Social Class Inside Out

November 20th, 2007 Posted in Social Class

 All they want is love and money.  (William Saroyan)

Social class is a tag for the social organization of economic life. The task is to describe the social forms and processes needed to produce, distribute, and consume goods and services.

Everyone has a place in economic life. You make and you use. You get and spend money. The connection with social class is direct and obvious. Vital needs are involved including chances and options for careers, relationships of production and consumption. Aware or not. we all participate.

Life and times in the 20th century were infused with social class consciousness: the Great Depression, the militant organizing drives of industrial unions, the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War, World War II. And so on.

The mutual penetration of concept and action adds complexity. How one defines social class is an assertive political act. In the study of social life we keep finding these fronts of intransigent conflict. The question of how to organize economic life is one of them. To approximate the reality of our subject we have to start by recognizing this. Theory and commitment to a value are synonymous. An unbiased study of social class is impossible. But I think we can come closer than we have been.

You cannot discuss social class without understanding that the theories and concepts used are themselves part of the thing itself. There are no sidelines, no spectators, everyone is in the game.

It is possible to attempt to opt out, to turn a back on the nasty business. One could approach social class as a meal in a cafeteria. A little of this and a little of that. Everyone’s plate with a unique combination. Opt for equality, solidarity, democracy, individual rights. Reject dictatorship, censorship, and exploitation. Admire free intellectuals, writers, artists, scholars who refuse to bend to power. Appreciate enterprise and skilled work. This kind of shopping requires an appreciation of the variety offered,

How we live now, our present socio-economic organization, has changed considerably from the way of our near ancestors. We have been in transition over the past five hundred years and accelerating. For the medieval span we had been primarily bound as peasant farmers to agricultural communes governed by a military class of nobles.

This system, in its European form, tracks back to the downfall of the Roman Empire. Over the centuries it has developed and changed but its basic ordering remained the same.

The new era we are in now is based on industrial production, developing technology and science. Even agriculture takes a rational industrial form. The question of its social organization is what has been in contention. The door to our subject goes through the conflict front. The complexity and variety of all sides has been shaded and usurped for decades by the cold war. Here alternative descriptions of social class have been among the prime weapons.

We can summarize by listing four interlocked issues.

1) The economic way is how we make-collect and distribute the goods and services for our survival and for enhancement of our lives. It involves technology and combinations of fixed economic forms and processes.

2) The social class order is how we organize the social life needed to operate the economy. Except in absolutist theories this is never entirely fixed. It varies with place (society) and time (history). Refining current descriptions and seeking alternates is the sociological task.

3) The anomalies are next; the unexpected consequences, the social costs of the operating economic way and its social order. The critique resides here. This is where the comparisons and arguments over the different class ways takes place.

4) Then the constant but never fully appreciated processes are in play involving inventions, insights, accommodations, new facts and confrontations that press for change. There is a limit on how far ahead we can predict and anticipate.

There are two current major concepts of social class (with a large number of variations.) They are diametrically opposed. We have to start by being sure that we understand the difference for that is where social class resides.

To be scientific is to reject a theological explanation of reality, to only accept as fact what registers upon the human senses. There are two scientific approaches to social life: the positive which describes things as they are, and the negative which describes things as they are not, ways that are rejected. What is and what isn’t. One side accepts what is, the other is critical.

Next post we will offer a critique of the scientific pretensions of the major social class theories.