After reading quite a few different takes on what class is for my sociology revisions, I am met with a fundamental question: so which point of view on class do you subscribe to? I think it's important to first get a little bit philosophical with this idea of class, so that we do not get too caught up with some of the artificially constructed battle lines.
At it's core, class is a way to group people. It is a social construct, created by sociologists to better understand society, and to give them a vocabulary to talk about certain groups of people within society. In a sense, class has always been a category that has "stuck around". In Victorian Britain, social stratification is very much divided along the lower, middle and upper class lines. Class theory is further refined by Marx's dialectical understanding of society as consisting of the working class, and the bourgouisie. Class identification used to be very strong across European societies in the nineteenth century, but has seen sharp decreases until after WWII. Nowadays, hardly anyone identifies themselves by reference to class. It is still used, however, in the media and popular discourse to differentiate people according to income - upper-middle class, middle class, lower class, underclass - but such usage hardly at all refer to Marxist or Victorian conceptions of class. This has led theorists such as Pakulski and Waters to sound the death knell for class, claiming that as a concept, it has exhausted its usefulness. Is class still useful in understanding society?
Neo-Marxists such as Erik Olin Wright places class in the broader tradition of Marxist thought, proposing that essentially, capitalistic society will always have two strict divisions: the working class, and the property owning class. Wright proposes that we should not understand society as comprising of two classes as such, but that these two classes lie at the extreme of a relational field within capitalist structures. The zone in the middle consists of a field where differing subclasses are relationally defined according to the "contradictions" they exhibit. For instance, one kind of middle class, defined by their increased managerial role, are essentially holding delegated capitalist powers. They inhabit a "contradictory class position" within capitalist class locations.
The urgent question seems to be: must we understand class in a neo-marxist way? Wright certainly makes a convincing case for it, giving us numerous reasons to subscribe to this his conception of class. For instance, one benefit of understanding class from the neo-marxist lens is that it aids our understanding of class conflicts. Central to Wright's theory of class is the concept of exploitation. It is the familiar Marxian notion that capitalism survives because property owners exploit and expropriate the surplus labour of the working class. In his model of class, society is inherently unstable and antagonistic.
Of course, we do see instances of this in our daily lives. We hear protests against big banks "stealing" our money, against financiers and against big corporations all the time; and every time that happens, Wright's theory is useful in illuminating the nature of the protests. It seems that as long as we're still living in a capitalist society, there is value to understanding class in the neo-marxist lens.
Pakulski's claim that class is dead seems a little premature, given that many of the revolts we have today can essentially be read as class conflicts. For instance, the occupy movement in the united states, with signs that read "we are the 99%", seem to be organized around the notion of income inequality and general hardships of the "working class". The Arab spring had a strong class dimension as well. The 2016 general elections in the US is punctuated by Bernie Sanders' persistent rallying cries to "break the banks", which, given that the banks are the chief financiers, capitalists and exploiters in the current state of affairs, makes sense in the neo-Marxist conceptions of class.
Class, however, can no longer be used as how it was once used, in the strictly structural, essentialist sense. How then, must we use it? To push a theory to its logical limits, let us imagine a world where the term "class" is not used. How then, might thinkers and sociologists refer to people of varying income? Would the term "income-group" suffice? Perhaps; but an immediate limitation to this approach is that we lose all sense of coherence in group identity. We lose the relational similarities that exists between people of the same income group.
When people use the phrase "it's a class problem" in daily speech, they often use it as a shorthand to connote three related concepts: income inequality, structural differences in endowments, and perhaps Marxist antagonism.
At the end of the day, class does not "exist" in the strict sense of the word - it doesn't exist in the way an apple exists - but understanding things from the perspective of class, whether from the Marxian perspective or from a Weberian perspective or a gradational perspective, gives us more solid grounds to understanding the complexities of the interaction within and between groups in society.
