The immediate problem with this approach is that it avoids any need to identify or explain any overall social processes that might, between them, be shaping changes in how we ‘cluster’ in particular classes, and how these classes interact with each other. This makes it very hard to ask really important questions about society as a whole, and how social differentiation changes through time: in short, you can’t see the wood for the trees. For this purpose, we could try a different approach. Specifically, it is helpful to go back to Marx; not the usual caricature of the ‘industrial proletariat’, but the actual concept of class in Marx. He argued that class was not a thing, but a relationship, that it was the key constitutive feature of any distinct form of social order, and that it was grounded in how a given society produced and reproduced its means of subsistence. In capitalism, the class relation is substantively what, for the purposes of critiquing political economy, he alternatively calls ‘capital’. This concept of capital is utterly different from that of Bourdieu: far from being an individual possession, it is the overall social relation between a class of people who own the means of production, and can live off the returns on those assets; and a class of people who are obliged instead to sell their labour-power in order to live and reproduce themselves. Marxs familiar names for the two sides of this bilateral relationship are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but given the widespread unease today about such terminology we might just as well call them the ‘owners’ and the ‘workers’.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:13:12 +0000
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