Logics of exploitation: subsumption and imprinting

2017

The question of class rests at the center of a left-Marxist project. Nonetheless, ›class‹ has not really played much of a role in recent stratecig debates and political prax- ises. The reasons are manyfold: since the 1970s, social democracy has abandoned the question of class in favor of models that assume a diversity of social strata; dis- tancing themselves from an understanding of class reduced to male industrial labor, new social movements have turned to questions of gender relations, the post-co- lonial legacy and ecology; and the ›end of socialism‹ has also done its part. At the same time, social antagonisms have inten- sified in Western industrial countries as a consequence of a financialised capitalism in crisis and declining profit rates. The lat- ter are being ›compensated‹ for by means of flexibilization, downward pressure on wages, and the destruction of public infra- structure, carried out on the backs of the majority of the population. Most recently, the successes on the right – from BREXIT through the Front National and AfD up to the election of Donald Trump in the US – have, in a strange way, put the question of class back on the agenda: legitimate anger on the part of those who feel they are being held back by this system and aren’t being represented has in many places been expressed by a rightward turn. How could critique of the current state of democracy and social inequality be articulated differently? Could left-wing politics by making »class experiences« once again their subject demarcate a clearer difference from ruling elites? Could this help forming a »connecting antagonism« (Candeias) from different perspectives? The answer cannot lie in going ›back‹ to old conceptions of »class struggle«! Collective effort is required to map out a »new class politics« that does not posit identity politics and the social question as antagonistic to each other, but rather overthrows all the relations under which so many suffer. Herein lies a chance to both sharpen emancipatory struggles in terms of class politics and draw the line against their selective integration within neoliberalism, as well as to read feminism, ecology, and anti-racism as integral aspects of »ques- tions of class«, thus (finally) placing them at the center of a left project. How can various parts of the class be connected? How can we read precarious labor in traditionally female vocations as a question of both gender relations and class relations? And how can racism be recognized as a form through which one part of the class is pitted against others? Creating solidarity is complicated, but more urgent than ever! The LuXemburg Magazine has worked on some of these questions. The present brochure assembles a selection of texts on the topic. with: Bernd Riexinger, Anne Steckner, Barbara Fried, Alex Demirović, Volker Woltersdorf, Markus Wissen, Bernd Röttger

Social Thought and Research, 1986

Conservatives don't dare to designate the increasing polarisation of income, power, education, and consumption norms as re-configuration of class society. Some even call for a clear class consciousness of the bourgeois class facing the so-called ›urban underclass‹ or the Precariat. Is this Precariat more than “a kind of impossible group“(Wacquant), fragmented along class, gender or ethno-national ascriptions? Or do we experience a kind of ›re-making of the working class‹? The Precariat is struggling, some times spontaneous, sometimes organised, not on a common ground, rather along diverse segmentations. A variety of new labour struggles or unrest emerges, but usually not interconnected to each other, and even less related to feminist or migrant struggles or struggles around the public sphere. Here the notion of restrictive and expanded capacity to act (Handlungsfähigkeit), of building agency comes into play. And also the notion of ›class‹ might play a role for the understanding of social transformations, to find a common interest formation across different segments, to articulate the different struggles? But we have to deal with the danger of fragmentation in a productive way, preventing wrong forms of unifying the movement whilenegating differences? This leads to the old question of the subaltern as political subject, and to a theoretical questioning of marxist class theory, or in other words to release it from vulgar classism. (2009)

Pragmatics, 2010

This paper describes how political discourse, as manifested in the policy statements of two Flemish political parties which assign to themselves the epithet 'social', contributes to the erasion of group-based or classrelated forms of social inequality. A brief comparison with the academic defense of 'Third Way' politics (in the work of Anthony Giddens) leads to the suggestion that we are witnessing a hegemonic process.

This general introduction locates the GBCS papers on the elite, and their respondents, within a context. It emphasizes some of the key points made by the respondents in order to intervene in a discussion about what is at stake in doing sociological research on class. It draws attention to the differences between on the one hand status and stratification, and on the other class struggle perspectives, and hence the difference between a hierarchical gradational analysis and a relational one based on the struggle between groups over value. I begin to answer a question raised by many of the respondents in this special issue: ‘what is the question that the analysis of class is designed to answer?’ I also draw attention to some of the problems with Bourdieu’s ‘structuring architecture’, showing how the partial reproduction of Bourdieu presents fundamental problems, leading to a Great British Stratification Survey (‘GBSS’) rather than aGBCS. The different trajectories in class analysis that confusingly merge over the concept of culture in the present are briefly mapped, showing very different intentions in analysis. I argue that to understand class we need to understand the processes of classification: exploitation, domination, dispos- session and devaluation, and their legitimation. Overall this special issue extends the sociological debate on class into a larger political frame about injustice, classification and value. It develops arguments from anthropology that maintain that it is the ability to define what value is (through culture) that is the ultimate difference in politics and power.

2011

I have selected these three articles for their important contribution to contemporary debates around social class, and, in particular, their development of conceptions of class that encompass understandings of how class is lived and experienced on an individual as well as collective level. Neither the cultural nor the embodied experiences of being classed were satisfactorily addressed in the conventional approaches to class theory that dominated the last half of the twentieth century.