erik olin wright, classes (NLR, 2009)

[the task:] "I will focus on three clusters of causal processes relevant to class analysis, each associated with a different strand of sociological theory. The first identifies classes with the attributes and material life conditions of individuals. The second focuses on the ways in which social positions afford some people control over economic resources while excluding others—defining classes relative to processes of ‘opportunity hoarding’. The third approach conceives of classes as being structured by mechanisms of domination and exploitation, in which economic positions accord some people power over the lives and activities of others. The first is the approach taken in stratification research, the second is the Weberian perspective, and the third is associated with the Marxist tradition."

(...) [the first paradigm--an "individual-attributes" approach] "‘Class’, then, identifies those economically important attributes that shape people’s opportunities and choices in a market economy, and thus their material conditions. Class should neither be identified simply with people’s individual attributes nor with their material conditions of life; rather, it is a way of talking about the interconnections between these two."

(...) here, "the central concern of sociologists has been to understand how people acquire the characteristics that place them in one class or another."

(...) [the second paradigm--"opportunity-hoarding"] "The second approach, in which classes are defined by access to and exclusion from certain economic opportunities, focuses on ‘opportunity hoarding’—a concept closely associated with the work of Max Weber."

(...) key [Marxist conception, through Weber]--"Accreditation and licensing are particularly important mechanisms for opportunity hoarding, but many other institutional devices have been used in various times and places to protect the privileges and advantages of specific groups: colour bars excluded racial minorities from many jobs in the United States, especially (but not only) in the South until the 1960s; marriage bars and gender exclusions restricted access to certain jobs for women until well into the 20th century in most developed capitalist countries; religion, cultural criteria, manners, accent—all of these have constituted mechanisms of exclusion. Perhaps the most important exclusionary mechanism is private-property rights in the means of production. Private-property rights are the pivotal form of closure that determines access to the ‘job’ of employer. If workers were to attempt to take over a factory and run it themselves, they would be challenging their exclusion from control over the means of production; the capacity of owners to acquire profits, meanwhile, depends upon their defence of this exclusion. The core class division between capitalists and workers—common to both Weberian and Marxian traditions of sociology—can therefore be understood, from a Weberian perspective, as reflecting a specific form of opportunity hoarding enforced by the legal rules of property rights."

(...) "Sociologists who adopt the opportunity-hoarding approach to class generally identify three broad categories in American society: capitalists, defined by private-property rights in the ownership of means of production; the middle class, defined by mechanisms of exclusion over the acquisition of education and skills; and the working class, defined by their exclusion from both higher educational credentials and capital."

(...) important [Weber vs. bourgeois social science]--"The critical difference between opportunity-hoarding mechanisms of class and individual-attribute mechanisms is this: in the former, the economic advantages gained from being in a privileged class position are causally connected to the disadvantages of those excluded from such positions. In the individual-attributes approach, such advantages and disadvantages are simply the outcomes of individual conditions: the rich are rich because they have favourable attributes, the poor poor because they lack them; there is no systematic causal connection between these facts. Eliminating poverty by improving the relevant attributes of the poor—their education, cultural level, human capital—would in no way harm the affluent. In the case of opportunity hoarding, the rich are rich in part because the poor are poor, and the things the rich do to maintain their wealth contribute to the disadvantages faced by poor people. Here, moves to eliminate poverty by removing the mechanisms of exclusion would potentially undermine the advantages of the affluent."

(...) [the third paradigm] "...the landowners not only gain from controlling access to the land (opportunity hoarding), they dominate the farm workers and exploit their labour. This is a stronger form of relational interdependency than in the case of simple exclusion, for here there is an ongoing relationship between not only the conditions but also the activities of the advantaged and disadvantaged. Exploitation and domination are forms of structured inequality which require the continual active cooperation between exploiters and exploited, dominators and dominated." [but it is surely important to ask what kind of an account of exploitation we have here? attached to the LTV, or not?]

(...) important, from least to most relational--"We could, then, summarize the contrast between the role of social relations in each of the three approaches to class analysis as follows. In the stratification approach, neither the economic conditions in which people live nor their activities are understood as directly reflecting social relations; it is the least relational of the three. The Weberian approach sees people’s economic conditions as being formed through relations of exclusion, but does not specify class as embodying relations among activities. The Marxist tradition is relational in both senses, drawing attention to the structuring effect of exploitation and domination on both economic conditions and activities."

(...) "Within this approach, the central class division in capitalist society is between those who own and control the means of production—capitalists—and those hired to use those means of production—workers. Capitalists, within this framework, exploit and dominate workers. Other positions within the class structure draw their specific character from their relationship to this basic division."

(...) [looking forward...] "These three processes operate in all capitalist societies. The differences in class structures between countries are produced by the varying interactions of these mechanisms. The theoretical task is to think through the different ways they are linked and combined; the empirical task is to develop ways of studying each mechanism and the interconnections between them."

(...) [sure, but isn't it worth calling this synthesis Marxist? who's his audience? i mean, as soon as you have an account of the context in which individual attributes are being assigned, you're no longer working with the categories of bourgeois class analysis] One possible nested micro-macro model is illustrated schematically in Figure 4. In this model the power relations and legal rules that give people effective control over economic resources—means of production, finance, human capital—generate structures of social closure and opportunity hoarding connected to social positions. Opportunity hoarding then produces three streams of causal effects: firstly, it shapes the micro-level processes through which individuals acquire class-relevant attributes; secondly, it shapes the structure of locations within market relations—occupations and jobs—and the associated distributional conflicts; and thirdly, it shapes the structure of relations within production, especially relations of domination and exploitation, and the associated conflicts in that sphere. The first of these causal streams in turn directs the flow of people into class locations within the market and production. Jointly the class attributes of individuals and their class locations affect their levels of individual economic well-being.

(...) [an obvious question-begger, not to be resolved here; but clear where erik olin wright stands...] "Such arguments are unconvincing. Marxism is a powerful tradition in social science because it provides far-reaching explanations for a range of important phenomena, not because it has some special method that sets it apart from all other theoretical currents. Of course, it is always possible that future efforts to formulate Marxism as a distinctive, comprehensive paradigm may succeed. But for the present, it seems more helpful to see Marxism as a research programme defined by attention to a specific set of problems, mechanisms and provisional explanatory theories."

(...) [ha--pragmatist realism! bit of a weak ending...] "It might seem from this assessment that, in the end, we should all simply declare ourselves Weberians. This was one of the accusations levelled against my work and that of other Marxists thirty years ago by the British sociologist Frank Parkin when he wrote: ‘inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Weberian struggling to get out’ I do not think this follows from the kind of pragmatist realism I am advocating here. Marxism remains a distinctive tradition in social science because of the specific set of problems it addresses, its normative foundations, and the distinctive inventory of concepts and mechanisms it has developed."

(1) worth thinking a bit more about this argument about the creation of a middle-class through expansion of massive education in the US -- is education more-or-less what the middle class rises and falls with, then?

(2) also useful to think about how this would translate to an analysis of the 'global proletariat', a la harman and others, no?