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Social class

Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. Anthropologists, historians and sociologists identify class as universal, although what determines class will vary widely from one society to another. Even within a society, different people or groups may have very different ideas about what makes one "high" or "low" in the hierarchy.


Contents

Dimensions of social class

The most basic class distinction between two groups is between the powerful and the powerless. Social classes with more power usually subordinate classes with less power, while attempting to cement their own power positions in society. Social classes with a great deal of power are usually viewed as elites, at least within their own societies.

In the simplest societies, power is closely linked to the ability to assert one's status through physical strength, thus age, gender, and physical health are often common delineators of class in rudimentary tribes. However, spiritual charisma and religious vision can be at least as important. Also, because different livelihoods are so closely intertwined in simple societies, morality often ensures that the old, the young, the weak, and the sick maintain a good standard of living despite low class status.

As societies expand and become more complex, economic power will often replace physical power as the defender of the class status quo, so that the following will establish one's class much more so than physical power:

Those who can attain a power position in a society will often adopt distinctive lifestyles to emphasize their prestige, and as a way to further rank themselves within the powerful class. In certain times and places, the adoption of these stylistic traits can be as important as one's wealth in determining class status, at least at the higher levels:

Finally, fluid notions such as race and sexual orientation can have widely varying degrees of influence on class standing. Having characteristics of the majority ethnic group and engaging in marriage to produce offspring improve one's class status in most societies. But what is considered "racially superior" in one society may be exactly the opposite in another, and there have been societies, such as ancient Greece, in which intimacy with someone of the same gender would improve one's social status so long as it occurred alongside opposite-gender marriage. Also a minority sexual orientation and, to a far lesser degree, minority ethnicity have often been faked, hidden, or discreetly ignored if the person in question otherwise attained the requirements to be high class. Ethnicity is still often the single most overarching issue of class status in some societies (see Wikipedia articles on apartheid, the Caste system in Africa, and the Japanese Burakumin ethnic minority for examples).

Social class:This graphic shows a definition of social class proposed by the New York Times, using quintiles as measurement for class. The information was based on US Census data from the 2000 Census as well as the 2003 Economic census survey. The graphic shows four different attributes which affect social class: professional prestige, educational attainment, income, and wealth.
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This graphic shows a definition of social class proposed by the New York Times, using quintiles as measurement for class. The information was based on US Census data from the 2000 Census as well as the 2003 Economic census survey. The graphic shows four different attributes which affect social class: professional prestige, educational attainment, income, and wealth.

The Middle Class

For most of human history, societies have been agricultural and have existed with essentially two classes- those who owned productive agricultural land, and those who worked for them, with the landowning class arranging itself into a sometimes elaborate hierarchy based on the criteria listed in the previous section, but without ever changing the essential power relationship of owner and worker. About the 1770s, when the term "social class" first entered the English lexicon, the concept of a "middle class" within that structure was also becoming very important. The Industrial Revolution was allowing a much greater portion of the population time for the kind of education and cultural refinement once restricted to the European leisure class of large landholders. Also, the far greater distribution of news and liberal arts knowledge was making workers question and rebel against the privileges and religious assumptions of the leisure class.

Today, most talk of social class assumes three general categories: an upper class of powerful owners, a middle class of people who may not exert power over others but do control their own destiny to a certain extent through commerce or land ownership, and a lower class of people who do not own property nor stock in the corporate system and who rely on wages from above for their livelihood. Since the Age of Revolution, Eurocentric governments have generally upheld the middle class as the ideal, and have at least claimed to be working toward expanding it. Especially in the United States, the ideal of a middle class reached via the American Dream is of central importance when discussing social class.

Historical models

Although class can be discerned in any society, some cultures have published specific guidelines to rank. In some cases, the ideologies presented in these rankings may not concur with the power dialectic of social class as it is understood in modern English use.

Indian

The Indian caste system is one of the oldest and most important systems of social class with peculiar rigidity (in the sense it is watertight class, with absence of upward or downward mobility,in caste hierarcy). It divided (and still divides) society based on heredity. In its simplest form, the Brahmin class, at the top, was idealized as a leisurely priest class devoted to religious ceremonies, while the Kshatriya defended them as military princes. These groups, roughly equating to the modern idea of an upper class, could be attained by the lower classes through reincarnation or rebirth in a later life so long as the lower class person upheld the dictates given them by the current rulers, i.e., Brahmins. The modern concept of the middle class was represented by the Vaishya caste of artisans, farmers, and merchants, and the lower classes were the Shudra and Ati-shudra laborers and members of the present OBC's and SC's, i.e., constitutional terms for Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes groups, who were restricted to occupations deemed low and unclean by the religious establishment. Within this basic framework were arranged a huge number of jatis, or subcastes. Despite being notorious for its rigidity, the caste system has in modern times been frequently inverted, and at least one president of India has come from the SC castes.

Chinese

Traditional Chinese society divided workers based on the perceived usefulness of their work and was somewhat more fluid than the Indian caste system. Scholars ranked the highest because the opportunity to conceive clear ideas in a state of leisure would lead them to wise laws (an idea that has much in common with Plato's ideal of a philosopher king). Under them were the farmers, who produced necessary food, and the artisans who produced useful objects. Merchants ranked at the bottom because they did not actually produce anything, while soldiers were sometimes ranked even lower due to their destructiveness. The Confucian model is notably different from the modern Eurocentric view of social class, since merchants could attain great wealth without reaching the social status accorded to a poor farmer. In truth, a rich merchant might purchase land to reach farmer status, or even buy a good education for his heirs in the hopes that they would attain scholar status and go into the imperial civil service. The Chinese model was widely disseminated throughout east Asia.[1]

Japanese

The Japanese class structure, while influenced by the Chinese, was based on a much more feudal environment. The Emperor, as a deity, was unquestionably at the pinnacle of the Japanese class structure (and still is, despite no longer being considered a god). However, for most of Japanese history the emperor was not allowed outside the palace grounds and his will was "interpreted" by a shogun, or military dictator. Beneath the shogun, daimyos, or regional lords, administered the provinces through their samurai lieutenants. Possibly through Chinese influence, and possibly springing from a lack of arable land, the Japanese class structure also ranked farmers above merchants and other bourgeois workers.

Iranian

The respect for individual achievement in Abrahamic religion often gave independent actors such as legislators and merchants greater status relative to the farmers of Dharmic religion, who had to work in concert with the land. But the protection of landowners' leisure through military force or religious guilt remained constant. Under the Qajar dynasty of Iran, the class structure was set up as follows:

As in many official class structures, the laborers who made up the majority of the population, but owned no land and relied on wages, were not even considered part of the structure at all. [2]

French

For most of France's history, it was an absolute monarchy, with the king at the pinnacle of the class structure. However, the French States-General, established in 1302, provided some sort of legislative assembly with its members ranked according to hereditary class. The First Estate consisted of the highborn sons of great families who had devoted themselves to religion (compare to the Indian Brahmins, Confucian scholars, and Qajar theology students). The Second Estate was highborn sons who were devoted to war (compare to the Indian Ksatriyas and Japanese daimyos, but contrast with the low status given to soldiers in China). The Third Estate consisted, technically, of everyone else, but was represented only by the richest members of the bourgeoisie. In truth, the peasantry had no voice at all in the system, as contrasted with the ideologically high status of farmers in Confucian China. The rigidity of the French hereditary system was a major cause of the French Revolution.

British

The Parliament of the United Kingdom still contains a vestige of the European class structure undone in France by the Revolution. The Queen maintains her status at the top of the social class structure, with the House of Lords up until very recently still representing the hereditary upper class and the House of Commons technically representing everyone else. As with the French States-General, the House of Commons historically spoke just for the gentry and very rich bourgeoisie. In the Victorian era of the United Kingdom, social class became a national obsession, with nouveau riche industrialists in the House of Commons trying to attain the status of House of Lords landowners through attempts to dress, eat, and talk in an upper class manner, marriages arranged to achieve titles, and the purchase of grand country houses built to emulate the old aristocracy's feudal castles. It was the Victorian middle class who tried to distance themselves from the lower class with terms such as "working class", which seemed to imply that their new white collar positions couldn't really be considered "work" since they were so clean, modern, and safe.

It was also in 19th century Britain that the term Fourth Estate was used to describe the press. Thomas Carlyle equated the Queen to France's First Estate of clergy, the House of Lords to France's Second Estate of hereditary aristocracy, and the House of Commons to France's Third Estate of rich bourgeoisie. But he then pointed out that the editors of newspapers in Britain's booming Industrial Revolution (similar to the pamphleteers before and during the French Revolution) held powerful sway over public opinion, making them equally important players in the political arena. The political role of the media has become ever more important as technology has blossomed in the 20th and 21st centuries, but few academic models today set aside the media as a specific class.

United States

Main article: Social structure of the United States

The social structure of the United States is a vaguely defined concept which includes several commonly used term that use educational attainment, income and occupational prestige as the main determinants of class.

Social class:Image:America Class.jpg

Marxist

Social class:An Industrial Worker capitalist class critique
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An Industrial Worker capitalist class critique

It was in Victorian Britain that Karl Marx became the first person to critically attack the privileges not just of an hereditary upper class, but of anyone whose labor output could not begin to cover their consumption of luxury. The majority proletariat which had previously been relegated to an unimportant compartment at the bottom of most hierarchies, or ignored completely, became Marx's focal point. He recognized the traditional European ruling class ("We rule you"), supported by the religious ("We fool you") and military {"We shoot at you") élites, but the French Revolution had already shown that these classes could be removed. Marx looked forward to a time when the new capitalist upper class could also be removed and everyone could work as they were able, and receive as they needed.

Karl Marx defined class in terms of the extent to which an individual or social group has control over the means of production. In Marxist terms a class is a group of people defined by their relationship to the means of production. Classes are seen to have their origin in the division of the social product into a necessary product and a surplus product. Marxists explain the history of "civilized" societies in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who actually produce the goods or services in society (and also developments in technology and the like). In the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wage-workers (the proletariat). For Marxists, class antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods -- in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeosie.

Marx himself argued that it was the goal of the proletariat itself to displace the capitalist system with socialism, changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which: "..the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." (Communist Manifesto).

Vladimir Lenin has defined classes as "large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. A Great Beginning

Proletarianisation

The most important transformation of society for Marxists has been the massive and rapid growth of the proletariat in the world population during the last two hundred and fifty years. Starting with agricultural and domestic textile labourers in England and Flanders, more and more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries.[citation needed] Private enterprise or self-employment in a variety of occupations is no longer as viable as it once was, and so many people who once controlled their own labour-time are converted into proletarians.[citation needed] Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth -- like doctors, academics or lawyers -- are now increasingly working as wage labourers.[citation needed] Marxists call this process proletarianisation, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the "first world." However, only in the strongly social-democratic societies such as Sweden is there much long-term evidence of the weakening of the consequences of social class.

The increasing dissolution of the peasant-lord relationship (see pre-capitalist societies), initially in the commercially active and industrialising countries, and then in the unindustrialised countries as well, has virtually eliminated the class of peasants. Poor rural labourers still exist, but their current relationship with production is predominantly as landless wage labourers or rural proletarians. The destruction of the peasantry, and its conversion into a rural proletariat, is largely a result of the general proletarianisation of all work. This process is today largely complete, although it was arguably incomplete in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dialectics, or historical materialism, in Marxist class

Marx saw class categories as defined by continuing historical processes. Classes, in Marxism, are not static entities, but are regenerated daily through the productive process. Marxism views classes as human social relationships which change over time, with historical commonality created through shared productive processes. A 17th century farm labourer who worked for day wages shares a similar relationship to production as an average office worker of the 21st century. In this example, it is the shared structure of wage labour that makes both of these individuals "working class."

Objective and subjective factors in class in Marxism

Marxism has a rather heavily defined dialectic between objective factors (i.e., material conditions, the social structure) and subjective factors (i.e. the conscious organization of class members). While most Marxism analyses people's class based on objective factors (class structure), major Marxist trends have made greater use of subjective factors in understanding the history of the working class. E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is a definitive example of this "subjective" Marxist trend. Thompson analyses the English working class as a group of people with shared material conditions coming to a positive self-consciousness of their social position. This feature of social class is commonly termed class consciousness in Marxism, a concept which became famous with Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness (1923). It is seen as the process of a "class in itself" moving in the direction of a "class for itself," a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process. In Lukacs' words, the proletariat was the "subject-object of history", and the first class which could superate false consciousness (inherent to the bourgeois's consciousness), which reified economic laws as universal (whereas they are only a consequence of historic capitalism).

Max Weber

The seminal sociological interpretation of class was advanced by Max Weber. Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with class, status and party (or politics) as subordinate to the ownership of the means of production, but for Weber how they interact is a contingent question and one that will vary from society to society.

Corporate

Modern corporations have established a fairly regular hierarchy, which economists in capitalist nations may extend to delineate social class in the broader society. In direct opposition to the Marxist ideology outlined above, the capitalist ideal is not that the class structure will disappear into an egalitarian utopia. Capitalism holds as an ideal that the smartest and hardest working individuals will rise to the highest levels of the class structure and then use their exceptional skills to raise the standard of living for all classes.

The above model applies in general to large corporations. In a small corporation, the major stockholder may officially be the company's president and may in fact function as both a chief executive officer and general manager, as well as assisting as a worker in daily duties. Also, there may be a wide range of subclasses within a corporate structure. "Supervisors" may regulate daily activity similar to the role of a manager, but without the ability to hire and fire or the access to company money given to a manager.

Academic models

Schools of sociology differ in how they conceptualise class. A distinction can be drawn between analytical concepts of social class, such as the Marxian and Weberian traditions, and the more empirical traditions such as socio-economic status approach, which notes the correlation of income, education and wealth with social outcomes without necessarily implying a particular theory of social structure. The Warnerian approach can be considered empirical in the sense that it is more descriptive than analytical. The traditional `pigeon-holing' mainstay of much of the advertising industry used to be that of social class. This, although it often revolves around occupation (usually that of the head of the household or chief wage-earner), is based on more than just income groups alone. In this way, it used to be assumed that the upper classes were the first to try new products, which then "trickled down" to the lower classes. Historically, there may have been some justification for this. The refrigerator, the washing machine, the automobile, and the telephone were all adopted first by the higher social classes[citation needed]. Recently, however, as affluence has become more widespread, the process has become much less clear. For example, television and in turn color television were more rapidly adopted by persons of lower social class (like the fictional Ralph Kramden, a bus driver) than by those of higher social class (like the fictional Ward Cleaver, a businessman). It is now argued that the new `opinion leaders' come from within the same social class. The class groupings which were traditionally used by the advertising agencies (for example in the NRS social grade schema were: AB - Managerial and professional, C1 -Supervisory and clerical, C2- Skilled manual, DE-Unskilled manual and unemployed. This approach has been reported to be of decreasing value in recent decades, especially in the distinction between clerical workers and manual workers in education and disposable income. Whereas some four decades ago, when these groupings were first widely used, the numbers in each of the main categories (C, D and E) were reasonably well balanced, today the C group in total (although now usually split to give C1 and C2) forms such a large sector that it dominates the whole classification system and offers less in terms of usable concentration of marketing effort. In addition, increased affluence has meant that consumers have developed tastes that are based on other aspects of their life-styles, and class-related behaviour appears to have decreased in terms of purchasing patterns. [3]

William Lloyd Warner

An early example of a stratum class model was developed by the sociologist William Lloyd Warner in his 1949 book, Social Class in America. For many decades, the Warnerian theory was dominant in U.S. sociological theory.

Based on social anthropology, Warner divided Americans into three classes (upper, middle, and lower), then further subdivided each of these into an "upper" and "lower" segment, with the following postulates:

To Warner, American social class was based more on attitudes than on the actual amount of money an individual made. For example, the richest people in America would belong to the "lower-upper class" since many of them created their own fortunes; one can only be born into the highest class. Nonetheless, members of the wealthy upper-upper class tend to be more powerful, as a simple survey of U.S. presidents may demonstrate (i.e., the Roosevelts; Kennedys; Bushes).

Another observation: members of the upper-lower class might make more money than members of the lower-middle class (i.e., a well-salaried factory worker vs. a secretarial worker), but the class difference is based on the type of work they perform.

In his research, findings, Warner observed that American social class was largely based on these shared attitudes. For example, he noted that the lower-middle class tended to be the most conservative group of all, since very little separated them from the working class. The upper-middle class, while a relatively small section of the population, usually "set the standard" for proper American behavior, as reflected in the mass media.

Professionals with salaries and educational attainment higher than those found in the middle of the income strata (e.g. bottom rung professors, managerial office workers, architects) may also be considered as being true middle class.

Paul Fussell

Sociologists who seek fine-grained connections between class and life-outcomes often develop precisely defined social strata, like historian Paul Fussell's semi-satirical nine-tier stratification of American society, published in 1983.

Fussell's model classifies Americans according to the following classes:

  1. Top out-of-sight: the super-rich, heirs to huge fortunes
  2. Upper Class: rich CEOs, diplomats, people who can afford full-time domestic staff, and some high salaried, prominent professionals (examples include surgeons and some highly-paid types of lawyers and bankers)
  3. Upper-Middle Class: self-made well-educated professionals
  4. Middle Class: office workers
  5. High Prole: skilled blue-collar workers
  6. Mid Prole: workers in factories and the service industry
  7. Low Prole: manual laborers
  8. Destitute: the homeless and the disreputable (but still free)
  9. Bottom out-of-sight: those incarcerated in prisons and institutions

Fussell no longer recognized a true lower middle class, its members either having advanced into the middle class due to rising requirements of formal education or becoming indistinguishable from the "high proles" or even the "mid proles".

Dennis Gilbert

In The American Class Structure, 6th edition (Wadsworth 2002), Dennis Gilbert lays out an even more precise breakdown of American social class by providing typical incomes for his conceptions of the classes:

Li Yi

In the Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification (University Press of America, 2005, ISBN 0761833315), Li Yi lays out a detailed model of Chinese social stratification after 1949. In China today, there are a peasant class, a working class (urban state worker and urban collective worker, urban non-state worker, and peasant worker), a capitalist class (about 15 million), and a class of cadre (about 40 million) and quasi-cadre (about 25 million).


Social class:Image:liyi1.jpg


Social class:Image:liyi2.jpg

Problems with the models

Some would argue that any conception of class based on power models is too narrow, since so much of quality of life cannot be expressed in terms of dollars or acres owned. A retired teacher on a small, but adequate, stipend may actually enjoy a great deal more freedom, health, and social respect than an overworked executive making a six figure income at a discredited corporation.

In addition, many people can be difficult to fit into the above models. There is the question, for instance, of whether the wife of an upper class man is automatically upper class herself, even if her education, manners, and her own net worth would place her in a lower class status. Additionally, children, who usually enjoy the comfort and prestige related to their parent's social class, may actually live very poorly with abusive high class parents or at a very high level of consumption and income if their low class parents spoil them. Some youth rights activists would argue that all minors are lower class due to their lack of choice in where they live, how they spend their time, and who makes the laws affecting them. Similar arguments could be made concerning women in many parts of the World.

See also


Social stratification: Social class
Bourgeoisie Upper class Ruling class Nobility White-collar
Petite bourgeoisie Upper middle class Creative class Gentry Blue-collar
Proletariat Middle class Working class Nouveau riche Pink-collar
Lumpenproletariat Lower middle class Lower class Old Money Gold-collar
Slave class Underclass Classlessness
Social class in the United States
Middle classes Upper classes Social structure Income Educational attainment

Further reading

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