Social class

• 1. Introduction

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  Social class shapes the schools a person attends, the jobs open to them, when they retire, whom they may marry, and how police and the courts treat them. Yet ask a sociologist to define it and you will not get a clean answer. The term carries a wide range of sometimes conflicting meanings, and there is no broad consensus on what class actually is. Some people argue that because of social mobility, class boundaries do not exist at all. The word itself comes from the Latin classis, used by census takers to sort citizens by wealth and decide their military service obligations. So how did an accounting tool for armies become the lens through which sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and social historians read entire societies? Who decides which stratum a person belongs to, and on what grounds? The answers depend on whom you ask: a man writing about factories, a man writing about prestige, a man writing about taste, or a survey of 160,000 people. Each drew the lines of class in a different place.

• 2. Marx And The Means

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  Karl Marx defined class by one thing: a person's relationship to the means of production. In his reading of modern capitalist society, the proletariat work but do not own those means. The bourgeoisie invest and live off the surplus the proletariat generates, and do not work at all. For Marx, class was both objective and subjective. Objectively, a class shares a common relationship to production. Subjectively, its members develop what he called class consciousness, a perception of their similarity and shared interest, plus a set of views about how society should be legally, culturally, socially, and politically organized. Marx argued that as the bourgeoisie accumulate wealth, they gain enough power to shape political institutions in their own interests. The non-elite class, by sheer numbers, hold the power to overthrow the elite. He described a layered army of labor: an industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requiring officers, the managers, and sergeants, the foremen and over-lookers, who command in the name of the capitalist. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx set the proletariat the goal of displacing capitalism with socialism, then developing into a communist society in which, in his words, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. That endpoint was a classless society where human needs, not profit, drive production, with no class, no state, and no need for money or banks. Later thinkers stretched Marx's binary. Erik Olin Wright described contradictory class locations, the idea that a person can occupy several class positions at once through multiple jobs, familial ties across classes, or a temporary leadership role.

• 3. Weber's Three Components

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  Max Weber broke with Marx on a single point: ownership of capital was not the whole story. Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, built from the interplay of class, status, and power. Class was a person's economic position, but unlike Marx, Weber refused to make it the supreme factor. He noted that managers of corporations control firms they do not own. Status, which Weber called Stand, emerged from estimations of honor or prestige rather than capital. He observed that poets and saints can wield immense influence with little economic worth. In Europe, some aristocrats lacked economic wealth yet kept political power, while many wealthy Jewish families lacked prestige because they were treated as a pariah group. Power, his third component, was a person's ability to get their way despite the resistance of others. An employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a member of the United States Congress might hold little property or status, yet command immense power. Academics later drew on this split to separate social class, a person's relatively stable cultural background, from socioeconomic status, the current and more changeable economic situation. That distinction would matter when a survey tried to measure both at once.

• 4. Bourdieu's Capitals

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  Pierre Bourdieu placed a person in the social strata more vaguely than Weber did, and he did it with capital, several kinds of it. There was economic capital, assets convertible to money and secured as private property. Against that he set culturally constituted forms: personal cultural capital, meaning formal education and knowledge; objective cultural capital, meaning books and art; and institutionalized cultural capital, meaning honours and titles. Bourdieu first published his theory of social distinction in 1979. Decades later that framework left the seminar room. On the 2nd of April 2013, results from a survey by BBC Lab UK, developed with academic experts and slated for the journal Sociology, were published online. The survey covered 160,000 residents of the United Kingdom, most of them living in England and describing themselves as white. It measured class by three resources: economic capital as income and assets; cultural capital as the amount and type of cultural interests and activities; and social capital as the quantity and social status of a person's friends, family, and contacts. The three-capital design was Bourdieu's, applied at a scale he never had.

• 5. Three Rungs Of Wealth

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  Today most discussions of class assume three economic categories, and they sort almost entirely by wealth and power. At the top sits the upper class: the rich, the well-born, the powerful, or some mix of the three, usually wielding the greatest political power. It is generally contained within the richest one or two percent of the population, with wealth passed down through generations as estates. By some new social and political theories, the upper class is the wealthiest decile group, holding nearly 87 percent of a society's wealth. The middle class holds jobs paying significantly more than the poverty line, with examples ranging from factory workers and salespeople to teachers, cooks, and nurses. In one model, the paradox of interest theory, the middle class sits in the 6th to 9th decile groups and holds nearly 12 percent of total wealth. It is also the most contested category. In the United States the label is applied so broadly that it includes people who would elsewhere be counted as working class, and its members are sometimes called white-collar workers. The lower class, occasionally called the working class, works low-paying wage jobs with very little economic security, and the term also simply means people with low income. Within it sits a further split. The working poor are employed but financially insecure, while an underclass of the long-term unemployed or homeless, often on state welfare, is treated today as analogous to the Marxist lumpenproletariat. In Marx's own time, the lumpenproletariat meant those in dire poverty, such as the homeless. The people who do this work are sometimes called blue-collar workers, and the conditions of that work expose them to obvious physical hazards, injury, and even death.

• 6. The Weight Of Position

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  Societies with large class differences carry a greater proportion of people who suffer anxiety and depression symptoms, a relationship demonstrated across a series of scientific studies. The starkest evidence is in how long people live. Between two Stockholm suburbs, the poorer and less-well-educated inhabitants near the station and the highly educated, more affluent inhabitants near Danderyd differ in life expectancy by 18 years. Education compounds the gap. Upper-class parents send children to exclusive schools, and in many places the state-supported schools serving upper-class children are of far higher quality than those the state provides for the lower classes. Paul Willis examined the other end of this in his 1977 book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, a study of working-class boys and their antipathy to acquiring knowledge. Beverley Skeggs described its irony as how cultural and economic reproduction is made possible by the lads' celebration of the hard, macho world of work. Mobility can also be blocked from above. A 2015 study by the Social Mobility Commission described a glass floor in British society that keeps less able children from wealthier backgrounds from slipping down, proposing they are 35 percent more likely to become high earners than bright poor children. Class even reaches into leisure: those of an upper social class are more likely to take part in sporting activities, though they tend to avoid certain sports long linked to the lower class.

• 7. When Class Was Law

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  The class system reaches back to Ancient Egypt, where elite standing was marked by literacy and the wealthy sat at the top while common people and slaves sat at the bottom. The system was not rigid. A man of humble origins could rise to a high post, and the Egyptians viewed men and women of all classes as essentially equal under the law, so even the lowliest peasant could petition the vizier for redress. Yet one observer wrote that not a single Egyptian was free in our sense, since no individual could question a hierarchy that culminated in a living god. Farmers were the bulk of the population, but the state, temple, or noble family owned the produce, and farmers owed a labor tax through the corvée system of irrigation and construction. Scribes and officials formed the upper class, known as the white kilt class for the bleached linen that marked their rank. Elsewhere, law wrote class onto the body. Sumptuary laws stipulated the dress and jewelry appropriate to a person's rank, reserving sumptuous dressing for high ranks and aristocracy, and they grew increasingly common in Europe during the Middle Ages. Even those lines could blur, as the distinction between patrician and plebeian was almost erased during the late Roman Republic. In some places the link between ethnicity and class hardened into law: the caste systems in Africa, apartheid, the position of the Burakumin in Japanese society, and the casta system in Latin America.

• 8. The Classless Horizon

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau shaped the political ideals of the French Revolution through his views on inequality. He saw humans as naturally pure and good, innocent from birth, with evil learned through the development of society. Private property, he argued, was the main source of social ills, because its value creates inequality. Even so, Rousseau accepted that social inequality would always exist given how society is run. Later Enlightenment thinkers turned that judgment around, treating inequality as valuable and crucial to a society's development and prosperity, and seeing the competition between classes as necessary. A classless society answers them directly: one in which no one is born into a social class, where distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or network arise only from individual experience and achievement. Because such distinctions are hard to avoid, anarchists and communists who advocate it propose various means to achieve and maintain it. Public belief in the opposite is widespread. In a Swedish survey, nine out of ten people considered it correct that they live in a class society. India, Nepal, North Korea, Sri Lanka, and some Indigenous peoples maintain social classes today, a reminder that the census takers' old Latin word still draws lines through living populations.