I do not mean to say that there is a class struggle; certainly not the class struggle, with all the Marxist baggage attached to that phrase; but only that class struggle exists.
A spinoff of this thread on Marxism. Starting at this post, FinnAgain rather incomprehensibly denies the rather commonplace observation that democracy in ancient Athens resulted from a class struggle. To the extent that he appears to be willing to be understood, he then goes on to deny that such a thing as class struggle even exists, ever or anywhere . . . though he does not actually, exactly say that . . . and perhaps even denies that social classes as such exist . . . though he does not quite say that either. Well, whatever FinnAgain might be trying to say, certainly he is saying it with a passionate conviction which, I suspect, some more articulate minds on the Dope might share; hence this thread.
I hold these truths to be as self-evident as anything can be in sociology or politics:
- Class is real. No sociologist in the world would dispute this. Hierarchical social class differentiation has existed in every known human society above a mesolithic level, from ancient times to the present day – including those where a conscious attempt has been made to eradicate it. Some societies are more egalitarian than others, some have harder and faster class boundaries than others, and in some cases it might be difficult to determine just how many classes the society contains and just where one ends and the next begins; but no known society is free of hierarchical class differentiation. There are some things we can confidently say about class that apply in every post-mesolithic society, regardless of cultural traditions or technological development:
- People of different classes live very different lives.
- There might be some class mobility, but for most people their class identity is determined from birth and they will live their whole lives in the same class.
- Class is not simply a matter of net worth or income. Different classes have, or develop, different social and cultural characteristics; and these tend to stay with an individual for life, even if his income is significantly increased or reduced. Liza Doolittle, however she might learn to pronounce her vowels and drink her tea, would never quite entirely be free of her cockney background.
- Classes are, to greater or lesser degree, endogamous – that is, biologically endogamous; most people marry within their own native class. (“Marrying up” may be possible, but of marginal social significance.) They are also what might be called socially endogamous (unless there’s a different word for that) – people are more likely to associate and socialize with persons of their own class than of other classes.
- Class relations are always hierarchical, by definition. Two social classes are not simply two groups with different functional specialties but equal status, like electricians and plumbers; one has a superior position to the other in terms of prestige, wealth, privileges, opportunities, education, and/or power/influence. (The members of an upper class might even be physically superior to those of a lower, if they are better-fed and train for war or sports.) Two clearly distinguishable endogamous social groups of clearly equal status would not be classes – perhaps “subcultures”. This is not circular argument or special pleading; that in every known culture social groupings exist which (1) are endogamous, and (2) are in a hierarchical relationship to each other, is simply an observed fact, and it is obviously an important enough fact to need a name, and “class” is simply the name for such a grouping.
- Different classes in a society perform different economic functions. Whether classes are strictly defined by or identical with their economic functions is a point of controversy, but functional differentiation by class is real and universal, and most (not necessarily all) occupational categories will be definitely associated with one class or another. The functions of the upper classes usually involve far less manual or menial labor than the lowers’, and are generally regarded as more elegant and admirable – regardless of whether they are governmental functions, or religious, or military, or academic, or professional, or commercial, or cultural, or artistic, or social in the narrow hosting-parties sense, or even purely ornamental.
- Classes are long-lived but not necessarily static or eternal. Over time in a given society, its class structure can change. A new class might emerge. A class can disappear, or effectively merge with another by intermarriage, or change its characteristics, as a result of social, economic, political, or cultural forces. As George Orwell wrote in 1941, “Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy ship owner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus.”
- Classes usually (not always) end at the border. National identities and cultures are powerful uniters and powerful dividers. Marx took it as an axiom that all the proletarians of Europe made up a single international working class, and had more in common with each other than with the ruling classes of their respective countries. But the proletarians, then and after, rarely acted as if they believed that or felt it. The endogamous behavior of a working class is almost always national – that is, English proles marry/socialize with English proles, rarely French proles – and any class consciousness they develop almost certainly will be intranational as a result. It is, generally, only a society’s upper classes that have some chance of marrying significant numbers of foreigners of their own rank, and of developing an international class identity and class consciousness, like the transcontinental aristocracy of medieval Europe. In the European Union today, with its open borders and easy transportation and universal language of wider communication (English), this process of social internationalization is being extended downward to the middle classes, but it’s a gradual process.
1a. Class isn’t everything. In a given society there are, also, other kinds of social groupings and divisions. People in a society can be divided/grouped by sex, socially-defined “race,” generational culture (Generation A vs. Generation B, as distinct from the young vs. the old, is a new thing in human history; but we definitely saw such generational-cultural conflict play out in the 1960s, and we saw the Baby Boomers retain some of their distinctive generational characteristics as they aged), religion, regional background, region of current residence, ethnocultural background, occupational category, political world-views, sports-fan rivalries, etc., etc. Most of these groups are much smaller and narrower than the society’s classes (with the notable exception of the sexes, which make up half of every class). The divisions between these groups are not essentially class divisions, they are not necessarily hierarchical divisions, and the groupings can cut across class boundaries. (However, a non-class grouping can become identical with a social class in some circumstances – e.g., “race” might define class status and economic function, as with the four varna or “colors” of India, or the Norman elite of medieval England, or the imposition of permanent lumpenprole status on nearly all African-Americans from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement.) Non-class social groupings, like social classes, can have their own group interests or concerns, and can come into conflict. And, of course, looked at from an extremely reductionist perspective, a society can also be characterized as an undifferentiated mass of individuals – which it really is, among other things – and each individual has his or her own unique combination of personality, values, world-view, etc. – and, of course, individuals have their own interests, which can come into conflict. (The principal purpose of any legal system is the management of human wills in conflict.)
- Class interest is real. Different things can be good or bad for the people of a given social class. In some respects, different classes have identical interests – plagues are bad, cures are good, for all classes of a society more or less equally. (I say “more or less” because even a plague can have class-differential effects – the Black Death of the 14th Century decimated the numbers of Europe’s workers and peasants, which increased the demand for the labor of individual survivors, with the effect of raising their wages and independence somewhat, and, some historians would say, beginning the very gradual process of the elimination of feudalism. And plagues, like all kinds of disasters, usually hit the poor harder than the rich, who can hole up in their mansions. That doesn’t always work out.) In some respects, however, different classes can have different and conflicting interests. It was in the interest of American slaveowners to preserve slavery and in the interest of American slaves to abolish it.
A class’s “interests,” for this purpose, include not only its material or economic interests, but any thing with which it is particularly concerned, for cultural or moral reasons or whatever. We often see social issues, such as abortion or gay marriage, on which public opinion seems to break down at least partially along class lines, even though these issues would not appear to affect the material interests of any class differently than another’s.
Of course it is possible for people to be grossly, even tragically, mistaken about what their class interests really are. Of course it is true that what really is in the best interest of a given class might be a highly debatable question, even one impossible of definition resolution or consensus. All of that, however, is only tangentially relevant to this discussion. After all, it is exactly the same for individuals. Reasonable minds can differ as to what is in a given individual’s best interest; reasonable minds cannot differ as to the fact that individual interests exist.
It is also possible that what is good for a class will not necessarily be good for every member of it. Again, that is of tangential relevance. Some things are good for America that are not good for every American. When John Gotti got locked up, that was (almost certainly) good for America and (most people including Gotti would agree) bad for the American known as John Gotti. I think we can all understand and accept this in general principle without embarking on any specific greatest-good-for-the-greatest number calculus. (The maxim “greatest good for the greatest number” is, of course, based on an unstated ethical assumption, to wit, that all human beings are equally ends-in-themselves – the sort of thing that Jefferson would confidently and groundlessly call “self-evident,” and at which Nietzsche would scream defiance disguised as denial. But, for purposes of this discussion, we need not resolve that ethical question, nor any other.)
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Class action is real. When members of a social class – not necessarily all or even most of them, just enough to make a difference – try to further or protect their class interest real or perceived, that is class action. This does not necessarily require “class consciousness,” in fact it does not even require concerted action (though both help immensely). As Michael Lind noted in The Next American Nation, “In personifying the overclass and describing its strategy, I do not mean to imply the existence of a literal conspiracy. When members of a disproportionately powerful class pursue similar class-based interests, the result will be similar to that of a conscious program even if there has been no concerted action.” By the same token, and further down the ladder, a striking labor union local can meaningfully be said to be taking “class action,” even if it has no stated or hidden goals beyond a dollar-an-hour raise and makes no effort to get other unions involved.
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Class conflict is real. Whenever the class interest or class action of Class A collides with that of Class B, there is class conflict.
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Class struggle is real. Class struggle is simply any class conflict that is not immediately resolved by victory or compromise or surrender. If the parties in conflict keep on fighting to get what they respectively want, there is class struggle. And it happens all the time. It might be fought out in the media, in the courts, in the marketplace, in the classrooms, in the blogosphere, in the boardroom, on the shop floor, on the picket lines, and/or on the battlefield; it might be about a vision of revolutionary social transformation or it might be about a 40-hour week with time and a half for overtime; but it’s all equally class struggle. The lower classes have no monopoly on it, of course – the upper classes can initiate and prosecute struggles of their own, for their own perceived interests (which generally include, at minimum, indefinitely holding on to whatever wealth, status and privileges they already have).
5a. Non-class groupings also have conflicts and struggles. Again, happens all the time. Any two groups with different interests or concerns as the members perceive them can come into conflict and struggle – see the women’s suffrage movement or the 1960s “generation gap”. I make no assessment here as to the relative importance of class struggles vs. non-class social-group struggles, I merely note the existence of both and the difference between them. Usually it is fairly simple to tell whether a given social-group conflict is a class conflict or not. Sometimes the question is more difficult, as with the Civil Rights movement: It certainly was about hierarchical social-status issues; practically all working-class black Americans were for it (as were the relatively few AAs of higher socioeconomic status), most working-class white Americans were indifferent or hostile; both of these race-class groupings were (and largely remain) highly endogamous; the working-class whites enjoyed a definite if slight social superiority to the blacks, and valued it highly; and it is debatable whether they were/are two social classes occupying adjacent segments of the same tier of the socioeconomic pyramid, or subcultures within the same national working class. Again, a question that need not be resolved here.
- Class struggle matters. It might or might not be the all-explanatory engine of history Marx believed it to be, but at any rate it does very often make real differences in the political, social, and/or economic circumstances of a society. (For better or for worse.)
6a. Class struggle isn’t everything. Historical changes and events can be driven by technological progress, economic forces, political leadership, political movements, religious beliefs, cultural currents, environmental factors, demographic changes, the fortunes of war, etc., etc. Again, I make no assessment as to the relative importance of class struggle compared to any of these; I merely assert it is important enough to rank in their company.
You don’t need to be any kind of Marxist to understand and accept the above. These are simply sociological facts, as plainly evident as sociological facts can be. Note that in the above paragraphs I am not saying, “Four legs good, two legs bad”. I am not asserting that a hierarchical class relationship necessarily involves the “exploitation” of one class by another. I am not here expressing nor implying any any opinions or value judgments as to the justice or injustice of any class system or of class systems in general; nor as to the value of class struggle, as distinct from its existence; nor as to the possibility or impossibility, or desirability or undesirability, of a classless society; nor as to class conflict as embodying any kind of Marxist dialectical process, nor any teleological process of any kind.
Or should I say **endlessly **that they are not using proper definitions or clear terminology?