In Search of the Subject of Change

Great books enable us to reflect on the subject matter under study and lead to the reading of others that expand our understanding and deepen our knowledge. They also make us think about the state of our profession and the way it has been shaped by open debates. More important, great works make us revisit issues and theories studied in the recent past and take a fresh look at topics we thought we understood. This is what the Dominican-born sociologist Carlos Julio Báez Evertsz delivers in his monumental Desigualdad y clases sociales, an interesting, timely, and comprehensive critique of theories of social classes.

The central argument of this book is that class remains pertinent to the analysis of contemporary societies. Báez reviews the debates in the social sciences on class to demonstrate that bourgeois social scientists have sought to either deny or obscure the centrality of the concept of class to prevent it from shedding light on the process of social change. While he assesses the works of classic Marxists such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci, the central part of his work focuses on Marx’s ideas on social class and the more recent theories of neo-Marxism, cultural studies, and postmodernism. Drawing on Marx, the classic Marxists, and the neo-Marxists, he proposes the concept of the collective worker, “the social majority that constitutes an important component of the economically active and inactive population, the intellectual and manual workers, industry, services, professional, communicators, teachers at all levels, health and public services, women, precarious workers, unemployed, retired, self-employed, underclass, etc.” (673). In contrast to the neo-Marxists, he excludes from the concept of the collective worker members of the petty bourgeoisie or middle class who have managerial or supervisory roles in the global functions of capital and therefore are in a “contradictory class location” in relation to ownership of the means of production.

The book opens (Chapters 1 and 2) with an investigation of social inequality, reviewing the most important works on the subject (Pareto, Piketty, Atkinson, Milanovic, and others) and warning (72–73) that

the struggle to reduce inequality means touching the interest of the superclass that controls a great portion of the world’s wealth. This is a road paved with obstacles because demanding equality is, in fact, proposing a radical organization of social relations . . . a long march with advances and setbacks . . . with conflicts not only between the haves and have nots but also with those who refuse to accept the changes necessary to redistribute wealth and income.

The analysis continues with a debate on Karl Marx’s view on social classes. For Marx, classes had objective positions in social structures derived from a mode of production. They were defined by their relations to the means of production and involved relations of exploitation and political domination, and therefore class struggles were at the core of the analysis of historical development. Max Weber challenged Marx’s view by arguing that social classes were based on “conditions determined by the marketplace.” He developed a three-dimensional approach to the study of social stratification, with each dimension influencing the others but not considered part of a form of class struggle.

The differing interpretations of class laid out in the works of Marx and Weber set the tone for the debate on social classes in the twentieth century and beyond. The second segment (Chapters 3–10) of the book reviews the functionalist theorists, ranging from Parsons, Merton, Davis, Moore, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Dahrendorf to Lensky and Ossowski, who sought to refute Marx’s view of social classes and proposed alternatives based on Weber’s three-dimensional approach. Recognizing strata rather than classes, they identified a continuum from lower to middle and upper. In line with Weber’s thought, they recognized the existence of conflict in society but not classes as an expression of relations of exploitation and domination.

The third section (Chapters 11 and 12) moves on to dissect the writings on the historical development of capitalism that explain Marx’s concept of social classes. Báez finds that Marx’s dialectical method shows at every point that capitalist exploitation—extraction of surplus value from productive labor—and domination are always at the core of the analysis. He spends a good deal of time discussing the importance of productive and unproductive labor in defining social classes. Productive workers produce surplus value, while many unproductive workers enable the capitalist to appropriate surplus value. Marx was the first to recognize that capitalist application of technology to the labor process was going to reduce the size of the productive working class but argued that unproductive workers in commerce, finance, services, etc., were also members of the working class. Thus from this perspective the working class is not diminishing but growing as a collective worker.

The fourth part (Chapters 13–16) examines neo-Marxist theories on social classes, including the works of Guglielmo Carchedi, Nicos Poulantzas, and Eric Olin Wright. While Carchedi and Wright focused on the contradictory class location of the new petty bourgeoisie or new middle class, Poulantzas, adopting an Althusserian structural perspective, divided a social formation into three spheres—economic, political, and ideological—and tended to privilege the ideological sphere when discussing the place of the petty bourgeoisie or new middle class in the debate. What is significant about the contributions of these three writers is their search for the subject of social change. If the industrial working class was shrinking, they argued, it should make alliances with the petty bourgeoisie or new middle class to bring about social change if not revolution. Báez argues, in contrast, that the collective worker encompasses those sectors of the new petty bourgeoisie or middle class that do not play a role in the global functions of capital.

The fifth part (Chapters 17–19) focuses on the neo-Weberian theorists John H. Goldthorpe, Anthony Giddens, and Frank Parkin. These three notable British sociologists had similar perspectives on Weber’s approach to social classes. Goldthorpe is credited with developing the “Goldthorpe Scheme of Class,” which in its latest version includes 11 classes grouped into three categories: service, intermediate, and working. Despite Goldthorpe’s claim that his framework was not conditioned by any macro-sociological theory, Giddens and Wright argued that it was neo-Weberian in that it defined classes in terms of the marketplace and occupation. Giddens’s approach was also indebted to Weber, because for him a class was an effect of the market in the broadest sense of the term and much less determined by mode of production. Nonetheless, he recognized that capitalist societies were class societies as compared with feudal and other types of societies. Parkin considered Weber’s approach to class more pertinent than Marx’s but acknowledged that inequality was systematic and anchored in the material order. With the Marxists, he considered social class at the core of the social structure of compensations, but he followed Weber in defining class in terms of the marketplace and the occupational order. Despite their indebtedness to Weber, Parkin and Giddens remained relatively close to Marxism in their concern for addressing the material order of class and its centrality in contemporary societies.

The sixth part (Chapters 20 and 21) deals with cultural studies, concentrating on the works of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, and Pierre Bourdieu. These writers called attention to the relationship between culture and social class. While acknowledged as one of the most noted British Marxist historians and a former member of the British Communist Party, Thompson sought to distance himself from what he considered Marxist economic determinism. He defined class in terms of experience, whereas Hall introduced identity and race as elements necessary for understanding social class. Eagleton revisited the so-called shrinking of the working class and claimed that, far from disappearing, it was increasing because of the incorporation of women into the workforce. Bourdieu drew on both Marx and Weber in defining social classes, but he remained closer to Weber through his use of the notion of legitimacy. For him, acceptance or rejection of the social world was based on legitimacy, and therefore class relations could not be reduced to power alone. He introduced the concepts of cultural, social, and symbolic capital and thus broadened the definition of social class to capture cultural elements that Marx had excluded.

The last section (Chapters 22–24) focuses on postmodernism and its claim that class was no longer a central analytical category. Báez delivers an insightful study of the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. These two pairs of writers had been Marxists but had progressively moved away from Marxism to what they called “post-Marxism.” They relied on linguistic and discourse analysis to make the claim that social class analysis was no longer a useful lens for observing contemporary societies. Laclau and Mouffe proposed a theory of discourse that replaced reality with discursiveness. According to Norman Geras, this led them to relativism in that they claimed that all objects acquired their existence through discourse, implying that there was no such a thing as objectivity, only prediscursive reality (591). Hardt and Negri proposed the concept of “multitude” to replace social class. The multitude was “a new version of social class. . . . It implies that the working classes are in the minority. . . . They become the majority when we add all the workers that carry out intellectual, immaterial, autonomous work, whether it is direct or creative, or routine tasks, which are inevitably subordinated” (616). Because of its vagueness, this concept has been identified with the people, the popular sectors, or the plebs. According to Báez, Hardt and Negri’s idea of the revolutionary subject is linked to the development of contemporary capitalism, in which the “actual distinction between ordinary work and socially necessary labor has lost its importance. The distinctions between productive and unproductive labor and between production and circulation have also lost their importance. Today, productive labor is no longer what produces capital directly but what ‘reproduces society’” (615). In short, according to Hardt and Negri, the Marxist labor theory of value no longer had an economic function because it was embedded in a specific form of the labor process and a type of capitalist accumulation that had been superseded.

Báez proposes the collective worker as the subject of changes that could potentially lead to participative socialism or egalitarian democracy. This concept is embedded in Marx’s view that the working class is made up of both productive and unproductive workers. While unproductive workers do not produce surplus value, they still enable capitalists to appropriate surplus value. Thus, breaking down the capitalist system is in the interest of both types of worker. The collective worker builds social power through class struggle and constructing alliances with other sectors of society, which may include, under certain historical circumstances, sectors of the middle class that play a direct role in the global functions of capital. Social power is different from economic power, which is based on property and control of economic resources. The power of the state depends on rules (laws and statutes) and its capacity to enforce them through its “monopoly of the use of legitimate violence.” Therefore, to achieve egalitarian democracy or participative socialism it is necessary to link social power to state power in such a way that the latter is subordinated to the former. It follows that the combination of social and state power would, in turn, subordinate economic power in society. Báez concludes that the vital interest of the collective worker or the working class is to replace capitalism.

The appearance of Desigualdad y clases sociales is opportune given that social inequality has become a threat to democracy. It reminds us that the concept of class remains pertinent to analyzing modern societies and that the working class still makes up the majority of the exploited and oppressed. Distinction in terms of income, credentials, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation dilutes the fact that the vast majority of the so-called middle class is essentially working-class, the strategic subject of change. Revolution is the long-term goal of the exploited and oppressed, but in the meantime it is of the utmost importance to begin by waging coordinated political and social struggles for change that will improve the lives of all workers, productive and unproductive.