Class

The Anthology

Stanley Aronowitz, Michael J. Roberts, Stanley Aronowitz, Michael J. Roberts

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780631224990, 9780631224983
• eBook ISBN: 9781119395478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Using an innovative framework, this reader examines the most important and influential writings on modern class relations.

• Uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines scholarship from political economy, social history, and cultural studies
• Brings together more than 50 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classes
• Analyzes class within the larger context of labor, particularly as it relates to conflicts over and about work
• Provides insight into the current crisis in the global capitalist system, including the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the explosion of Arab Spring, and the emergence of class conflict in China

PART ONE
The Working Class

Chapter 1
Representing the Working Class

Michael J. Roberts

The sometimes confusing array of ways in which the class relations in society are interpreted is not only a problem in the news media and the other various representations produced by the culture industry. The problem exists in the social sciences as well. In the social sciences, research on the American working class has been, to a large extent, framed by the contrast between the conceptual framework of historical materialism (the western Marxist tradition) and the dominant paradigm in social science, which includes foundational texts by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. In the theoretical framework of historical materialism, the concept of class must be deployed within the wider philosophical and political context concerning the normative issue that is sometimes referred to as the “labor question”, whereas for conventional social scientists working in the dominant tradition the theoretical context that frames the analysis of the concept “class” plays a much more limiting role. In conventional social‐science discourse, the issue of class is often distilled down to questions of description, method and accuracy of measurement. Indeed, the sometimes contentious discursive exchanges between those working within the framework of historical materialism and their interlocutors in the social sciences frequently get displaced through, and encoded by, academic debates concerning methodological procedures and techniques for measurement of empirical phenomena.

In conventional social science, the concept of class is typically separated, analytically, from the concept of work so that class is understood as an outcome, in order to frame the issue more generally within a theoretical context that is designed to map patterns of inequality in distributions of wealth and income.¹ In historical materialism, on the other hand, class is conceptually fused together with work, so that class is conceptualized in terms of activity rather than outcome. This difference approaches what Thomas Kuhn, in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, refers to as a paradigmatic incommensurability, because the manifestation of these differences reveals that in contrast to the framework of historical materialism, social scientists working within the dominant paradigm deny the existence of a working class that exists in antagonism with a capitalist or ruling class. A relationship of that kind simply does not appear in the research results produced by the dominant paradigm in social science.

To return to the normative dimension, it is also important to note that historical materialism does not break from the humanities, because to focus on production and work involves an examination of the unfreedom which pervades the workplace in capitalist social formations. The critique of unfreedom in the workplace animates much of the research on the working class within the paradigm of historical materialism. While class and class struggle are core concepts for those working in the Marxist tradition, it is important to note that historical materialism is not itself a unified discourse in the social sciences, as there are several distinct intellectual trajectories that have developed in response to particular empirical problems. Failure to acknowledge these distinctions leads many conventional social scientists to incorrectly claim that the Marxist point of view suffers from crude economic determinism. Part of the problem is that conventional social science relies almost exclusively upon a reading of the Communist Manifesto to construct its understanding of the Marxist concept of class, ignoring all of Marx’s more nuanced analyses of class relations and intra‐class fractions, like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Class Struggles in France, to say nothing of the sophisticated appropriation of Georg Hegel in the Grundrisse and the three volumes of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. A truncated reading of Marx leads Weberians like John R. Hall, the editor of Reworking Class, to claim that “the once dominant Marxist theory that predicted a historically decisive struggle in the capitalist world between two classes – workers and owners – is widely recognized as inadequate” (p. 1). This volume should be seen as an attempt both to provide an alternative view of class as well as to correct some misinterpretations of the Marxist view on class.

I

On the one hand, what is being studied differs from one paradigm of social research to another. For reasons having to do with methodological training in their disciplines, professional social scientists working in the dominant paradigm tend to ignore both the asymmetrical structural relations that constitute the labor process as well as the history of the transformation of the social relations of production. Instead, the preferred objects constituted for analysis are income, education and status levels – what mainstream sociologists refer to collectively as socio‐economic status or “SES” for short. SES is the central organizing concept in the field of inequality studies in conventional social science, referred to as “social stratification.” It is important to emphasize that the modifying term “economic,” in the concept SES, is severely restricted to only indicate levels of income and wealth, phenomena that are said to allow for the expanded exercise of power in the marketplace. The legacy of narrowing the viewpoint of stratification studies to the space of markets was forged by Max Weber’s attempts to merge sociological analyses with the marginal utility theory developed by the Austrian School of Economics, which included important figures such as Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen Bohm von Bawerk. The reification of market interactions within conventional social science means that most stratification research focuses exclusively upon lifestyle differences, “life chances,” and the unequal distribution of resources, but not on how wealth is produced in the first place. Weber himself argues in volume two of Economy and Society that “class situation is…ultimately market situation…the market is the decisive moment…” (1978, p. 928). This difference in orientation regarding the concept of class leads Weberians to construe class in terms of questions such as “What does an individual have?,” and “What is an individual likely to obtain?”, whereas in the tradition of historical materialism the questions are “What does the person do?”, “What is the individual likely to do?” and “Will they maintain or change the existing social relations?”

In short, what happens at work during production is outside of the ordinary conceptual framework in the social studies of class inequality. For example, the so‐called “occupational ladder” theorized by conventional sociology is understood as a continuum of social status ranks leading from one rung of the ladder up to the next all the way from bottom to top, leaving no conceptual room for understanding a break in the structure of the ladder that would separate individuals into distinct classes (and class fractions) with contradictory interests based upon their relation to the process of production as well as their opposing relationship to one another. Viewing class in terms of a status location on a continuous vertical ladder involves a conceptual process that constructs the phenomenon “class” as a thing that can be located in social space, whereas in historical materialism class is understood as an antagonistic relationship that takes place in time, as a phenomenon that happens. The difference between viewing class as a thing and understanding class as a relationship that develops historically turns upon epistemological differences that orient the direction and content of social research. This dissimilarity between the concept of class in historical materialism and the social‐science concept of SES is only partly explained by methodological differences due to the preference for historical analysis among Marxists, and the preference for survey research and statistical methodology among conventional sociologists. The differences go beyond the contrast in methodology. Class and SES are notions that differ from one another in the sense described by Thomas Kuhn, where competing concepts exist within a larger context of incommensurable theoretical paradigms. In short, the issues at hand regarding class versus status are not reducible to questions regarding the proper procedures of measurement. Measuring is ultimately not the issue.

Rather than beginning and focusing the analysis upon the conditions of poverty and inequality (outcomes) as in the conventional paradigm, the tradition of research in historical materialism begins with laboring activity in the analysis of capitalist society because this way of fusing the concepts of class and work places an emphasis on the agency of individuals. By setting the focus on the practices of working people, the researcher is able to reveal the ways in which workers exercise a certain amount of power within the struggles that condition the forms of the workplace and their everyday life outside the workplace. The conventional focus on class as an outcome, however, implicitly assumes a relative disempowerment of workers, since they are mapped onto the bottom of the distribution of wealth, power and status. Mapping and measuring class as outcome conceals and silences working‐class agents.

Exploring the region beyond the “market” is the raison d’être for historical materialism. This is not to say that Marxists ignore market dynamics, especially labor market formations, but to ignore the moment of production results in a one‐sided point of view on economic activity in general that distorts the understanding of the class relation in capitalist social formations. In an effort to address this weakness in conventional social science, contemporary Marxists continue to analyze the process of proletarianization: namely, the de‐skilling of workers in all segments of the economy through the relentless separation of mental and manual labor that follows from the application of specific forms of technology designed to dominate workers on the shop‐floor of the workplace, in both blue‐ and white‐collar working environments. The knowledge of the production process as a whole is wrested away from the minds of workers on the assembly line (as well as office workers isolated in cubicles) and situated within the manuals and computer programs of engineers and computer programmers working for management. Ultimately, this knowledge itself becomes a force of production as it is objectified within machines that displace workers on the factory floor and position them as mere appendages of the machines. Key figures in this tradition of sociology include Harry Braverman and Michael Burawoy, who, despite being recognized in the field of sociology, still constitute the minority perspective in the field of stratification and inequality studies.²

The process of proletarianization is not limited to manufacturing sectors in the economy. White‐collar workers, service‐sector workers, and skilled workers in the bio‐tech fields have all been subject t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• General Introduction
• How to Read This Book
• PART ONE: The Working Class
• PART TWO: The Middle Class
• PART THREE: The Capitalist Class
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement