Canadian Journal of Sociology Online January-February 2006
Sociologists have been preoccupied with class analysis since Marx's unfinished discussion in Capital. Marx's conceptualization of classes rooted in the organization of production and his concern with the egalitarian distribution of resources has been debated both by the Weberians, who focus on life chances and Durkheimians, who focus on occupations and the symbolic culture. In general, what distinguishes a Marxian analysis is its historical explanation of the causes and consequences of inequality. Marxists look at human history and analyze how property ownership and appropriation of labour power have shaped classes, affecting life chances, resulting in conflict and social change. In contrast, for those whose scope of investigation has been narrower in time and space, the discussion shifts to life chances, occupations, rent and symbolic order. The implication is that Marxists should be better able to explain general patterns in human history. In contrast, non-Marxist class analysts are better able to identify the specificity of (post)modern conditions. Perhaps it is the price one pays for looking at human conditions across time and space in order to develop a general theory of history and of humanity. In other words, the distinction is between those who describe the capitalist or (post)modern social world and those who use history to critique this world in order to provide solutions for human misery. The latter is interested to explain and emancipate a world whose productive labourers have been subject to exploitation, alienation, subordination, oppression and limited life chances. This world, if not transformed, will be subject to constant individualization and greed from which the seeds of destruction are sown. This does not mean that all non-Marxists are uninterested in explaining exploitation and alienation or unable to develop a critique of the (post)modern world. It does mean that the closer some of the non-Marxists become in conceptualizing these issues, as Wright has stated, the more inside of them is a Marxist struggling to get out.
Wright's Approaches to Class Analysis can be located as continuation of discussion in these two broadly defined camps Marxist and different shades of non-Marxists. The book is an intellectual exercise on what classes are, why, and if they are in conflict in the (post)modern world, how and if class relations help mobilization and social change. First, Wright sets the agenda by reformulating his conceptualization of class, first developed in the New Left Review and then in Classes. He makes it clear that emphasis on location within the productive relations and the consequent exploitation are what makes Marxian class analysis important and distinctive from other approaches. However, he also includes aspects of Weber's emphasis on market capacity and exchange relations. Thus, if non-Marxists' class analysis emphasizes conflict over distribution, then Marxists, Wright argues, emphasize both conflict over distribution and more importantly conflict over the productive process.
Once Wright sets the agenda for class analysis, we are exposed to detailed class analyses by non-Marxists, where each of neo-Weberians, neo-Durkheimians and those who follow an analysis based on a combination of these classics, breathe new life into class analysis by showing how modern and industrial social changes have created conditions that are unaccounted in the Marxian model and thus have restructured class relations.
Breen's Weberian approach is now familiar to most students of sociology, wherein the market distributes resources and members of class share common life chances based on what they bring into the market. Therefore, in this approach it is not the possession of assets per se but their implementation in the market. This class scheme does not make any claim in identifying a group as the "engine of social change" aiming to bring about an egalitarian society. Classes are not necessarily the major source of conflict, collective action or social change. Any social entity (gender, region, ethnicity, race, age, etc.) can be a source of conflict over scarce resources.
Still within a Weberian tradition, Sorensen defines exploitation as the presence and absence of rent producing assets. For him, the ability to control the supply of assets by owners is fundamental to exploitation and class analysis. Groups who have monopoly over assets through rights and legislations, for example, can help increase return to their assets and thus exploit those without such monopolies. Sorensen's exploiting class includes capitalists who have monopoly over property and union workers who have monopoly over labour power. Does this mean that since legislation protects welfare recipients and others, by definition, they should be included in Sorensen's exploiting class?!
Grusky highlights the fact that sociologists have paid little attention to a Durkheimian notion of class. For him, the labour market is organized into classes, albeit at a more detailed level than is conventionally allowed. That is, by stating that occupations should be understood as real classes, he muddies the class concept and confuses occupation with class.
Weininger's reformulation of Bourdieu's conception of class and emphasis on habitus and the symbolic system is an eclectic model rooted in the Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxian analysis of inequality. In this conceptualization class structure entails three orthogonal axes of volume of capital (economic and cultural), composition of capital (extent of economic and cultural capital), and trajectories of capital (change and stability of economic and cultural capital over time), providing a theoretically and methodologically continuous dimension of class where social space is separated by volume, composition and trajectory. This does not mean that there is no conflict between "classes." On the contrary, each class brings into the (battle)"field" more or less advantageous types of "capital" where the outcome of the struggle depends on volume, composition and trajectories of capital. The model tends to reify culture as class and fails to account for accumulation of capital through surplus labour. The focus is more on unequal distribution of wealth than unequal access to productive forces.
Finally, Pakulski looks at class from a (post)modern perspective. For him, class theory faces the problem of validity and relevance, either morphing with their competitors or being improved into oblivion. He argues that increasing differentiation and individualization in the postmodern world have made class analysis unimportant. For him class and possibility of an egalitarian society is completely an open question.
Overall, all of these theorists' conceptualization of class differs from Wright's and a Marxian conceptualization of class as stated above. Marxists primarily anchor class analysis in emancipation and a political project for social change. The former does not have such a project.
I found this book intellectually engaging. Approaches to Class Analysis brings together recent theorists of class analysis from different theoretical perspectives, each of whom help unpack economical, social and cultural processes that allow us to understand what classes are and whether they have potential for mobilization. It should be of interest to students of sociology. In fact, I would consider it as a valuable addition to a graduate course in social inequality and stratification.
Reza Nakhaie
Department of Sociology
University of Windsor
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/classanalysis.html
February 2006
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