Thinking about social class

Marx's theory of social class is founded on the idea of conflict of interest defined by the property system.  Marx puts the point this way in the Communist Manifesto: “History is a history of class conflict.” And his inference from this fact: “Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains” (Marx and Engels 1848). Individuals belong to classes depending on their position within the social property system.  The social property system defines the access and use enjoyed by different groups of the resources available to a society at a given period of history.  The primary resources are capital, land, and labor.  (We might now want to add "knowledge" and "data" to this list of categorical resources.) Individuals belong to classes defined by the type of access and use they have to what kinds of resources.  

This is a structural definition of the concept of class. A person’s class is defined by his or her position within a system of property relations, defining one’s location with a structure of domination, control, and exploitation. The group of people who share a similar position within the property relations of a society constitute a class. Their circumstances, resources, and opportunities are similar to those of others in the class, and they have common interests that are in opposition to members of some other classes. So class works as a social sorting process: individuals are tracked into one class or another through specific sociological mechanisms (schooling, parental attitudes, neighborhood). And it works to assign very different ranges of material outcomes to members of the various groups; working-class families wind up more poorly educated, less healthy, and more vulnerable to economic fluctuations than their counterparts in the landlord class, the financial elite class, or the capitalist class. Part of the challenge of developing a sociology of class involved identifying some of the concrete pathways of difference created by class with respect to specific opportunities – education, health, adequate nutrition, access to creative work, and other important social resources.  

Status and consciousness are also part of the sociology of class. And, of course, there is the concrete sociological task of better understanding the lived experience of people who wind up in the various segments of the class system. Individuals develop specific features of mentality out of the experience they have in the class environments of their parents, their schools, and their workplaces. And these differences in turn give rise to differences in behavior -- consumer behavior, political behavior, and inter-group behavior. And members of a class may acquire a common perspective on their situation -- they may come to diagnose the social relations around them in a similar way, they may come to a common “class consciousness” that leads them to engage in collective action together.

Evidently, the groups that own capital and land have access to material resources that owners of labor power do not; so capitalists and landlords have social advantages lacked by proletarians.  Proletarians gain access to material goods by selling their labor power to owners of capital and land; they become wage laborers.  Class relations create substantial differences of material wellbeing and substantial inequalities of wealth and income.  By controlling the wealth constituted by capital and land, these privileged classes are able to take a disproportionate share of society's wealth.  The great modern social classes, in Marx's historical analysis, are the bourgeoisie (capital and land) and the proletariat (wage labor).  In feudalism the great classes were the feudal aristocrats (owners of land and rights in the labor of serfs) and serfs (usufruct of small parcels of land, labor obligations to the lord).

Class and property are thus conceptually intertwined.  An economic structure can be defined as a system for producing social wealth in which productive resources and the results of production are unevenly divided across different groups. Classes are the major social positions within an existing economic structure. Producers create wealth through their labor and creativity; property owners extract a part of this wealth through a system of social relations that privilege them.  Another way of putting the point is to ask: where does the individual gain his/her income -- from the sale of labor time, from the sale or rent of physical assets, or from the sale or rent of expertise? Workers derive their income from the sale of their labor time; capitalists, financiers, and landlords derive their income from their ownership of physical and financial resources, and professionals, experts, and intellectuals derive their income from their possession of scarce expert knowledge and skills. 

In nineteenth-century France we might have classified the population into land owners, capital owners, wage laborers, artisans, professionals (accountants, architects), intellectuals, government officials, civil service workers, small merchants, smallholding farmers, tenant farmers, landless workers, and lumpenproletariat. And these groups can be roughly triangulated according to their ownership of three major elements: labor power, valuable skills and knowledge, and economic assets (land, property, wealth). Within any society there are groups that fall outside the primary classes -- small traders, artisans, small farmers, intellectuals. But it is central to Marx's theory of class, that there is a primary cleavage between owners of the means of production and the direct producers, and that this cleavage embodies a fundamental conflict of interest between the two groups. 

Classes, according to Marx, also constitute a system of exploitation: a system in which a substantial share of the fruits of social production are transferred from one group to another, through the normal workings of the social-property system. The producing class is exploited by the ascendant class: wealth is transferred from producers to owners. Serfs and lords, slaves and masters, workers and owners represent the primary classes of feudalism, ancient slavery, and nineteenth century capitalism. The proletariat produces surplus value, and the bourgeoisie gains ownership of this surplus through the workings of the property system, in the form of profits, interest, and rents. As Marx puts it in Capital:

He, who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.

Finally, the theory of class suggests the need for a theory of class consciousness: the ways in which members of distinct classes understand their roles in society, and the social relationships that largely determine their fates.  Marx’s concept of ideology is intended to express the notion that large system of ideas serve a social function of concealing the conflictual nature of the property and class system in which people find themselves.  The concept of false consciousness falls within this notion; members of a class possess false consciousness when they seriously misconstrue the nature of the social relations within which they live.

The explanatory thrust of the theory of class goes along the lines of a sociological hypothesis: people who have a similar location within a system of property relations will also develop other important similarities: similarities of thought, values, style, behavior, and politics, for example. And so Marx believed that structurally-defined classes of people were likely to further develop a similar class consciousness -- a similar framework of thought in terms of which they understand the social forces around them; and he expected that classes of people would come to share a signature framework of political motivation -- a set of ideas, interpretations, and values that would motivate them to engage in collective action together. 

(Several earlier posts have focused on social class as well; link, link, link, link, link.)

A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

A recurring theme in Understanding Society for the past several years is the occurrence of unfathomable atrocity in the twentieth century. Many of the examples considered occurred in Europe. But atrocities have occurred in many countries and civilizations. A horrific example occurred in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1968. In the small rural village of Keezhvenmani, some 44 dalit people, mostly women and children, were gathered into a hut by the strongmen of local landlords, the hut was set afire, and all 44 innocent dalit people died a horrifying, torturous death. The exact number of victims is uncertain.    

The term "dalit" refers to the lowest caste of people in the Indian caste system, now officially designated as "Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe", and the massacre at Keezhvenmani was only one of a number of mass murders of dalits in Tamil Nadu since independence. (Here is a detailed report by Human Rights Watch on violence against dalit women in India (link). A central finding of the report: "The lack of law enforcement leaves many Dalit women unable to approach the legal system to seek redress. Women are often also unaware of the laws; their ignorance is exploited by their opponents, by the police, and, as illustrated by the cases below, by the judiciary. Even when cases are registered, the lack of appropriate investigation, or the judge’s own caste and gender biases, can lead to acquittal, regardless of the availability of evidence or witnesses. The failure to successfully prosecute cases of rape also allows for crimes against women to continue unabated, and in the caste context, encourages the use of rape as a tool to punish and silence Dalit communities.")

The young scholar Nithila Kanagasabai (herself a resident of Tamil Nadu) attempted to provide an evidence-based reconstruction of the Keezhvenmani massacre in "The Din of Silence: Reconstructing the Keezhvenmani Dalit Massacre of 1968" (link). 

The background of the 1968 killings was the conflict between landlords who owned or controlled the rice paddy of the region (mirasdar) and the landless workers (often formerly bonded laborers) who were the primary workforce. These agricultural workers were dalits and they were extremely poor. When these workers and families began to support the mobilizing efforts of the increasingly active presence of several Communist parties in the region, the landlords began to use violence against these workers and families. A number of murders occurred in the months preceding the December 1968 massacre at Keezhvenmani. Here is Kanagasabai's description of the December 25 massacre:

According to eye witness accounts, on 25th December 1968, at around 10 p.m., the mirasdars and their henchmen came in police lorries and surrounded the cheri (hutments), cutting off all routes of escape. They shot at the labourers and their families who could only throw stones to protect themselves or flee from the spot. They also started burning the huts in the vicinity. Many of the women and children, and some old men, sought protection in a hut that was 8 ft x 9 ft. The hut was burnt down, and the people with it. Both the sessions court and the high court that later heard the case, held that those who committed the arson were not aware of the presence of people in that particular hut (Krishnakumar, 2005). But eye witness accounts by the survivors point to an altogether different truth. (111)

The accused perpetrators of this atrocity were charged, tried, and convicted, but their convictions were set aside by the Madras High Court. "The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to identify and punish the guilty” (114).

This event illustrates the workings of oppression involving both caste and class. The landless workers were predominantly dalit -- the lowest caste. And they were the poorest of the poor, with very little power to assert a fair share of the harvest. Land owners were in a position to resist increases in wages (the primary demand of the workers in this dispute), both through their structural advantage within the property system (land ownership) and their coercive power (through their ability to call upon armed thugs to carry out their violence against the dalit protests). A solution for the property disadvantage for the dalit workers is land reform, and during the years following the Keezhvenmani massacre there was a reasonably strong organization dedicated to land reform and dalit land ownership, the Land for Tillers Freedom (LAFTI). However, land reform based on NGO activism is likely to remain small-scale, in comparison to state-wide land reform programs.

Kanagasabai quotes V Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran in the introduction to Mythily Sivaraman's Haunted by Fire (2013):

That episode and visit brought home to Mythily the starkness of life in this grain rich part of Tamil Nadu... She realised that the price for dignity, for daring to declare oneself a communist was very high in these parts – many had paid with their lives... Unsurprisingly, in her subsequent reflections, she refused to concede that the monstrous incident at Kilvenmani was only a wage dispute gone wrong, and argued passionately for it to be recognised for what it was: class struggle in the countryside. (Geetha & Karunakaran, 2013)

Class struggle in the countryside, indeed -- landlords exercising horrendous violence against landless workers.

Social cognitive frameworks and social class

It is evident that all of us "filter" the social worlds that we inhabit according to a set of expectations, assumptions, stereotypes, and values. We understand a social interaction that we ourselves participate in, or merely observe, through these assumptions and filters. We might describe these systems of thought as "social-cognitive frameworks" -- the collection of basic assumptions that an individual possesses in terms of which he or she conceptualizes and frames the social world around him, and some of the basic norms, values, and pro/con attitudes that influence behavior in everyday environments. These frameworks are not inevitable or uniform within a particular society. Instead, they are influenced by ordinary experiences in life in work, neighborhood, family, school, and military settings. And surely they vary dramatically by one's position in the systems of class, gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and status within which one lives. Here I would like to explore one aspect of how these social-cognitive frameworks are constituted through an individual's early and young-adult experiences -- the world of work.

A social-cognitive framework involves something like a taxonomy of the various categories of people around one, along with powerful social emotions: who can be trusted? Who feared? Who is a potential friend and ally, and who is an adversary or enemy? Which groups are thought to be admirable, and which contemptible? Are there socially specific indicators or labels that guide judgments like these -- a way of dressing, a tattoo, a readiness to smile, a motorcycle? And, finally, a social-cognitive framework involves a set of values and orienting goals for the individual -- the activities and achievements that he or she aspires to attain.

For example, what do Amazon warehouse workers think of the professors they may encounter when they visit Madison or Ann Arbor -- what assumptions do they make about the professors' social attitudes? And vice versa -- what assumptions do professors make about the hourly working people they encounter? And what about the technical specialists at the warehouse or factory -- how do the Amazon workers think about these "white collar" "professional" men and women, and how do they behave towards them?

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that George Orwell attempted to get inside the social-cognitive frameworks of the working class men and women with whom he interacted in the north of England, as recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier. He paid close attention to the ways these men and women talk, dress, eat, work, and raise their children, and made it very clear that these practices and mental frameworks differ a great deal from other social strata in England in the period. Orwell identified his own class origin as "lower-upper-middle class", and has a clear understanding of the distinctive social views of that segment of English society:

I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as a mound but as a layer—the layer of society lying between £2,000 and £300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom. You notice that I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerry-built modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact that the upper-middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as £300 a year—to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely middle-class people with no social pretensions. Probably there are countries where you can predict a man’s opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a war or a general strike—possibly not even then. (chapter 8)

Here is his portrait of the lower-middle class gentile view of the working class:

And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of Punch during the past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has arisen, and to do that one has got to realise what the working classes look like to those who live among them but have different habits and traditions. (chapter 8)

Where do these social-cognitive frameworks come from? Orwell tries to answer this question as well.

I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important. To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another. It is useless to say that the middle classes are ‘snobbish’ and leave it at that. You get no further if you do not realise that snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism. It derives from the early training in which a middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the ‘lower classes’.  (chapter 8)

And Orwell is persuaded that these assumptions are deep and stable, once established.

 A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously, living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his habits, his manners, his imaginative background—his ‘ideology’, in Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes Labour, or, when possible, Communist at the elections? It is noticeable that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music, ballet, are still recognisably bourgeois tastes; most significant of all, he invariably marries into his own class. (chapter 8)

Throughout Orwell's essays there are two consistent themes: that the social perceptions and attitudes of English men and women differ dramatically by class, and that (unlike many of his counterparts) he has a fundamental respect for the values and perspectives of working people. His analysis of the poetry of Kipling, for example, is very much concerned with the worldview of social relations that it expresses.

Charles Sabel addressed this question of worker mentality (or what I am calling "social-cognitive frameworks") in Work and Politics. One of the most interesting parts of Sabel's book is the attention he gives to the consciousness and values of various strata of workers. His description of the "craftsman's ethos" is particularly intriguing, since it pertains to a category of labor that is in a sense a carry-over from pre-modern handicraft economies:

From the point of view of the middle class, the craftsman is a contradictory figure, capable of tasks that presuppose self-esteem and assertiveness, yet in a more general way lacking both. Despite his apparent social proximity to middle-class managers and social scientists, he has remained as mysterious to them as the other parts of the working class. The craftsman's autonomy on the job is frequently attested: Not only does his independence often make supervision superfluous, but he frequently outwits managers in complex negotiations over work rules and piece rates.... Yet it has been repeatedly shown that the craftsman's attitudes toward education, child rearing, and the social hierarchy are those typical of what might be called a subaltern social class. Where the middle-class manager teaches his son to questions rules and inquire into the justification of hierarchy, the skilled worker often teaches his son to accept both respectfully. (82) But to judge by the few studies of the experience of apprenticeship itself, however organized and by whomever administered, the programs teach two related lessons. The first concerns objects and techniques, the second the social preconditions and implications of the craft's knowledge. (83)

Sabel's answer to the question, what are some of the the primary determinants of a person's social-cognitive framework, is to point to the circumstances and values inculcated in technical training programs and internships. These processes of formation and training lead to an orienting set of values and aspirations. And these values are distinct from those that a similarly talented young person would gain from a university education in engineering. Sabel writes:

Incorporation into a new social world also defines the craftsman's hopes for the future, and in ways that shed light on his apparently inconsistent behavior in the labor market. What counts for him now is technical prowess, not place in an officially defined hierarchy of jobs: Titles are not important, savoir faire is. Careful studies by Siegfried Braun and Jochen Fuhrmann show that this is precisely the opposite of the middle-class attitude. The middle class conceived of a career not as a series of successively more complex jobs, but as a progression through a socially recognized hierarchy of posts, each patently more prestigious than the preceding one. The craftsman wants to be able to do something; there is evidence that he is often indifferent to or ignorant of the career possibilities -- understood in the middle-class sense -- that apprenticeship opens to him. (84)

 

Sabel refers to this value orientation as a craftsman ethos, and he believes it is a distinctive social-cognitive orientation to the contemporary world of work.

These passages provide clear documentation of the workings of distinctive social-cognitive frameworks across class (in England, anyway). And it seems likely that a similar ethnographic account could be provided for the many forms of social separation that exist in modern US society as well: across lines of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, and age cohort, for example. Further, these differences of perspective are important, since they create the environment in which social interaction, friendship, or political solidarity arise. Social cohesion and political persuasion are important but challenged goals in twenty-first century United States (as well as other countries); and it seems apparent that group-specific differences in social expectations and assumptions about other groups are likely to be important for cohesion, conflict, and persuasion.

This raises a very interesting question: where does this kind of inquiry fit within the domain of the social and behavioral sciences? Is it a question for ethnographers? For micro-sociologists like Erving Goffman? For social psychologists or opinion researchers? For journalists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Studs Terkel? And more abstractly, is it possible to formulate a better theory or landscape map of the socially situated actor that takes into account the formation and influence of diverse social-cognitive frameworks?

Did Marx invent "class conflict"?

Marx offered several theories of the modern world that he observed around him in mid-nineteenth-century Britain that have influenced much of turmoil that ensued in the following century and a half -- theories about the "capitalist mode of production," about the role that class conflict plays in historical change, about the determinants of the actions of the state. These themes are expressed in Capital, and in the The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto decades earlier. So one might imagine that these are theoretical constructions of Marx's imagination, a particular way of interpreting the social realities that he observed. The Right blames "Marxism" for discontent among many citizens in western democracies. Marx was a "radical," and his radical vision of conflict and exploitation guided his narrative about the nature of modern capitalist society. Adam Smith had one vision of the emerging modern society, Thomas Carlyle had a different one, and Marx had a yet another. The reason working people are discontent, according to the Right, is that there's too much Marxism around, too many critical theories that provoke conflict.

But is this the right way of thinking about the matter? I don't think so. It puts the poet of modernity first, with imagination and rhetoric, and the concrete social processes and contradictions second. But that gets the story backwards. Ideas, including ideas about social relations among different groups in society, have had a role in historical development in the two-plus centuries of economic development since Mr. Watt turned on his steam engine. But the real history was written by actors and groups, considering and framing their own struggles, and seeking to maintain their footing in a changing world. These actors were often illiterate, poor, and disadvantaged. But they brought their own practical understanding to their situation in the social world; they brought social identities, they brought moral frameworks, and they brought practical skills of action and interaction to their struggles to secure their livelihoods and dignity.

Consider the brief sketches that Charles Tilly offered in 1978 of "collective action" in early modern Britain in From Mobilization to Revolution. Here Tilly has described two "riots" by ordinary villagers in 1765 against the establishment of new "houses of industry" (poorhouses where the poor were compelled to work for food).

The confrontations at Nacton and Saxmundharn acted out pervasive characteristics of eighteenth-century conflicts in Great Britain as a whole. While David Hume and Adam Smith worked out the relevant theories, ordinary Britons fought about who had the right to dispose of land, labor, capital, and commodities. Attacks on poorhouses, concerted resistance to enclosures, food riots, and a number of other common forms of eighteenth-century conflict all stated an implicit two-part theory: that the residents of a local community had a prior right to the resources produced by or contained within that community; that the community as such had a prior obligation to aid its weak and resourceless members. (3)

And these protests were not guided by "revolutionaries" in the background; neither were they inarticulate cries of protest against changes they could not understand. Rather, these ordinary villagers recognized well the actions that were being taken against them, and they came forward to resist.

Not that the fighters on either side were mere theorists, simple ideologues, hapless victims of shared delusions. Real interests were in play. The participants saw them more or less clearly. At two centuries' distance, we may find some of their pronouncements quaint, incomprehensible, or hopelessly romantic. In comfortable retrospect, we may question the means they used to forward their interests: scoff at tearing down poorhouses, anger at the use of troops against unarmed crowds. Yet in retrospect we also see that their actions followed a basic, visible logic. The more we learn about eighteenth-century changes in Great Britain, the clearer and more compelling that logic becomes.

The struggle did not simply pit different ways of thinking about the world against each other. Two modes of social organization locked in a battle to the death. The old mode vested power in land and locality. The new mode combined the expansion of capitalist property relations with the rise of the national state. Many other changes flowed from that fateful combination: larger-scale organizations, increasing commercialization, expanded commercialization, the growth of a proletariat, alterations of the very texture of daily life. The new mode won. The world of the moral economy dissolved. But when ordinary eighteenth-century Britons acted collectively at all, usually they acted against one feature or another of this new world. On the whole, they acted in defense of particular features of the moral economy. (4)

Tilly's interest in this book is a familiar one that recurs throughout his long career: analyzing the historical details that provide sociological insight into the processes of "mobilization and rebellion" when men and women find themselves in circumstances that are existentially threatening for themselves and their families. And yet, Tilly understood what Marx sometimes did not: that it is not true that "workingmen unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." In any real historical situation (except perhaps the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising, or with Spartacus in Thrace) the potential rebels always have something to lose; mobilization and rebellion are always risky and costly. Mobilization and rebellion require explanation.

Here Tilly provides a very compact description of Marx's theory of class as Marx works it out in his analysis of the politics of the 1848 revolution in France:

If that is so, we might pay attention to Marx's mode of analysis. Implicitly, Marx divided the entire population into social classes based on their relationships to the prevailing means of production. Explicitly, he identified the major visible actors in the politics of the time with their class bases, offering judgments of their basic interests, conscious aspirations, articulated grievances, and collective readiness for action. Classes act, or fail to act. In general, individuals and institutions act on behalf of particular social classes. (There is an important exception: in analyzing Louis Napoleon's seizure of power, Marx allowed that those who run the state may act, at least for a while, in their own political interest without reference to their class base.) In analyzing readiness to act, Marx attached great importance to the ease and durability of communications within the class, to the visible presence of a class enemy. When Marx's political actors acted, they did so out of common interests, mutual awareness, and internal organization. (13)

So, no, Marx did not invent class conflict. Marx was not the inventor of class conflict or the spark who ignited a motivation to find a pathway to fundamental change in the relations of power and property that govern the lives of ordinary people. Rather, he was the John Snow of early capitalism, the scientist who worked out which pump handle was giving rise to the cholera of fundamental inequality. As that timeless philosopher, Bob Dylan, put it, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Marx was the weatherman, not the weather. E.P. Thompson put the point vividly in The Making of the English Working Class: class was "made" through concrete historical experiences, and conflict was an unavoidable component of this making; link.

Who, then, is the actual author of "class conflict"? The modern world, with its economic relations governed by a system of property guaranteeing various extremes of inequality, and no guarantee that a humane social contract will emerge protecting the life interests of all parties -- this is the circumstance that invented class conflict. There are powerful, pervasive features of our economic system that generate and deepen inequalities. The only check to this process is the organized strength of ordinary men and women, demanding a fair share of social cooperation, and all too often this countervailing force has not been sufficient. Social democracy  is a solution (link, link, link, link) -- provision of extensive prerequisites of a decent human life to every individual (education, healthcare, access to a job); full and equal rights of political participation, real equality of opportunity, use of progressive taxation to ensure that everyone benefits from economic cooperation -- and yet social democracy has been unconscionably hard to sustain in western democracies.

And in case anyone thinks that this is just an antiquarian question, relevant to Nacton and Saxmundharn in 1765 but not to Detroit, Atlanta, or Seattle today -- just consider the devastation created by the current pandemic for people all over the country who are on the disadvantaged side of the buffet line: disproportionately without healthcare, disproportionately represented in "frontline" positions in the coronavirus pandemic, disproportionately forced to return to work in unsafe conditions or lose what slender entitlements they currently possess, disproportionately represented in the lists of sick and dying, ... This is class conflict in our contemporary world. And the genuinely important question for Chuck Tilly's successors is this: what kinds of mobilization are possible in 2020 to address the appalling inequalities of power, property, opportunity, and wellbeing our society has created? How can ordinary working people achieve and maintain the social democracy (link) that alone promises to fulfill the compact of the equal freedoms and human fulfillment of all people?

Social relations across class lines

People relate to each other on the basis of a set of moral and cognitive frameworks -- ideas about the social world and how others are expected to behave -- and on the basis of fairly specific scripts that prescribe their own behavior in given stylized circumstances. It is evident that there are important and deep differences across cultures, regions, and classes when it comes to the specifics of these frameworks and scripts. Part of what makes My Man Godfrey humorous is the mismatch of expectations that are brought forward by the different signals of social class presented by Godfrey. Is he a homeless man, a victim of the Depression, or an upper class gentleman in disguise? His accent suggests the latter; whereas his dress and living conditions suggest one or another of the first two possibilities.

It is relatively rare for people in the United States to have sustained contact with individuals from substantially different socioeconomic circumstances; and when they do, the interactions are generally stylized and perfunctory. Consider churches -- there is remarkably little socioeconomic diversity within churches in the United States. This is even more true of elite private and public universities (link). Take the percentage of Pell eligibility as an indicator of socioeconomic diversity. The University of Wisconsin-Madison serves only 10% Pell-eligible students, and Yale University only 12% Pell-eligible. According to the New York Times article providing this data, the upper margin of Pell eligibility is a family income of about $70,000; so roughly 90% of the undergraduate students in these elite universities come from families with greater than $70,000 annual income. What is the likelihood of a Yale or UW student having a serious, prolonged conversation with a person from a family below the poverty line (roughly $25,000)? It is virtually nil.

Non-elite public universities are more diverse by this measure; in 2011 49% of 19.7 million students in AASCU universities are Pell recipients (link). So the likelihood of cross-class conversations occurring in non-elite public universities is substantially higher than at flagships and elite private universities. But, as Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton show in Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, even more socioeconomically diverse public universities fall victim to institutional arrangements that serve to track students by their socioeconomic status into different life outcomes (link).

This lack of socioeconomic diversity in most fundamental institutions in the United States has many consequences. Among these is a high level of perspective-blindness when it comes to the ability of upper-income people to understand the worldview and circumstances of lower-income people. In a very blunt way, we do not understand each other. And these forms of blindness are even more opaque when they are compounded by unfamiliar racial or religious backgrounds for the two parties.

This socioeconomic separation may go some ways towards explaining what otherwise appears very puzzling in our politics today -- the evident hostility to the poor that is embodied in conservative rhetoric about social policies like food assistance or access to Medicaid-subsidized health insurance. A legislator or commentator who has never had a serious conversation with a non-union construction worker supporting a family earning $18.50/hour ($38,500 annually) will have a hard time understanding the meaning of a change in policy that result in additional monthly expenses. But also, he or she may not be in a position to understand how prejudicial his way of expressing himself is to the low-income person. (I've treated this issue in an earlier post as well.)

E.P. Thompson considered some of these forms of separation and mutual incomprehension across class boundaries in eighteenth-century Britain in his excellent essay, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture" (link). His central theme is the passing of a paternalistic culture to a more purely economic and exploitative relationship. Patrons came to have less and less of a sense of obligation when it came to the conditions of the poor within their domain. Simultaneously, men and women on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum came to have a more confident sense of their independence from earlier forms of subordination, sometimes in ways that alarmed the old elites. But this growing sense of independence did not after all threaten the relations of subordination that governed:

And yet one feels that "crisis" is too strong a term. If the complaint continues throughout the century that the poor were indisciplined, criminal, prone to tumult and riot, one never feels, before the French Revolution, that the rulers of England conceived that their whole social order might be endangered. The insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace. The styles of politics and of architecture, the rhetoric of the gentry and their decorative arts, all seem to proclaim stability, self- confidence, a habit of managing all threats to their hegemony. (387)

The efforts that universities make to enhance the diversity and inclusiveness of their classrooms often focus on this point of social separation: how can we encourage students from different races, religions, or classes to interact with each other deeply enough to learn from each other? The need is real; the segregation of American society by race, religion, and socioeconomic status is a huge obstacle to mutual understanding and trust across groups. But all too often these efforts at teaching multicultural competence have less effect than they are designed to have. Organizations like AmeriCorps and CityYear probably have greater effect, simply because they succeed in recruiting highly diverse cohorts of young men and women who learn from each other while working on common projects (link).

Marx on peasant consciousness

One of Marx's more important pieces of political writing is the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851) (pdf). Here is his analysis of the causes of the specific nature of peasant political consciousness leading to the election of Napoleon III:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France‘s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

This a particularly interesting analysis of the social psychology of group solidarity, and one that has contemporary significance as well. It sheds a lot of light on how Marx thinks about the formation of class consciousness -- even as it significantly misunderstands the agency of rural people.

What are the limitations of the French peasantry, according to Marx here? They are isolated, burdened, unsophisticated, primitive, apolitical, and ignorant of the larger forces around them. Therefore, Marx says, they cannot constitute a unified and purposive political force. (The photo of a battalion of Vietnam Minh troops in Indochina just a century later refutes this conception.)

From this description we can draw several positive ideas about the foundations of collective solidarity. Here are the elements that Marx takes to be crucial in the formation of collective consciousness in this passage:

1. The group needs to possess "manifold relations" to each other.
2. There needs to be effective communication and transportation across space, not just local interaction.
3. There needs to be a degree of economic interdependence.
4. There need to be shared material conditions in the system of production.
5. There needs to be an astute appreciation of the social and economic environment.
6. There needs to be organization and leadership to help articulate a shared political consciousness and agenda. 

And Marx seems to have something like a necessary and sufficient relation in mind between these conditions and the emergence of collective consciousness: these conditions are jointly sufficient and individually necessary for collective consciousness in an extended group.

There are several crucial ideas here that survive into current thinking about solidarity and mobilization. So Marx's thinking about collective consciousness was prescient. It is interesting to consider where his thoughts about collective solidarity came from. How did he come to have insightful ideas about the social psychology of mobilization and solidarity in the first place? This isn't a topic that had a history of advanced theory and thinking in 1851.

Two sources seem likely. First is the tradition of French socialist thought in which Marx was immersed in the 1840s. French socialist thinkers were in fact interested in the question of how a revolutionary spirit came to be among a group of people. And second is Marx's own experience of working people in Paris in 1843-45. He writes of his own observations of working people in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1844:

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

Here Marx gives as much importance to the substantive relations of friendship and everyday association as he does to shared material interests in the formation of the class consciousness of French workers.

Marx's misunderstanding of the political capacity and consciousness of peasant communities has been noted by many scholars of rural revolutions. James Scott once opened a public lecture on the revolutions of the twentieth century by saying that his lecture would only treat the peasant revolutions of the century. But he then paused and laughed, and said, this isn't much of a limitation, because they were all peasant revolutions! Marx's assumption that only urban workers were capable of revolutionary consciousness was a serious misreading of the coming century of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles. (Here is an earlier post on Scott's studies of peasant politics. Scott's accounts can be found in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance and The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century picks up similar themes.)

Also interesting in the Eighteenth Brumaire is Engels' statement on the law of history as class struggle in his preface to the third edition of the book:

In addition, however, there was still another circumstance. It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science -- this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.

Engels plainly endorses the idea of laws of motion of society and the idea of class conflict as the primary motor of historical change. "History is a history of class struggle." There is not much room for contingency or conjunctural causation here! But this is a dimension of Marxist theory that is plainly incorrect. Far better is to understand history in a more multi-factoral way in which contingency, conjunction, and agency all play a role.

Historians of Past & Present

image: "Historians of Past and Present," National Portrait Gallery, London

A recent article on J. H. Elliott in the New York Review of Books includes a very striking portrait of the founders of the British history journal, Past and Present. The painting includes Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Lawrence Stone, and Keith Thomas (standing); and Christopher Hill, J. H. Elliott, and Joan Thirst (seated). The journal has been an incredibly important platform for some of the best social history being written from its founding in 1952 through the present, and it is very striking to see these pathbreaking historians all depicted together.

The journal was founded post-war by a group of historians who were Marxist and often members of the British Communist Party; but the journal itself maintained an intellectual independence from doctrine and party that allowed it to cultivate genuinely important historical research. As Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm put the point in the 1983 essay mentioned below, "In our dealings with Party or Group we were quite explicit in establishing that the journal was independent, and would accept no policy instructions" (5).

There is one element of this piece of intellectual history that I continue to find particularly intriguing. This has to do with the relationship between intellectual honesty and political conviction.  How is an historian's work (or the work of a social scientist or philosopher) affected by his or her political convictions? Intellectual honesty seems like a straightforward thing: we want scholars to pursue their findings as the facts and inferences guide them. We want them to help us understand how the world works, based on their best reading of the evidence. We don't want them to "spin" events or processes into alignment with their political ideologies or commitments. So how did this work for the historians of Past and Present and for Communist historians who were not part of the journal like E. P. Thompson? 

One part of the answer seems clear: these historians chose their topics for research based on their intuitions about the drivers of history, and these intuitions were certainly bound up in their political commitments and passions. So when Hobsbawm focuses on "Machine Breakers" (1952) or Soboul on "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4" (1954) or Rodney Hilton on "Freedom and Villeinage in England" (1965) or E. P. Thompson on "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd" (1971), the topics they study have an obvious relevance to their political passions. But what about their findings? Are they able to see the aspects of their stories that are unexpected from a classical Marxist point of view? Is history "gnarly" and unpredictable for them? And are they honest in laying out the facts as they found them? Having read each of Hobsbawm, Soboul, Hilton, and Thompson with a certain degree of care over the years, my belief is that they meet this test. Certainly this is true for Thompson; the originality of his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, is precisely to be found in the fact that it is not a cookie-cutter theory of class. Instead, Thompson goes into great detail, based on a rich variety of primary sources, about the sources of identity that working people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created for themselves. These historians are not doctrinaire in their findings, and they honestly confront the historical realities that they find.

One way of getting a feeling for the journal is to look at its contents. The topics included in the first ten years of publication of Past and Present cover a broad range of historical subjects. Here are some exemplars from the first decade:

• Hill, Christopher. 1952. "Puritans and the Poor." Past & Present (2):32-50. doi: 10.2307/650123. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650123
• Hilton, R. H. 1952. "Capitalism--What's in a Name?" Past & Present (1):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649987. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649987
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1952. "The Machine Breakers." Past & Present (1):57-70. doi: 10.2307/649989. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649989
• Homans, George Caspar. 1953. "The Rural Sociology of Medieval England." Past & Present (4):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649895. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649895
• Kiernan, V., and Christopher Hill. 1953. "Puritanism and the Poor." Past & Present (3):45-54. doi: 10.2307/650035. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650035
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1954. "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century." Past & Present (5):33-53. doi: 10.2307/649822. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649822
• Mondolfo, Rodolfo, and D. S. Duncan. 1954. "The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour." Past & Present (6):1-5. doi: 10.2307/649811. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649811
• Soboul, A. 1954. "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4." Past & Present (5):54-70. doi: 10.2307/649823. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649823
• Childe, V. G. 1955. "The Sociology of the Mycenaean Tablets." Past & Present (7):76-77. doi: 10.2307/650174. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650174
• Kosminsky, E. A. 1955. "The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the XIth to the XVth Centuries." Past & Present (7):12-36. doi: 10.2307/650170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650170
• Rudé, George E. 1955. "The Outbreak of the French Revolution." Past & Present (8):28-42. doi: 10.2307/649776. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649776
• Aston, T. H. 1956. "The English Manor." Past & Present (10):6-14. doi: 10.2307/650142. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650142
• Goubert, Pierre. 1956. "The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example." Past & Present (10):55-77. doi: 10.2307/650145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650145
• Soboul, A. 1956. "The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Past & Present (10):78-95. doi: 10.2307/650146. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650146
• Connell, K. H. 1957. "Peasant Marriage in Ireland after the Great Famine." Past & Present (12):76-91. doi: 10.2307/650016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650016
• Klíma, A. 1957. "Industrial Development in Bohemia 1648-1781." Past & Present (11):87-99. doi: 10.2307/649742. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649742
• Ludloff, R. 1957. "Industrial Development in 16th-17th Century Germany." Past & Present (12):58-75. doi: 10.2307/650015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650015
• Jones, A. H. M. 1958. "The Roman Colonate." Past & Present (13):1-13. doi: 10.2307/649865. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649865
• Małowist, M. 1958. "Poland, Russia and Western Trade in the 15th and 16th Centuries." Past & Present (13):26-41. doi: 10.2307/649867. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649867
• Cobb, R. 1959. "The People in the French Revolution." Past & Present (15):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649832. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649832
• Trevor-Roper, H. R. 1959. "The General Crisis of the 17th Century." Past & Present (16):31-64. doi: 10.2307/650152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650152
• Briggs, Asa. 1961. "Cholera and Society in the Nineteenth Century." Past & Present (19):76-96. doi: 10.2307/649981. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649981
• Soboul, Albert, and Georges Lefebvre. 1961. "Urban Society in the Orléanais in the Late Eighteenth Century." Past & Present (19):46-75. doi: 10.2307/649980. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649980
• Dore, R. P. 1962. "Talent and the Social Order in Tokugawa Japan." Past & Present (21):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649996. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649996
• Finley, M. I. 1962. "Athenian Demagogues." Past & Present (21):3-24. doi: 10.2307/649993. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649993

Out of this list a number of themes recur: for example, underclass life, revolution, class, and economic history. These topics reflect the theoretical and political interests of the founders and the editors of the journal, and they served to encourage a substantial volume of additional research along these lines in the years that followed. Many of these essays have proven to be a classics in their genres.

Two interesting articles were published in the journal in 1983 about its own history (link). The first was by three of the founding editors of the journal, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm. And the other was by Jacques Le Goff, the then-editor of the equally important French history journal, Annales.  These two essays offer very interesting snapshots into the role that the journal played in British history through the mid 1980s.

Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm emphasize the intellectual independence of the journal from its inception. This independence derived from the commitment of the board of editors: "It has been the collegiality of the Board which enabled us to know each other, to formulate a consensus about the sort of history we wanted to encourage -- irrespective of ideological or other divergences within the Board -- to establish policies and perspectives for the journal, however tacitly and empirically, and to establish a flexible continuity of policy" (12).

Jacques Le Goff also addresses the Marxist orientation of the journal in his 1983 contribution in these terms:

Never having had any prejudice against Marxism, provided it was open and undogmatic, I was totally able to accept a publication in which there was certainly an element of Marxism but which gave no impression of being subject to a dogma, still less to a party. (14)

Le Goff emphasizes the importance of the intellectual impetus that Past and Present created for historians everywhere. He draws attention to the annual conferences that the Past and Present Society organized, and the importance of many of these discussions for further developments in historical research.

Past and Present has been a leading forum for a particularly dynamic field of historiography in its six decades of publication. Its pages have highlighted the importance of social and economic history; the concrete history of social classes; the dynamics of revolution; the role that technology played in ordinary life in medieval and modern times; the key roles that agriculture and rural life played in early modern history; and underclass social life. These are themes that have a great deal of salience for a Marxist interpretation of history.  But what is displayed in its pages, from beginning to the present, is rigorous, critical history -- not Marxist dogmas about the working class, the peasantry, or the inevitability of social revolution.

(Here is a rational discussion of Hobsbawm's political affiliations in the Guardian; link. And here is a diatribe against Hobsbawm's insufficient commitment to Marxism in the International Marxist Tendency; link. This lengthy piece presents an alternative interpretation of Hobsbawm's life and work. Harvey Kaye provides extensive discussion of these figures in The British Marxist Historians. Also interesting is Michael Scott Christofferson's French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s.)

Social hierarchy and popular culture

There is some interesting work being done on the sociology of taste these days.  I'm thinking specifically of a literature that has developed around the idea of "omnivorousness" and social status.  Richard Peterson initiated much of this discussion in 1992 with an article in Poetics entitled "Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore" (link).

Between World Wars I and II it was widely accepted in intellectual circles that the emerging mass media were  spawning an equivalent mass audience, an audience that was unthinking, herd-like, and inherently passive yet easily swayed by skilled political and commercial demagogues. (243)

But, Peterson claims, empirical research in communications does not bear this out; instead, the audience has differentiated into multiple audiences.  The simple model of a "highbrow discerning elite with well-refined tastes and ... an ignorant and stimulus-seeking mass" (244) has been discredited. In other words, the simple theory of status that postulates that elites can be identified by a set of uniform refined cultural tastes does not hold up.

The hallmark of those at the top of the hierarchy according to the received elite-to-mass theory is patronizing the fine arts, displaying good manners, wearing the correct cut of clothes, using proper speech, maintaining membership in the 'better' churches, philanthropic organizations and social clubs, and especially for the women of the class, cultivating all of the attendant social graces. (245)

But, according to Peterson, this assumption can be tested, and it turns out to be incorrect. Peterson and other collaborators (Albert Simkus in particular) used social data sets to examine the distribution of preferred music styles across occupational groups arranged from high status to low status.  Their status hierarchy of occupational groups ranges from "higher cultural" -- architects, lawyers, clergymen, and academics, to farm laborers.  And the musical genres include a list of 10 types of music, ranging from classical to country. Here is one of the central findings:

The data presented in table 4 do not show this clear pattern of aesthetic exclusivity. Indeed, the occupational groups at the top are more likely to be high on liking these non-elite forms while the occupational groups at the bottom are likely to be low on their rate of liking them. Only one category of music, country and western, fits the predicted pattern, while three groups, mood music, big band, and barber shop music, show just the opposite of the predicted ranking. (249)

Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the "elite culture-mass culture" distinction in favor of an "omnivore-univore" distinction.  There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people; but it doesn't correspond to the elite-mass distinction previously postulated.

Peterson and Kern's "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore" (ASR 1996, link) carries this line of thinking forward.  Here is how Peterson and Kern begin their article:

Not only are high-status Americans more likely than others to consume fine arts, but, according to Peterson and Simkus (1992), they are are also more likely to be involved in a wide range of low-status activities.  This finding ... flies in the face of years of historical research showing that high-status persons shun cultural expressions that are not seen as elevated.... In making sense of this contradiction, Peterson and Simkus (1992) suggest that a historical shift from highbrow snob to omnivore is taking place. (900)

"Snob" is defined as a person who does not like a single form of lowbrow or middlebrow activity, and "omnivore" is open to at least one such activity.  Here are the lowbrow activities they track: country music, bluegrass, gospel, rock, and blues (901), and the defining highbrow arts activities they select are classical music and opera.  Their empirical finding is that highbrows have increased their "omnivorousness" by about half a genre in a ten-year period of time from 1982 to 1992, from 1.74 lowbrow genres to 2.23 lowbrow genres (902).

They ask the natural question, what are some of the causes of this marked change during these years?  And they put forward five factors; "in concluding we speculatively suggest five linked factors that may contribute to the shifting grounds of status-group politics" (905). They cite structural changes in society (broader education and exposure to the media, for example); value changes (declining levels of racial exclusion and stereotype); art-world changes (decline of elitist theories of art, rising appreciation of non-elite art forms); generational politics (the rock'n'roll generation); and status-group politics (gentrification of "lower-class" artistic forms).

This research is interesting in several ways.  First, it is a statistically sophisticated attempt to observe the distribution of cultural tastes across a population and across time. The statistical analyses in the two studies allow Peterson and his collaborators to sort through issues about within-cohort and across-cohort taste changes. So this permits a more nuanced observation of a shifting social reality. And second, it arrives at what appears to be a statistically sound finding -- that highbrows were broadening their cultural tastes during the decade observed.  Highbrows became less snobbish.

So this literature provides some tools for observing and measuring the prevalence and shifts of things that seem highly subjective -- musical tastes, in this instance.  And it suggests some ways of formulating and evaluating hypotheses about the factors that explain the observed distributions and changes.

This literature pays explicit homage to Bourdieu's theorizing about taste in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, originally published in 1979 in French.  But the thrust of Bourdieu's work seems to be quite different from Peterson's. Bourdieu does indeed seem to believe that there are some very specific cultural markers that identify the elite class in society. He finds that one social group, the petite bourgeoisie, is indeed "omnivorous" in at least one sense: "Uncertain of their classifications, divided between the tastes they incline to and the tastes they aspire to, the petit bourgeois are condemned to disparate choices ... ; and this is seen as much in their preferences in music or painting as in their everyday choices" (326).  But this statement seems to reproduce the elite-mass paradigm that Peterson rejects, in that it seems to position the tastes of the petit bourgeoisie intermediate between elite and mass tastes.

Here is a fascinating and complex graph Bourdieu provides mapping cultural items against occupational groups (higher-ed teachers, engineers, secondary teachers, industrial employers, etc.).

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.

Social mobility?

We often think of the United States as a place with a lot of social mobility. What exactly does this mean? And is it true? Ironically, the answer appears to be a fairly decisive "no." In fact, here's a graph from a 2005 New York Times series on income mobility that shows that the United States ranks second to last among Great Britain, US, France, Canada, and Denmark when it comes to the rate of income improvement over four generations for poor families. And here are two very interesting recent studies that come to similar conclusions -- a report on social mobility by the Center for American Progress and a 2007 academic study by researchers at Kent State, Wisconsin and Syracuse. Here is how Professor Kathryn Wilson, associate professor of economics at Kent State University, summarizes the main finding of the latter study: “People like to think of America as the land of opportunities. The irony is that our country actually has less social mobility and more inequality than most developed countries” (link).

Basically social mobility refers to the likelihood that a child will grow up into adulthood and attain a higher level of economic and social wellbeing than his/her family of origin. Is there a correlation between the socioeconomic status (SES) of an adult and his/her family of origin? Do poor people tend to have poor parents? And do poor parents tend to have children who end up as poor adults later in life? Does low SES in the parents' circumstances at a certain time in life -- say, the age of 30 -- serve to predict the SES of the child at the same age?

The fact of social mobility is closely tied to facts about social inequality and facts about social class. In a highly egalitarian society there would be little need for social mobility. And in a society with a fairly persistent class structure there is also relatively little social mobility -- because there is some set of mechanisms that limit entry and exit into the various classes. In the simplest terms, a social class is a sub-population within a society in which parents and their adult children tend to share similar occupations and economic circumstances of life. It is possible for a society to have substantial inequalities but also a substantial degree of social mobility. But there are good sociological reasons to suspect that this is a fairly unstable situation; groups with a significant degree of wealth and power are also likely to be in a position to arrange social institutions in such a way that privilege is transmitted across generations. (Here are several earlier postings on class; post, post, post.)

A crucial question to pose as we think about class and social mobility, is the issue of the social mechanisms through which children are launched into careers and economic positions in society. A pure meritocracy is a society in which specific social mechanisms distinguish between high-achieving and low-achieving individuals, assigning high-achieving individuals to desirable positions in society. A pure plutocracy is a society in which holders of wealth provide advantages to their children, ensuring that their adult children become the wealth-holders of the next generation. A caste system assigns children and young adults to occupations based on their ascriptive status. In each case there are fairly visible social mechanisms through which children from specific social environments are tracked into specific groups of roles in society. The sociological question is how these mechanisms work; in other words, we want to know about the "microfoundations" of the system of economic and social placement across generations.

In a society in which there is substantial equality of opportunity across all social groups, we would expect there to be little or no correlation between the SES of the parent and the child. We might have a very simple theory of the factors that determine an adult's SES in a society with extensive equality of opportunity: the sum total of the individual's talents, personality traits, and motivation strongly influence success in the pursuit of a career. (Chance also plays a role.) If talent is randomly distributed across the population, rich and poor; if all children are exposed to similar opportunities for the development of their talents; and if all walks of life are open to talent without regard to social status -- then we should find a zero correlation between parents' SES and adult child's SES. So, in this simple model, evidence of correlation with SES of parent and child would also be evidence of failures of equality of opportunity.

However, the situation is more complicated. Success in career is probably influenced by factors other than talent: for example, personal values, practical interests, personality qualities like perseverence, and cultural values. And these qualities are plainly influenced by the child's family and neighborhood environment. So if there is such a thing as a "culture of poverty" or a "culture of entrepreneurism", then the social fact of the child's immersion in this culture will be part of the explanation of the child's performance in adulthood -- whatever opportunities were available to the child. (French sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie makes a point along these lines about the segregation of immigrant communities that exists in French society today; post, post.) So this is a fact about family background that is causally relevant to eventual SES and independent of the opportunity structure of the society.

But another relevant fact is the sharply differentiated opportunities that exist for children and young adults from various social groups in many societies, including the United States. How is schooling provided to children across all income groups? What kind and quality of healthcare is available across income and race? To what extent are job opportunities made available to all individuals without regard to status, race, or income? How are urban people treated relative to suburban or rural people when it comes to the availability of important social opportunities? It is plain that there are substantial differences across many societies when it comes to questions like these.

Education is certainly one of the chief mechanisms of social mobility in any society; it involves providing the child and young adult with the tools necessary to translate personal qualities and talents into productive activity. So inequalities in access to education constitute a central barrier to social mobility. (See this earlier post for a discussion of some efforts to assess the impact of higher education on social mobility for disadvantaged people.)

And it seems all too clear that children have very unequal educational opportunities throughout the United States, from pre-school to university. These inequalities correlate with socially significant facts like family income, place of residence, and race; and they correlate in turn with the career paths and eventual SES of the young people who are placed in one or another of these educational settings. Race is a particularly prevalent form of structural inequalities of opportunity in the US; multiple studies have shown how slowly patterns of racial segregation are changing in the cities of the United States (post). And along with segregation comes limitation on opportunities associated with health, education, and employment.

So the findings mentioned above, documenting the relatively limited degree of social mobility that currently exists in the United States by international standards, are understandable when we consider the entrenched structures that exist in our country determining the opportunities available to children and young adults. Race, poverty, and geography conspire to create recurring patterns of low SES across generations of families in the United States. (See an earlier post on Douglas Massey's analysis of the mechanisms of race and inequality in the US.) And limited social mobility is the predictable result.