Understanding Social Divisions

Shaun Best

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780761942979, 9780761942962
• eBook ISBN: 9781446223543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of social divisions has dominated research within the social sciences since the nineteenth century. Early stratification categories of class, race, and gender, have in more recent years been joined by issues such as sexuality and disability. Understanding Social Divisions addresses the full range of social divisions in one volume while also considering the nature of social division in itself, in a comprehensive and accessible overview.

Shaun Best: outlines and evaluates theories and research from a long historical period

looks at how social divisions influence the formation of identity and `the other?; discusses the mechanisms that are drawn upon to maintain social divisions; considers how solidarity is maintained given that most people in society may feel in some way divided from the rest of society; and, explores how individuals place themselves within the social divisions of class, gender, sex and sexuality, race and ethnic diversity, disability and mental illness.

The concluding chapter explores the role of the State in the processes of social division, in areas such as: asylum, citizenship, childhood, old age, disease and policing of terrorism.

This book is essential reading for students of social divisions from a wide variety of social science backgrounds.

One

Chapter Outline

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By the end of this chapter you should have a critical understanding of the major contributions to class analysis including:

• The Marxian analysis of class
• The Weberian analysis: class, status and party
• Nietzsche on the will to power and the will to truth
• The functionalists conception of class: Talcott Parsons; Davis and Moore
• The rise of meritocracy: Michael Young, Peter Saunders
• The rise of the underclass and the culture of poverty: Oscar Lewis, Charles Murray and Loic Wacquant
• Harry Braverman’s Labour Process Theory
• Class structuration: Anthony Giddens
• Later Marxists on class: John Roemer; Erik Olin Wright; Guglielmo Carchedi; Nicos Poulantzas
• The Regulation School: Michel Aglietta, Bob Jessop, Alain Lipietz
• The neo-Gramscian turn in class analysis: Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
• The linguistic turn in class analysis: Patrick Joyce, William Sewell Jr and Richard Price
• Postmodernity and social frameworks: Malcolm Waters, David Ashley and Daniel Bell
• The move away from Marxian orthodoxy: Jean Baudrillard and Fredrick Jameson
• Zygmunt Bauman and the concept of stratification.

Class Division

Introduction

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All societies appear to have some form of inequality between people in terms of income, wealth and prestige. Inequality may be real, but class analysis is a set of concepts. One cannot point to inequality in the world and assume that this is a sufficient justification for accepting class analysis. Class analysis is a range of possible explanations for these persistent inequalities. In addition, explanations for the persistence of such inequalities change over time. In the nineteenth century Marx argued that ownership/non-ownership of the means of production was the central element in class division. In Marx’s abstract model of class – the model found in his most influential book Capital (1867) – differences in income and status were essentially irrelevant. Conversely, for most of the twentieth century, inequality in income and wealth was synonymous with class analysis. Sociological explanations of class took their starting point from either Marx or Weber, and both approaches shared the assumption that classes were real and had a significant impact on people’s life chances. Nevertheless, even in the early twentieth century, some theorists challenged the assumption that inequality was synonymous with class analysis: elite theorists, for example, attempted to explain inequality without reference to class. In the latter years of the twentieth century, class became increasingly irrelevant in academic analysis with concepts such as cultural identity – particularly in relation to gender, race, disability and sexuality, all of which will be fully explained in later chapters – having a more significant impact upon our chosen styles of living.

In this chapter the main forms of class analysis will be outlined and evaluated. The emphasis will be on the processes of class formation. In other words, the central questions will be:

• What is class?
• What are the factors that bring about the process of social division for each of the class theorists?

Marx on Class

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The Marxian analysis revolves around the concept of class and Marx’s great insight was to see the exploitation of the working class by the factory owners as the determining factor in social division. In the Marxist analysis of class, the forces and relations of production are the determining factors to bring about social change. Although Marx paid little attention to formal definitions of class boundaries, from the Marxian perspective if a group owns the means of production, they wield not only economic power but also political power. People’s behaviour is determined by the class grouping in which they find themselves. In other words, class membership mediates people’s agency; furthermore our ability to make perceptions of the world and act on the basis of those perceptions is class determined.

According to Marxian analysis, the state is viewed as an institution that helps to organise capitalist society in the best interests of the bourgeoisie. The legitimacy of the capitalist system is maintained by ideology; working-class people are victims of a false consciousness. In other words, working-class people are said to hold values, ideas and beliefs about the nature of inequality that are not in their own economic interests to hold. Working-class people have their ideas manipulated, by the media, schools and religion for example, and regard economic inequality as fair and just.

MARX AND CLASS DIVISIONS

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In the nineteenth century Marx singled out class divisions as the engine of history. In particular he drew a sharp distinction between:

• The bourgeoisie: the class that owned the factories, shops and offices (i.e. the means of production) and
• The proletariat: the class of people who did not own the means of production, but who provided the labour.

In the Marxian analysis, the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat by not paying them the full value of their labour power.

In Capital, Marx outlines his abstract model of class, which is essentially a two-class model. There are other classes in capitalist society but they are disappearing and in any case are largely irrelevant to the essential dynamic of capitalist society. The key distinction is ownership/non-ownership of the means of production; for Marx, it is this division that separates the classes. The bourgeoisie own the means of production (factories, shops and offices) and the proletariat do not own the means of production. The relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is an exploitative one; the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat.

The exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is explained by the Labour Theory of Value, which Marx derived from David Ricardo. Marx begins Capital with a discussion of the commodity. A commodity is anything that is manufactured, has a value and can be sold. There are two forms of value for Marx, firstly there is use value, which reflects the intrinsic value or personal value that a person gets from having or consuming a commodity. Marx has little interest in the value, desire or pleasure that you or I can enjoy from consumption. Marx is interested in the second type of value, which he terms exchange value, or the value in monetary terms that a commodity can fetch in the marketplace. For Marx, the exchange value of a commodity reflects the amount of labour power that went into the production of a commodity.

What is labour power? Each worker has muscles, limbs and brains that they can use to make things. In other words, each person carries with them a potential stock or fund of labour – each person has a potential capacity to make products. Although each person has different skills, abilities and levels of intelligence, Marx argues that such differences can be subsumed under the abstract concept of a unit of labour power. It is the number of such abstract units present within a commodity that determines its exchange value. However, Marx argues that labour power is also a commodity, and the value of labour power reflects the amount of labour power that went into the reproduction of labour power itself.

Marx argues that workers have to be paid enough to feed themselves and clothe themselves and also be paid a little bit extra to produce, clothe and feed the next generation of workers. In other words, workers have to be paid enough to reproduce their own labour power. In terms of the length of the working day, Marx argues that the first part of the working day is socially necessary labour time, in which the workers are paid the full value of their labour power. However, any time that the workers work beyond socially necessary labour time is what Marx terms surplus value labour time in which the worker is not paid for the value of their labour power, but rather is creating surplus value for the bourgeoisie. People working for the bourgeoisie after they have completed socially necessary labour time is what Marx regards as exploitation. In addition, there is pressure on the bourgeoisie to extend surplus value labour time and pay workers only enough to reproduce their own labour power and little else. It is only by the bourgeoisie behaving in this exploitative manner that the profitability of individual capitalistic enterprises can be maintained. Hence Marx argues that workers will go through a period of getting poorer (Verelendung), a process of immiserisation.

MARX AND THE MODE OF PRODUCTION

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Marx viewed society as a mode of production, and history is the change from one mode of production to the next. Initially people lived in a form of society that he termed Primitive Communism: a mode of production in which there was no private ownership, no class system, no family and no incest taboo. With the development of private ownership came institutions, such as the state and the family, which play a central role in modern capitalism.

The mode of production is made up of two parts: firstly the economic base, which contains the forces of production and the relations of production. The forces of production are all the things that we need to produce commodities such as raw materials and technology. The relations of production are the class relations; in capitalism this would be the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Secondly, above the economic base there is the superstructure, this is the realm of culture, politics, ideas and ideology. In the Marxian analysis, the economic base determines culture and ideas within a society.

ACTIVITY

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The Labour Theory of Value has come under some considerable critique, as Savage (2000) suggests:

A herb, for instance, which is found to be the cure for an illness may suddenly increase in exchange value despite the fact that no more labour is embodied in producing it (picking or growing it) than before. One Marxist response is to recognise the ‘transformation problem’ which emphasizes the distinction between price and value, and accepts that the price (though not the value) may change according to contingencies such as these. However, in this case the point of distinguishing the ‘value’ of a product becomes unclear. (Savage 2000: 11)

Questions:

• In your own words explain the critical point that Savage is making about the Labour Theory of Value.
• What do you understand by the ‘transformation problem’?

In summary, for Marx, the human being is the sole source of value in production. The ratio of constant capital to variable capital is known by Marxists as the organic composition of capital. If less labour is employed, or more constant capital is employed in the production process, the organic composition of capital is said to rise. Marx argued that this rising organic composition will cause the rate of profit to fall over time. However, a central problem is the transformation problem. The transformation problem is concerned with how to transform labour values into the system of prices.

In the Marxian analysis, the formation of the working class is a process of proletarianisation. Working-class people have lost both the ownership and control of the means of production and have become a homogeneous group of wage-earners. The driving force behind this process of proletarianisation is ‘material’ in nature, as Marx made clear in his Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1968: 182)

ACTIVITY

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Rewrite the above quote from Marx in your own words. Return to this activity after you have finished reading the chapter and ask yourself if you agree or disagree with the points that Marx is making. Give some reasons for your answer.

Max Weber on Class

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For Weber, society is stratified in three distinct ways on the bases of: class, status groups and parties. However, all three of these forms of stratification are concerned with the distribution of power within a community. At its core, the Weberian analysis comprises:

• Class: concerned with stratification of the economic order
• Status: concerned with stratification of the social order
• Party: concerned with stratification of the political order.

A social class is made up of all the people who share the same market-class position in terms of common economic interests, a similar degree of control over consumer goods, assets and resources, and a similar level of marketable skill. Later Weberians have identified two components of the class position:

• Market situation: which reflects the amount of money a person receives
• Work situation: which reflects the conditions of service that a person enjoys.

From a Weberian perspective, classes then are formed in the marketplace according to the laws of demand and supply. If a person has marketable skills that are high in demand and in relatively short supply, then that person will be in a high social class position. In contrast, if a person has few marketable skills and/or there is little demand for those skills, then that person will be in a low social class position. A person’s class situation reflects their ability to buy goods, gain a position in life and ‘find inner satisfaction’ (Weber 1978: 30...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Placing Myself in the Social Divisions
• 1 Class Division
• 2 Disability and Mental Illness
• 3 Race, Racism and Ethnic Diversity
• 4 Gender and Sexuality
• 5 State-Sponsored Social Divisions
• Conclusions
• Index