I decided to write this book because I was dissatisfied with the character of both academic and journalistic writing on class in post-industrial societies at the beginning of the twenty first century. The Academic writing was (mostly) embedded in an internal debate within Sociology. Even those contributions which drew on the insights of Marx and Weber had lost sight of the relationship between the transformed character of the whole social order and the way in which class is lived by people. In failing to understand class not only in terms of identities engendered by lived experience but also as something lived in an active sense: that is as a source of potential association and action towards transformation, the debate was generally passive and disempowering. Journalistic writing was at best naïve. The term working class was disassociated from reference to the wage labour relationship and used merely as a label for the poorest and most dispossessed part of that class. The reality of exploitation as a basis for the determination of class status did not appear in often self pitying or voyeuristic othering descriptions. Even when written against attacks on those “others”—for example Jones Chavs (2011)—whose subtitle was ‘the demonization of the working class’, by equating the working class only with its poorest and most dispossessed fraction, the argument lost sight of the complex and dynamic relationships among individual lives, the class structure, and the contemporary form of the capitalist mode of production. These approaches miss the significance of class as a source for action in the world in which we live and will live.
Contemporary debates are unsatisfactory because they do not take proper account of the dynamic nature of class. This dynamism exists at the level of individual lives, at the level of households , a key social formation in which lives are lived, at the level of places in the sense both of neighbourhoods and even more importantly localities which provide the spatial frame for social existence, and at the level of the whole capitalist social order itself. To take these in reverse order, we need to recognize the enormous significance of what I am going to call the second ‘great if partial’ transformation. The Great Transformation was the title of Polanyi ’s (1944) account of the relationship between the development of the modern state and the creation of a society dominated by the market form of social relations. What Polanyi paid less attention to was the simultaneous development of industrial capitalism, of the implications of the new technologies of energy production, and particularly of coal based energy, for the production of material commodities through a factory system. What emerged from his great transformation was not just market capitalism but industrial market capitalism. The formerly ‘Advanced Industrial Countries’—that is the industrial capitalisms of Europe and North America 1 —now have economic systems which are post-industrial in that both the proportion of economically active people engaged in any form of industrial production is now a fraction of what it was and the value of industrial product in those countries is much lower as a proportion of overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although still higher proportionately than is the case for the industrial component of the labour force. We do not live in a post-industrial world. Rather industrial production has shifted its location from the global North to the global East and South, particularly to China but also to countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, Vietnam etc. 2 There is a world of industrial capitalism, much of it under the political control of the Chinese Communist Party, but it is not where it was.
I use the term ‘great if partial’ transformation to describe what has happened to ‘formerly Advanced Industrial Countries’ in my adult life time because whilst they have certainly become post-industrial they are still dominated by market relations, to a degree even more than in the industrial era. That is a consequence of the recommodification and marketization of public services through privatization . They remain capitalist in that the means of production are overwhelmingly owned by capitalists and the great majority of working adults obtain their living by selling their labour. So we have a post-industrial capitalism and the first level of dynamic change which we have to engage with is precisely that ‘great if partial’ transformation.
This is evident at the level of place. The great powerhouses of the former industrial world are now either rustbelts or have been expropriated by new forms of capital accumulation based on the secondary and quaternary modes of accumulation—on speculation in the value of real property and speculation in financial instruments, as opposed to the primary mode of accumulation, the production of real commodities. World Cities—New York and London for example—were major zones of industrial production fifty years ago. Changes in places have had enormous consequences for the lives of the people who live in them BUT these consequences are not uniform. The interwoven dynamics of individual lives and the households in which the domestic parts of those lives are lived are shaped by place but shaped in very different ways depending on other causal factors at the level both of the individual and the household . Every post-industrial city region has its prosperous neighbourhoods. Nunthorpe in Middlesbrough on Teesside , one of the most severely deindustrialized having been one of the most industrialized city regions in the world, is in the least deprived 10% of English Wards by the 2015 Index of Multiple Deprivation. Yet Middlesbrough has the highest proportion of its neighbourhoods of any English municipality—nearly 50%—in the most deprived 10% in England. Ingleby Barwick in Stockton, another borough in deindustrialized Teesside , is often claimed to be the largest owner occupied housing development in Europe. It is very much a location of the ‘missing middle ’ (Byrne 2005) so often ignored in class analyses. The two wards which make it up are both in the least deprived quartile in England. We find the same in the Cleveland Ohio City region where suburbs like Shaker Heights, a multi racial inner ring suburb, are radically different in terms of income and education levels from Cleveland itself and the Gross Pointe suburbs adjacent to Detroit—the paradigm of urban deindustrialization—are among the most prosperous areas in the USA. 3 The dynamics or urban change are both inter-urban and intra-urban.
The class debate literature in Sociology usually fails to consider how the lives of individual people AND of the households in which they live are also dynamic. People move through their lives. They move spatially, both within city regions and across city regions, and even to deep rural areas on retirement. As Callaghan (1998) has shown, they have a vision of their future life based on movement up 4 and a very clear sense of class character as expressed through neighbourhood of residence. They move through households from their families of origin—childhood and adolescence may be lived in more than one household —mine was—and often through multiple households in adult life—I have. They move through educational systems and in income levels where the composition of their households in adult life in terms of numbers of earners can be crucial. They move in terms of cultural identity, although this can be very ‘sticky’ and in political orientation, which again can be very ‘sticky’. Social Policy studies have appreciated the significance of the dynamism of lives. Sociology really has not.
Much of the literature is siloed in introverted disciplinary debates. There is little discussion in the Sociological literature on class of the way in which Social Policy has deployed the notion of social exclusion and related this to the rights and status of citizenship. Social Policy pays insufficient attention to the structural determinants of the inequalities it examines. One symptom of this siloing is the virtual absence in the sociological literature of consideration of the way in which states in various ways and at every level—supra-national, national, regional and local—play a constitutive role in the construction of class positions. This is most evident in relation to the role of the state in the delivery of incomes in cash and in kind, and in the role of taxation in reducing incomes available for consumption. Other than a social mobility driven concern with education systems and class, and the literature on health inequalities by class, there is little sociological engagement with the state as a crucial agent in the formation of classes and class identities. Those literatures, although of course useful in giving us an empirical account of the effects of class structure, engage only partially with the generative mechanisms of class formation.
As for the significance of place in the causal processes which constitute class structures, there is less relationship between the sociological consideration of class and social geography’s interest in spatial inequalities, particularly inequalities at the intra urban regional level, than one might expect from the long established intersection of interests of urban geographers and urban sociologists. Much of the geographical literature is descriptive but we can relate spatial evidence on intra and inter urban regional inequalities to the generative processes which have transformed an industrial into a post-industrial social structure.
The emphasis on dynamism is a lead in for me to explain the sub-title of this book: A Complex Realist Approach to Understanding the Dynamics of Class and Class Identities. Complex realism is a synthesis developed by Reed and Harvey (1992) of Bhaskar ’s philosophical ontology of critical realism (1979) and the scientific ontology of complexity. Complex systems 5 cannot be understood by a reductionist analytical programme which seeks to explain the nature of the system in terms of the causal properties of its components. Rather their character is an emergent product of complex interactions among their components, which may themselves be complex, of the components with the system as a whole and of the system with other systems at multiple levels which have significant relationships with it. Complex systems have dynamic trajectories...