Where's class

One thing that surprised me about returning to the graduate classroom in the social sciences was the lack of conversation about class.  I think most of my professors would consider themselves left-wing or progressive, so it was not a function of ideological aversion.  But in training people to research public administration, class did not emerge as a frequent touch point. Although, really I’m not surprised.  Class always struck me as a problematic as an analytical or even an organizational tool—it’s hard to define.  In the U.S., or maybe in contemporary society more generally, we are sloppy in how we use the term.  We talk about working class, middle class (divided into lower middle class and upper middle class), upper class, maybe about lower class, but there are no real lines here.  And these categories have nothing to do with the definitions in Marx.  We define class, when we define it, in terms of some sort of income bands, although working class can sometimes mean a certain kind of work—a union electrician is working class even with an income in the 6 figures, a poorly paid unionized teacher may or may not be considered working class. 

For Marx, class was a position in the social order defined by the relationship to the means of production. Those who owned it were the bourgeoisie, those who worked for wages were the proletariat.  Subsequent theorists like Gramsci added subsumed classes—people like professionals who work on behalf of either the owners or the workers.  

Whereas the normal American class formulation with its varieties of class bands would be populated in a somewhat balanced way (at least pyramidal), for Marx class distribution is very polarized—a small number in the bourgeoisie, a great number in the proletariat.  The Occupy Movement with its invocation of the 1% seemed to get back to this sort of starkly differentiated class sorting, but it was still an arbitrary income cutoff and did not relate to function.  Should we talk about the 1% or the 0.1% (the billionaire class)?  What about those at 2%, 3%, all high incomes?  Would a non-profit hospital or university exec be considered part of the same elite as someone with a controlling interest in a corporation? 

When I was younger, there were debates over whether one should talk about race and gender, or whether these needed to be understood as secondary to class conflict.  Well, in 2021, there is much more discussion of race and gender, and a much stronger and more cogent critique of existing systems coming from those perspectives.  The classic Marxist class-first argument seems to have taken a back seat.

The temptation to prioritize between race, gender, sexuality and class of course creates false conflicts.  CRT gives us the concept of intersectionality which allows you to navigate this stuff pretty well.  A female CEO experiences misogyny as a woman, but experiences it differently than a woman who is not in the C-suite and/or is black, an immigrant, indigenous, etc.

The best precis on class I’ve run across lately is in Kathy Ferguson’s The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, a fine book that looks to have some very actionable ideas which I’ll address in another post.  She presents a breakdown of class that is a little more complicated than 19^th century Marxism, but still has a functional base: “the elite, consisting of directors and top executives, who make policy; the ‘new working class,’ made up of highly skilled technical, managerial, and professional employees, who occupy the middle level of organizations; and the industrial and clerical working class, whose positions generally have low educational requirements and involve highly routinized, fragmented work. At the bottom are the marginal workers who occupy the “casual jobs” of the secondary labor market, whose relationship to large organizations is tangential and insecure, and who move back and forth between the roles of worker and client.”  (p. 84).  These definitions have a good grounding in function, although the boundaries will blur, of course, and the emergence of the contemporary tech economy (the book was published in 1984) might mix this up.

I’m still not sure that class, either defined in terms of relationship to the means of production or a schema like Ferguson’s can prove very important analytically in today’s world.  It does not seem that people identify themselves along these lines or experience solidarity within these groups. Distinctions within any of these classes seem stronger than distinctions between them. Unions will argue with this, but who they represent is so spotty, and seems to have nothing to do with a functional class distinction.  The presence of unions has more to do with how certain groups of workers are handled in certain kinds of organizations—they survive in legacy large commercial organizations, and they expand in government organizations where they seem more to represent professional interests more than class. Unions today have suffered from an assault so relentless that they arguably have been forced to distort themselves simply to survive, and have ended up in a form that can only represent narrow interests.

Kathy Ferguson. 1984. The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy. Temple University Press.