SO478 - week 5

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These are my notes from October 24 for SO478 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Marx and beyond

My favourite week so far.

Readings

Class, Status, Party by Max Weber

Chapter 13 of Social Stratification: Class, Race, & Gender in Sociological Perspective. Detailing Weber’s three-component theory of stratification.

• laws are upheld essentially with violence
• distinction between social/economic orders (though they condition/react to each other)
• classes not as communities but as bases for communal action (based on economic circumstances)
  • communal action referring to the psychological component (actors “feel” like they belong together)
  • he distinguishes it from societal action: “a rationally motivated adjustment of interests”
• owners of property are favoured in the market (tends towards monopoly), whereas non-owners must sell labour or existing owned goods to subsist
  • thus the core of all class distinctions comes down to property vs no property
  • further distinction between rentiers vs entrepreneurs among the propertied
  • class situation really comes down to market situation
  • credit-debtor relations can also have an impact depending on power of creditor (as expressed through interest rates)
• the communal action that brings forth class “situations” (struggle?) is action between different classes
• central issue today: determination of the price of labour
  • struggle between labour and their direct contacts in the workplace
  • strange tension in that the shareholders/bankers/rentiers pocket most of the gains from labour and yet are not directly involved in the struggle (instead, their representatives in the workforce)
  • this is what has allowed historical alliances of the bourgeoisie with the proletariat (1917, 1789, etc)
• status groups: amorphous communities, not necessarily economically determined; more social & networked & lifestyle-based
  • can include ethnic groups
  • requires performance of rituals
  • within a status group, overt pursuit of economic advantage is stigmatised
• parties: acquiring social power for some cause, often material (can be personal, or more idealistic, or both)
  • only arise from communities that already have some sort of order & staff
  • their structure is ofc influenced by the structure of domination within the larger community (and outside world)
  • my take: applicable to formal political parties but also less formal ones (e.g., Bolsheviks/Mensheviks pre-revolution)
• summary of the three axes: class (mostly economic/material), status (prestige), and party (power to achieve political aims)
• types of classes (defined by people “occupying the same class situation”)
  • property class: based on differentiation of property holdings (rentiers, essentially)
  • acquisition class: opportunity for exploiting services on the market
  • social class: social interchange (esp intergenerationally)
• ofc no two people are incompletely identical class situation
  • Weber says that those who are unskilled, w/o property, and unemployed are in an identical situation but that’s a bit reductive because there are degrees of “unskilled”
• on property classes
  • on the power of propertied classes to monopolise
    • purchase of expensive goods
    • can change policies to make monopolies easier to attain
    • accumulation of property through unconsumed surpluses (basically because they have a lot of it)
    • savings-based capital accumulation opportunities & thus loans, etc
    • socially advantageous education
  • classes that have negative property privilege
    • themselves property (slaves)
    • “outcasts”
    • debtor classes
    • those who just don’t own much
  • middle classes: some property, but not enough that they don’t have to sell their labour I guess
• on acquisition classes
  • positively privileged: entrepreneurs (can easily acquire capital/trust based on status, skills, etc)
  • negative: those with fewer skills (as seen in the eyes of the employer) and connections
  • examples: working class; petty bourgeoisie; intelligentsia
  • the gradation of skill (and its potential for creating divisions between different types of workers) is an important thing to consider re: working class unity
• on status classes: can be based on occupation, birth, authority within a certain group, etc
  • these classes develop most strongly in a market economy
• market relationships as being generally open (contrast with, say, familial relationships, or guilds which are less open)
  • often a dialectic between increasing membership (to expand influence) vs closing it off (to protect their existing members)

The Forms of Capital (scanned PDF) by Pierre Bourdieu

I quite liked this one, but it’s very dense and typically French prose that many will hate.

• capital as accumulated labour (incorporated, embodied) -> appropriated by private actors to command further labour
• some lovely lambasting of the traditional treatment of capital by economists (as if it’s this dead, rational thing, free from subjective judgments etc etc)
• capital can present as:
  • economic capital: directly convertible into money, can be institutionalised via property rights
  • cultural capital: can sometimes be convertible into economic capital, can be institutionalised via educational qualifications (or other systems)
  • social capital: interpersonal relations and obligations, can be institutionalised via titles of nobility or the like (Nobel Prize, Forbes 30 Under 30 lol)
• forms of cultural capital: embodied (in people); objectified (cultural goods); institutionalised (e.g., with education)
  • in its embodied state: easier to disguise than economic capital—recognised instead as legitimate competence
    • ofc owners of this capital benefit from its scarcity & the distribution of cultural capital is shaped by this
  • in objectified form: can refer to, say, paintings, but also to machines
    • to operate a machine, one needs both the material means of possessing it and the knowledge required to operate it (cultural capital), either directly or via someone else
  • institutionalised: establishes conversion rates between cultural & economic capital by quantifying, say, the value of a degree (commodifying)
• social capital: networks of exchange within the group (gifts, words, friends, etc) also define the limits of the group
• economic capital is at the root of all the others, but this fact is concealed from the possessors
  • capital is converted from one type to another usually in line with the goal of ensuring the reproduction of the system (whether it is conscious or not)
  • if outright economic capital transmission is hindered, then it will take place under cover via other forms

Capitals, assets, and resources by Mike Savage et al

• using Bourdieu’s theories to poke holes in CARS theory
• capital’s distinction is in its potential to accumulate, be converted into other resources
• on the sociology of stratification since the 1980s—moved away from macro divisions of labour -> toward micro divisions based on individuals re: assets, resources, capitals
• CARS theory: shows that market processes are driven by exogenous factors (assets)
  • no free markets in reality—assets (and thus class inequality) are integral to the exchange relationship (citing John Roemer)
  • the goal is to move stratification theory away from exploitation and focus instead on accumulation
• Erik Olin Wright, in his landmark 1985 book Classes, ontologised three kinds of assets: property, organisation & skill
  • relational assets depend on aparticular social relationship between the advantaged and the disadvantaged
  • resource: knowing to drive vs asset: being right-handed (cus it pits right- and left-handed people gainst each other) which is weird, highlighting a weakness in gme theoretical logic
• Bourdieu also had symbolic capital & field-specific forms of capital (educational, political)
  • economic class cannot truly be separated from the social angle if we want a better understanding of cultural phenomena
  • class is not merely a set of relations of the structure; instead, it should be understand as an emergent effect (I really like this)
• the fundamental idea is not exploitation but CARS accumulation

Lecture

This lecture was given by Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology at LSE.

• the three main approaches to explaining inequality that we’ll consider today:
  • the orthodox economic approach
  • the sociological approach, focusing on exploitation
    • various theories: Marx focuses on class; Weber, on status; Bourdieu, on social capital (left to the last approach)
  • the interdisciplinary approach, which combines the two and focuses on capital accumulation (Piketty’s theory is one facet of this approach; Bourdieu’s is another)

The orthodox economic approach

• where growth is the goal and studying inequality is sidelined
• trickle-down economics, rising tide lifts all boats etc
• if inequality is addressed at all, there’s an asumption that the market will eventually step in to reduce it
• pay discrepancies are justified by the presumed additional productivity of skilled workers (education/skills treated as investments in human capital)
  • thus if you try to target inequality by restricting high earnings, you hinder the efficiency of the market
• on the other hand, even orthodox economists usually recognise that some people nee to be “helped” into the labour market in order to achieve greater overall efficiency (so some sort of social welfare system is needed)
• any apparent “monopoly rent” on skills is seen as temporary & equilibrating (since others will have an incentive to acquire those skills to get the higher pay)
• lately, though, there’s been a new generation of economists who do focus on inequality
  • the late Tony Atkinson (LSE/Oxford), often thought of as the “godfather” of inequality studies
  • also Stiglitz, Krugman, Milanovic and ofc Piketty
• new themes in the economics of inequality (as opposed to the neoclassical tradition):
  • pace those who assume we’re all rational and knowledgeable actors, markets are actually becoming increasingly imperfect due to increasing systemic information asymmetries
    • (my thoughts: the “attention economy” angle is relevant here too: we have finite attention spans and thus can never truly be rational. more thoughts on that in my notes for Srnicek’s lectures)
    • some examples of information asymmetry: basically all consumer-facing tech companies that control what you see & are completely opaque about their processes
    • also, salary negotiation, where (except in rare circumstances where the worker has a lot of power) the corporation has more knowledge about salary bands etc than the worker
  • political capture as rich/business interests influence/coerce government into providing more favourable conditions
  • winner-take-all/superstar markets (think sports, media, etc—any high-profile industry) where there’s a huge premium at the top end as people compete for the “best” and a long tail for everyone else
  • another factor is the intergenerational accumulation of wealth, driven by inheritance and the fact that r > g … market processes dont have much of a role to play here
  • the question we should ask is: do these economic solutions give us enough, or do we need another approach as well?

The sociological approach

• theories of exploitation—instead of an individualist view, there’s a division between the exploiter and the exploited
• obviously this is where Marxist theories of capitalism come into play: we have the bourgeoisie exploiting the labour-power of the proletariat (appropriating the surplus value)
• Weber’s term for this is domination, which he defines as the systematic use of power by one group over aother (can also apply to race, gender, etc)
• exploitation depends on it being hidden to some degree (masked, mis-identified)
  • Marx: commodity fetishism & false consciousness—any freedom one might feel is superficial
  • Bourdieu: mis-recognition of inequality (esp gender, which is often seen as “natural”)
  • Christine Delphy, French sociologist whose 1977 book “The Main Enemy” pioneered materialist feminist ideas
    • within marriage, you have unpaid labour -> the exploitation of women by men (in terms of property rights, domestic labour, access to sexuality)
    • not just a private relation—as some would like to think—but in fact institutionalised, structural; underpinned by state/corporations
• Marx’s view of class is that it arises due to exploitation (extraction of surplus value), and his framing is teleological (with Hegel)
  • it’s a fairly rigid and categorical way of looking at things which may be too crude for our purposes nowadays
  • on the other hand, it can be useful when looking at the globl context, if we expand the division of labour into an international one (where the global South is exploited by the North)
  • how do we fit in more contemporary phenomena like those of large middle classes or self-employed workers, or those who are working but also have investments (housing, pensions)
  • also, how does exploitation work in a more financialised/service-based economy instead of the factory-style industrial capitalism that Marx encountered in his day?
• John Goldthorpe, British sociologist who takes an empirical (non-Marxist) approach to building a class schema
  • he distinguishes between longer-term, more prestigious careers & more precarious hourly jobs
  • my thoughts: both groups are exploited; it’s just that those in prestigious careers are experiencing a shinier, better-disguised exploitation
    • their exploitation comes in the form of believing in the enterprise (à la Willing Slaves of Capital which is my fave book on this topic)
    • so they’re pulled in by a nice title, expensive office architecture, catered dinners and this dream that they’re somehow better than others, that it’ll all mean something in the end
    • but ofc it’s all empty underneath
• Weber has an alternative approach, which he calls “status” (basically pecking order)
  • here, competition/domination is central
  • more fine-grained than Marx’s categorical approach
  • can be measured partly by occupational prestige
  • Nancy Fraser combines Marxian and Weberian theories: redistributional struggles are not just about material goods (class), but also about respect (status)

The interdisciplinary approach

• Combines Marx, Bourdieu and Piketty
• expanding idea of differential accumulation over time & seeing inequality arise as an emergent phenomenon
• for Bourdieu, we have to take into account the macro/continuous/emergent considerations of the social world
  • basically the social world (once you introduce capital to it) has a long memory
  • markets are not, contrary to the fantasies of some economists, constantly reinvented every second as blank slates
  • his main controversial concept is that of cultural capital: snobbery, skills, education, network, access to institutions
  • it’s all about displaying your advantage over those beneath you, and accumulating capital in the process
  • the context of his writing: France in the 60s, which is ofc a very different cultural landscape
  • open question: is there less cultural stratification these days (in the sense that more people are cultural omnivores, consuming both “low” & “high” culture?)
• Piketty on Bourdieu (the fact that he even talks about Bourdieu is notable since Piketty is an economist)
  • Bourdieu was writing in the 60s when inequality was much lower, and so it made sense to talk about cultural capital then
  • but now, economic factors are prevailing, so economic capital is becoming more relevant; thus, we should look at both factors in combination

Seminar

• Why is Marx still relevant today & what are the limitations?
  • lots that he didn’t really anticipate:
    • the rise of the advertising-industrial complex & how that plays with our affects and keeps us continually wanting to consume consume consume
    • the IT revolution introducing zero marginal cost goods (and all the attendant possibilities of that for a postcapitalist world)
    • Guy Standing’s concept of the “precariat” & how that could spell a potential legitimation crisis for capitalism
• on social stratification today
  • when most people have access to a particular technology (say, the Internet), then stratification will still occur, it’ll just be based on skill (ability to use it)
• on how we evaluate the usefulness of the different lenses of sociological models
  • my own take on the Marxian notion of classes is that it’s not meant for “us” and we have to remember that
    • his approach is much more teleological: it’s about getting the proletariat to understand the chains
    • his categorical theory was not designed to help us, in a sociology class, interpret the world; it was designed to change it
    • we also have to remember that those in the Marxist tradition tend to be more binary about class distinctions than Marx was
    • Marx’s main thing was that of exploitation—we can leave the rigidities of the class theory behind and focus instead on exploitation
• on autonomy and self-determination and a little bit of freedom as a mask for hiding greater exploitation
  • my example: tech companies, where you’re nominally given more control than less prestigious industries
    • you can control your workflow, lots of creative freedom, work from home, take unlimited vacation, etc
    • but ofc that’s just a means of controlling you, giving you a longer leash so you think you’re free and thus feel some sort of gratitude for your corporation which lets them squeeze more work out of you
• on the educational system as a means of laundering injustice and disguising it under the fantasy of “meritocracy”
  • my personal favourite takes on meritocracy:
    • Immanuel Wallerstein has a great quote from his book Historical Capitalism: “The institutionalized meritocratic system helps a few to gain access to positions they merit and from which they might otherwise be barred. But it allows many more to gain access to positions on the basis of ascribed status under the cover of having gained this access by achievement.”
    • Piketty has a similar take on it, in an interview with Mike Savage for the III: “it’s as if the […] modern meritocracy discourse is invented as a way to protect the elite from democracy”
  • there’s an interesting intersection between meritocracy discourse and cultural capital in some specific fields (e.g., tech)
    • you can kinda just show up in the tech industry and if you look the part and know the right words (cultural capital) people will assume you have merit, open doors for you
• how do we update Bourdieu’s theories of social capital for today?
  • accents, vocabulary, table manners, clothing, travel, knowledge of cultural artefacts etc
  • where does the low/high distinction come from & who makes that distinction?
    • my own take is that it’s best thought of as materially conditioned
    • underlying economic stratification underpins social/cultural stratification, as you would expect
    • Marxian idea that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas—“high culture” is thus determined (to some degree) by the habits of the ruling class itself
  • on the other hand, cultural markers/trends are constantly shifting—it’s more fluid/dynamic than Bourdieu makes it out to be
  • cultural capital is probably most important when you’re an outsider and thus have no social capital to fall back on
• open question: can you eradicate social/cultural stratification if there is still economic inequality? what’s the relationship between the two

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