erik olin wright, classes (1985)

Chapter One, Posing the Problem: The Agenda of Class Analysis 1. The Legacy of Marx (6-7)

(6): two problems

1. abstract structural maps (class relations
   
2. concrete conjunctural maps (concrete classes-as-actors, political alliances, etc.)
   

(8): the two are, he's arguing, clearly not linked by the contention that gradations will fade as capitalism advances--"this image of a pervasive tendency towards radical polarization... is incorrect..." [the growth of professional and technical occupations, the expansion of managed hieraarchies]

2. The Agenda of Contemporary Marxist Class Analysis (8-16)

(9): we can sidestep the issue, then, no longer

(10): important-- "class structure exists independently of the specific people who occupy specific positions... class formation, on the other hand, refers to the formation of organized collectivities within that class structure on the basis of the interests shaped by the class structure... A given type of class structure may be characterized by a range of possible types of class formation..."

(10-11): three levels of abstraction

1. mode of production (can have different forms, certainly)
   
2. social formation (specific combinations of distinct modes of production--e.g., pre-capitalist classes within capitalism)
   
3. conjuncture (analysis in terms of concrete historical detail, contingent historical factors--this is also where non-class factors are likely to be explored)

(12): for Poulantzas, the State's relation to class can be analyzed at the level of the mode of production; for Skocpol, only at the conjuctural level

(13): embarassment of the 'middle-class'

(13): embarassment of the peasantry

(14): other work suggesting that class formation cannot be deduced from class structure, but is conditioned by the presence or absence of autonomous, institutional factors

(14-15): a new marxist class analysis--(1) self-consciously precise; (2) committed to working at the middle-level of abstraction.

(15-16): outline

PART ONE: CONCEPTUAL ISSUES Chapter Two, The Biography of a Concept: Contradictory Class Locations

(19): not a commentary on epistemology or philosophical principles, but it is, it seems, in a sly way..

1. The Logic of Concept Formation (20-24)
(20): constraints on concept building

1. theoretical presuppositions
2. empirical constraints

(21-22): dangers of theoreticism on the one hand, and empiricism, on the other

(23): "conceptual adjudication" as a "double-process"--in terms of abstract conceptual requirements and empirical observations

(23): 'dogmatism' -- refusing to call theory into question; and 'eclecticism' -- refusing to worry about theoretical coherence

2. Steps in the Analysis of the Formation of the Concept of Contradictory Locations (24-25)

(24-25): five steps (see section headings, below)

3.The Empriical Setting (25-26)

(26): how to categorize people, according to class? "How should we deal with the numerou cases of people who did not seem to be either bourgeois or proletarian?"

4. Theoretical Constraints (26-37)

(27): of two sorts

1. imposed by the explanatory role of class, around issues (1) class formation, structure and consciousness (28-31)--primarily the notion that 'class' has to be intelligible outside these three processes, against EP Thompson; and (2) around class and revolution
2. "not only should class structures be viewed as setting the basic limits of possibility..., but they also constitute the most fundamental social determinant... and thus historical epochs can best be identified by their predominant class structures." [this, he's noting, doesn't require technological determinism (since we are agnostic on what produces class) or class functionalism (since we are not concerned with superstructure in its specificity, just primacy of 'class'). moreover, you can have a struggle on non-class basis, but within the limits set by class (maybe you can eliminate patriarchy, for example, he's saying)]
   

(29): important claim about the way in which other mechanisms (race, gender, etc.) might explain the non-correspondence of class structure to formation and/or consciousness [there is a problem in this formulation, of course, but we can leave it for later; actually he raises this later, see limiation #2]

(30): transformation/limitation/selection diagram, quite useful

(32): map of history as class structures, motor of history as class struggle.

(32-33): class struggle definition has been three-fold:

1. agents--must be class actors
   
2. objectives--must target distribution of resources
   
3. effects--anything with an effect on class relationships, counts
   

(32): "The first of these definitions seems to me to be the most fruitful theoretically."

(34): four basic structural properties of the concept of class, which are also constraints 3-6

1. classes are relational--"classes are always defined" in relation to other classes; not gradationally. (for three reasons, detailed on pg. 35--struggle/conflict, typologies in theory of history, explains essential features of gradiational-based distributions)
   
2. relations are antagonistic--opposing interests
   
3. antagonisms rooted in exploitation--not just simple inequality, causal relationship between affluence of one and poverty of the other
   
4. exploitation based on social relations of production--production-centered concept, even if there are distinctions between three positions: Poulantzas, Roemer, Wright
   

(36): key--"an exploitative relation necessarily implies either that some people must toil more so that others can toil less, or that they must consume less at a given level of toil so that others can consume more, or both." [let's think about this more, as we proceed]

5. Alternative Solutions (37-42)

(37): alternative solutions to the problem of the middle-class:

1. actually, society is simply polarized--that this is apperaence, not essence, based on fact that managers don't own means of production. BUT this fails constraint one--doesn't satisfactorily explain class struggle, etc.
2. 'the new petty bourgeoisie', as owners of skill or human capital (in ideological predispositions, and in intermediate position in class conflict). BUT same problem--too much diversity to be subsumed, here (in sum, first and sixth constraints)
   
3. "the new class," in relationship to reproduction (or cultural production) of capitalism [BUT again, too amorphous--fifth and sixth constraints]
4. "middle strata"--outside of basic class relation
   

6. Building a New Concept (42-51)

(43): key move--dropping assumption that have to be in only one class; possibility of being in "more than one class simultaneously." so you have contradictory positioning, which is generative of contradictory interests.

(45): key--Balibar's distinction between 'ownership' and 'possession'--used by Wright (former means 'real control', whereas latter means 'control over actual operation'). and this can be further divided--control over physical means of production, and control over labor. but this does not go far enough--later discussing control over money capital, physical capital, labor. and four degrees of control.

(47): question of how this ought to be specified, further

(48): class map, figure 2.2 (this is 1979, he's saying)

(51): shift to appropriation and domination relations--so semi-autonomous becomes appropriation of labour process, but not appropriation of product

7. Problems with Conceptualization (51-64)

1. contradiction? how are objective interests of petit bourgeois pole contradictory to objective interests of proletarian role? heterogenous, dual, instead.
   
2. overstating the autonomy of this class; structural underdetermination; empirical anomalies
   
3. classes in post-capitalism?
4. shift from exploitation to domination (most fundamental), which is what the concept really rested on (and not exploitation). this is troubling, because domination, unlike exploitation, doesn't necessarily generate opposed objective interests.
   

Chapter Three, A General Framework for the Analysis of Class

1. Roemer's Account of Class and Exploitation (64-73)

(65): concept of explotiation as a particular way of understanding inequalities, which makes a claim about a causal relationship between rich and poor.

(65) "in Roemer's analysis the rich are said to exploit the poor when it can be established that the welfare of the rich causally depends upon the deprivations of the poor--the rich are rich because the poor are poor, they are rich at the expense of others." The Traditional Marxian concept is a subset of this larger, general concept.

(65): two approaches

1. Labour Transfer--without LTV, "market-based exploitation can be formally derived simply from inequalities in the distribution of property rights in the means of production."
   
2. Game-Theory--(1) would S be better off upon withdrawal? (2) its complement, S', would be worse off. and (3) the background condition is that S' dominates S. this helps Roemer identify four kinds of exploitation: capitalist (with per-capita share of assets), feudal (leave with personal assets--in fact, neoclassical economists only see feudal exploitation, and therefore can't see exploitation in capitalism), socialist (per capita share of inalienable assets), status .
   

(72): agreeing, here, with Roemer that the "basis of the capital-labour relationship should be identified with the relations of effective control... over productive assets" [which is not necessarily Weberian]

2. Towards a General Framework of Class Analysis (73-92)

(73): three modifications, on Roemer

1. economic exploitation and economic oppression--appropriation of 'fruits of labour', such that wealth of exploiting class depends on work of exploited class
   
2. recasting concept of feudal exploitation, by definition of labor power as an asset (thus our definitions are now symmetrical)
3. organization asset exploitation--control over division of labor

(81): "in all exploitation relations... what exploitation generates is effective claims on the social surplus. This in turn gives exploiters at least some control over investments..."

(83): useful Table 3.2

(85): important--skill assets don't really open up to relational hierarchies, which is what is demanded by the concept of class. in this sense socialism can be seen as a society with exploitation, but without fully coherent classes.

(86): communism as the withering away of of skill-based exploitation (i.e., situation in which control over skills gives you preferential access to the social surplus)

(87): a 'heterogenous' exploitation definition of the middle class, now.

(88): KEY table that follows from the previous reflections.

(89): "one of the consequences... is that it is no longer axiomatic that the proletariat is the unique... rival to the capitalist class..." [hmm, this strikes me as a serious stretch--you need to speak about numbers, organization, etc.] The spectre of the 'third class' benefiting from revolutions--unapologetically ahistorical.

(90-91): the possibility of bureaucratic/mangerial alternatives, when capitalism is meeting with difficulty? ok, but again, not very useful...

(91): "...it does suggest that the process of class formation and class struggle is considerably more complex and indeterminate than the traditional Marxist story has allowed..." [ok, this is fair enough, and as far as it goes...]

(91-92): four benefits of these amendments

3. Once Again, Unresolved Problems (92-110)

1. status of organization, in organization assets--is it not just another skill? are these not just strategic jobs, that require loyalty payoffs? BUT we need a concept that maps onto our class structure question.
   
2. relationship between skill and class--can skill-based differences really ground a class relation? are we not just speaking about fractions, within a class?
   
3. interaction among forms of exploitation--managers partaking, indirectly, in capitalist exploitation? we are going to assume this away.
   
4. non-asset bases of exploitation--why not religious classes, military classes, sex classes, etc.? well, unique role of productive forces; or, at least, a 'distinct logic' that systematically implicates 'subsistence'

Chapter Four, Implications and Elabroations...

1. Alternative Class Theories (106)-- Weberian (via Parkin, Giddens), rooted in "social closure" due to unequal ownership of resources (but, again, the key difference is that the Weberian theory doesn't have an account of exploitation, just a notion of inequalities generated though market exchange with this ownership as background. In other words, it becomes a problem of level of abstraction--for Marx, at the level of mode of production, skill-based exploitation doesn't feature; only at the level of the social formation; for Weber, only one level of abstraction exists, and 'class' exists specific to it as well as to the social formation (so feudalism wouldn't have 'class', in this sense). "At the heart of the distinction... is the contrast between an essentially culturalist theory of society and history and a materialist theory," since it enlists meaning-based definitions)
2. Mode of Production and Social Formation (109) -- question of the relative weight of different exploitations, at various levels of abstraction; concept of "dynamic primacy"; question of 'internal-external' relations; the question of 'overlapping exploitations', which ties into the expectations re: class formation.
3. The Theory of History (114): development of forces of production conditions probability of achieving more progressive social formations (not, of course, 'necessity'). Revision of three theses: capitalism can lead to statism, as well as socialism (organization exploitation might not be eliminated); proletariat is no longer only bearer of revolutionary mission; socialism has a distinctive kind of exploitation, not simply transitional.
   
4. Legitimation and Motivation (118): ideologies of two types--(1) rights to defend privilege; (2) welfare to defend privilege [here Wright's point about the 'costs of revolution' comes in; as Vivek says, what about the 'costs of counter-revolution'?]
5. Class Structure and Form of the State (122)
6. Class Structure and Class Formation (123): from class-in-itself, to class for-itself, how? "relative indeterminacy"--the structure, Wright's arguing, constitutes "the material basis for a variety of potential class formations."
7. Class Alliances (124): alliances between 'classes, segments of classes, and between contradictory class locations' are plausible, depending on what strategies actors choose to pursue; concept of 'net exploiters'
   
8. Women in the Class Structure (126): gender as conditioning skill, as credential itself, or as a form of feudal exploitation; but are they a distinct class? depends, says, Wright, on the complex particular to a given household.
   

(130-131): Six advantages of exploitation-based conception of class

1. more coherent way of describing different types of class structures
2. more coherent way of understanding "contradictory nature of contradictory locations."
   
3. much better link to 'interests,' than domination-based concept
4. more systematically materialist
5. more historically coherent
6. critical character, opening up to emancipation
   

(113-114): 'Asiatic' mode of production as, actually, a 'social formation' involving feudal and organizational exploitation.

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?