage laborers who decide to opt out of work when they can. But every economic theory of class has to insist that these cases are deviations from the norm, not the norm itself. They cannot retreat to the view that these assumptions are only convenient fictions to create elegant models if they also believe—which class theory certainly does—that they actually predict real outcomes.

Marx certainly held to the view that the behavioral assumptions of his theory captured real facts about the world—in particular, how social actors respond to structural pressures. And the foundational premise of his theory was that the class structure exerts real pressure on its incumbents so that it inclines them toward specific economic strategies. Hence, what drives the system are the causal properties of the structural positions, not the personal details of the individuals who happen to be situated in them. This is how the class structure generates the system’s “laws of motion”—its macroeconomic dynamics. Locations that can be described as belonging to the same category—steel manufacturer, fast-food worker, or investment banker—induce the people located within them to pursue broadly similar economic goals, which aggregate into large-scale patterns of economic behavior.

The challenge for such a theory is to explain whether we are justified in expecting that a class structure will generate a predictable economic practice, whatever its cultural context. The reasoning behind the challenge goes something like this. All economic strategy is a species of social action. And all action, by definition, is meaning oriented. It is motivated by the particular way actors understand their situation, and those understandings are derived from the ideological and symbolic universe into which the person has been socialized. But this appears to run up against the basic assumptions of structural class theory. As we have just seen, in that theory, agents’ structural locations are supposed to impel them into patterns of social action that can be predicted simply on the basis of their structural location. This suggests that the motivation stems from the structure, unmediated by the cultural and ideological socialization of the actor. And this, in turn, makes it appear that, for materialists, class processes exist outside of culture so that economic agents function on the basis of a rationality that has no connection to their identity or moral valuations. If this is so, we have to be suspicious of a theory that seems to evacuate culture from any domain of social interaction, even the economic.

The premise of the culturalist argument is undoubtedly correct. There is no structure that is free of culture and no social action that is unaffected by meaning constellations. So how is a materialist class theory, which insists on the primacy of structure over culture, even possible? In this chapter, I try to show that we can accept the premise that structures have to be interpreted by agents . . . while rejecting the conclusion, derived by many cultural theorists, that structural class theory has to be doubted, if not abandoned altogether. Materialists therefore do not have to imply that class action exists outside culture; indeed, they can affirm the latter’s ubiquity in social life. With the argument vindicated, we can then move on to the other, still daunting worries about a materialist class theory, which I engage in the chapters to follow.

1.1

Culture and Social Structure

The challenge to materialist theory is ably summarized by William Sewell, one of its most influential critics in the 1990s. He recounts the early days of the cultural turn, when traditional historians like himself, trained in a kind of structural analysis, first encountered the arguments of cultural anthropology, a field that played an enormously influential part in the turn away from materialism. Whereas traditional theory was based on a prioritization of social structure as the fount of analysis, the argument from culture insisted that “the social world was constituted by the interpretive practices of the actors who made it up.” Hence, “even social and economic structures, which appeared to be the concrete foundations or bony skeletons of social life, were themselves products of the interpretive work of human actors.”¹

But what does it mean to say that a social structure is the product of the “interpretive work” of social agents? It seems to designate a very powerful role to culture in the reproduction of social structures; indeed, it would seem to suggest that the latter are creations of the former. Minimally, it suggests that the agents’ participation in the structure depends on first understanding and then internalizing their role in it. The structure depends on the agents’ unpacking of a cultural script. Hence, the very existence of the structure seems to depend on the vagaries of cultural mediation.

This description is undoubtedly accurate for very many, even most, social structures. Consider the example of a religious congregation. The relations that bind together the priest with his parish are a kind of structure. Its relata are the priest and the members of the church. And participation in that structure situates them relative to one another in patterned behavior. That structure will remain inert unless its relata—the people it binds together—accept their roles in it. But in order for them to accept these roles, they first have to apprehend what their participation entails. If you simply herded people into a church without their having understood and accepted the norms of comportment, it would amount to nothing more than a collection of individuals occupying a small space together. Thus, the members have to understand the difference between the roles of priest and laity; the laity has to not only apprehend the significance of the rituals but also be willing to concede to the priest his authority, both over them and over the sanctity of the practices; they have to understand how they are supposed to relate to one another within the rituals and also in the quotidian dimensions of the gatherings; the priest, in turn, has to have some mastery of the symbolic universe that supervenes on the ritual gatherings, as well as power to ordain the members of the congregation, to distinguish between the profane and the holy, and so on.

Clearly, the actors have to be socialized into their roles as a precondition for the structures being activated at all. But it is also true that as the actors struggle to understand the codes and schemas attached to the structure, they have to filter them through the cultural universe they already inhabit. They do not come to the structures as a tabula rasa. They are already acculturated to certain norms of comportment and ways of relating to the world—a particular sensibility into which they have to integrate the new codes. This is what Patrick Joyce seems to have in mind when he insists that interests cannot be derived directly from economic structures because they are “constructed through the agency of social identities.”² They are “constructed” in that actors have to put work into the interpretive process to successfully navigate the social structure. But the tools they use in this construction are the meanings, schemas, beliefs, and sensibilities with which they are already endowed—the basis of their existing identities. Hence, structures do not just create identities, they are filtered through the identities with which the actors are already endowed.

This is the sense in which structures are activated through the construction of meaning. It clearly seems that unless the cultural processes are correctly handled, the structures will never come into being at all. They seem, therefore, to be produced by culture. Now, with this comes an important corollary—if it takes interpretive effort to acquire cultural competency in the roles attached to the structures, it stands to reason that the effort can also fail. There is an irreducible degree of contingency to the acquisition of meaning for the social actors. First of all, the actor might fail to adequately understand the details of the role he is expected to fill. In the case of the congregation, a member of the laity may come to the rituals with a set of expectations forged by his prior identity as a member of a different religion and may fail to adjust to the rigors of the new one; the priest, for his part, could fail to learn the intricacies of his role—the nuances of the incantations, the vast corpus of texts that comprise the religion’s doctrine, or even the chain of hierarchy within the priesthood.

A second source of breakdown would be if the actor chose to reject the role attached to the structure. In the congregation, members might decide that the demands placed on them by the religion are too many or too exacting. Or they might find religions that are more fulfilling, that generate a sense of belonging more aligned to the actor’s desires. They might even decide to turn away from religion altogether and seek solace in more worldly affairs. Either way, there is a possibility that actors might not adopt the meaning orientation required by the structure. And if this is so, the structure will break down or never acquire an anchor in the community.

So, the culturalist framework rests on two pillars:

•The argument from meaning: Social structures require the appropriate meaning orientation on the part of social actors.

•The argument from contingency: The process of meaning formation is vulnerable to breakdown and hence highly contingent.

The distinction is important because, without the argument from contingency, it is very hard to maintain the explanatory priority of culture over structure. We might agree that all structures require a certain meaning orientation from actors. But if we could just assume that agents will acquire and internalize the interpretative scheme appropriate to their structural position, the suggestion that structures depend on culture—or that they are “the product of the interpretive work of social actors,” in Sewell’s words—would lose warrant. For we could very well accept that a social structure needs actors to understand and accept the roles that come with it but also predict that once the structure is in place, the actors’ role identification will simply follow in train—that is, the structure itself will induce actors to orient themselves in the needed fashion. If so, then insisting on the analytical priority of culture becomes hard to sustain because it will really be the structure that is pushing the causal process. If we are sure the implantation of the structure will itself be enough to instill actors with the appropriate meaning orientation, the key link in the chain is not culture but the antecedent structure. Culture would turn out to be an effect of structure and not vice versa, as Sewell suggests. Hence, the mere requirement of interpretive competence is not a threat to a materialist class analysis.

The real power of the culturalist framework rests on the idea that meaning not only activates structure but its availability to carry out this task might be highly variable. Culture’s importance as the decisive link in the chain is elevated if it happens that the needed socialization might not materialize—if actors might not understand their roles or if they reject the required value orientation, even in the presence of structural pressures. This being the case, all the action can be taken to occur at the point of meaning construction and internalization, not at the point of the antecedent structure. Hence, the causal role of culture indeed comes to the fore. It becomes the arbiter of how actors respond to their structural location, and the latter becomes captive to the former’s function and effect.

1.2

How Class Structure Is Different

The question for us is whether class is a structure that depends on a highly contingent cultural mediation, as I have just described it. No doubt it depends on actors’ internalization of the norms appropriate to its reproduction, as do all structures. But is there a deep contingency to this internalization process so that the structure’s stability cannot be taken for granted until a host of exogenous cultural factors are also present? In the following, I show that, when it comes to capitalist class relations, there is no such contingency.

The Logic of Wage Labor

Consider the situation of a wage laborer. Suppose that, much like the member of the church congregation, he approaches his new structural location with little knowledge of how it works. Perhaps he was of peasant origin and, having been recently proletarianized, is habituated into the values and expectations of a rural smallholder. Clearly, he has to undergo some kind of cultural adjustment if he is to survive as a wage laborer. He has to understand that his new vocation has a set of demands and norms that are entirely different than what he was accustomed to while working his own land; he has to decode what it means to search for work, compared to working on his own plot; he has to accept that his employer has authority over him, that he must retain his job over time, and so on. These changes are not, by any means, trivial. They require the construction of an appropriate cultural stance, an interpretive scheme that enables him to navigate his place in the structure. Hence, wage labor, no less than the church congregation, requires that actors internalize the appropriate codes—or else the structure will remain inert.

The adoption of an appropriate meaning orientation would seem to put class structures in the same state of cultural construction as the church congregation. But the priority of culture over structure needs more—the norm internalization must also be a contingent affair. So we need to ask, is there any reason to expect that this process of cultural education might fail? Recall that there are two avenues for failure—a breakdown in meaning and a refusal to participate. Now, a breakdown in meaning requires that the actor fails to understand the obligations of his place in the social structure. In this case, it would entail that he cannot comprehend that, having been deprived of every other source of income, he should seek out employment. Or that, having found employment, he now needs to provide his services to the person paying him. He might, of course, recoil at the idea of having to do so, and I will address that shortly. The question here is not whether he resists accepting his new situation but whether he could fail to understand it.

I am not aware of any instance in modern history where a transition to capitalism was derailed, o...