(II) Class Formation, Class Struggle & Class Compromise

1. PEDU 6210Education Policy and SocietyTopic 4Education Policy and Social Differentiation: Modern Education as Balance Wheel of Social Origins?

2. EDM 6210Education Policy and SocietyTopic 4 (ii)Understanding Social Class: Class structure, class formation, class struggle, class compromise, …a century’s discourse

3. (II) Class Formation, Class Struggle & Class Compromise

4. Class Formation, Class Struggle & Class Compromise Among the approaches to class analysis, Marxist approach seems to be the most ambiguous. It does not confine its analysis on class delineation and class structure. It extrapolates all the way to the project of human emancipation from all class exploitation. Accordingly, Marxist approach to class analysis can be differentiated into three levels.

5. Class Formation, Class Struggle & Class Compromise …..Accordingly, Marxist approach to class analysis can be differentiated into three levels. (i) Class location, class place and structure analysis: The class in itself thesis (ii) Class formation and class struggle: The class for itself thesis (iii) The theory of history: The thesis of class struggle history

6. Class Formation (Wright, 1997, p. 374)

7. Class Formation, Class Struggle & Class Compromise In the section, we shall survey on how individuals or group of individuals in a particular class location (i.e. class in itself) develop into a self-conscious solidarity and ready to take necessary actions to defend their interest (i.e. class for itself)

8. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Class formation: Erike O. Wright, US sociologist and prominent member of the From Class Structure to Class FormationAnalytical Marxism, writes that “I will use the expression ‘class formation’ either to designate a process (the process of class formation) or an outcome (a class formation). In both cases the expression refers to the formation of collectively organized social forces with class structures in pursuit of class interest. …

9. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Class formation “….If class structures are defined by the antagonistic social relations between class locations, class formations are defined by cooperative social relations within class structure. Strong, solidaristic relations individuals are prepared to make significant sacrifices for collective goals would be one form of class formation, but class formation can also be more narrowly instrumental, without strong solidarities binding people together. ….

10. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Class formation “….. Class formations are important because they constitute a crucial link between class structure and class struggles.” (Wright, 1997, P. 379)

11. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Distinction from traditional Marxist conception: “Understood in this way, the contrast between class structure and class formation is similar to the tradition Marxist distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself. The class in/for itself, however, was linked to a teleological notion of the inevitable trajectory of class struggle within capitalism toward the full revolutionary formation of the proletariat. …

12. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Distinction from traditional Marxist conception: “….. The expression ‘class formation,’ in contrast, does not imply that the collectively organized social forces within a class structure have any inherent tendency to develop toward revolutionary organization around ‘fundamental’ class interests.” (Wright, 1997, P. 380)

13. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: Wright has worked out a micro- and macro-levels to analyze the mechanism of class formation.

15. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At the micro-level: It consists of three constituent concepts • Class location: It refers “to the location on individual (and sometimes families) with the structure of class relation.” (Wright, 1997, P. 379) Within the Marxist tradition, the concept can further be differentiated into • Class place: It refers to the objective location where individual find themselves in the structure of class relation • Class position: It refers to the subjective and collective stances that individuals consciously take and hold in the class relation

16. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At the micro-level: It consists of three constituent concepts • Class consciousness: It refers to the mentalities and subjectivities commonly shared by individuals of a same or similar class positions. It includes the “will” and “intentionality” that class members are holding in relations to various class issues. The concept, according to Wright, can be decomposed into three elements: • Perceptions and observation: This aspect of class consciousness “involves the ways in which the perception of the facts of a situation have a class content and are thus consequential for class action.” It also includes observation and “conscious choice involves processing information about the ‘world’. ‘Facts’ …are always filtered through categories and belief about ‘what exists’.” (Wright, 1997, P. 385)

17. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At the micro-level: It consists of three constituent concepts • Class consciousness: ….. • Theories of consequences: “Perceptions of the facts by themselves are insufficient to allow people to make choices; people also must have some understanding of the expected consequences of given choices of action. This implies that choices involve theories. These may be ‘practical’ theories rather than abstractly formulated theories. …One particular important aspect of such theories is conceptions of what is possible. …Historically, working-class rejections of socialism and communism have as much to do with the belief that such radical alternatives to capitalism would not work or that they are unachievable because of the power of the dominant classes, as with the belief that alternatives to capitalism are undesirable.” (Wright, 1997, P. 286)

18. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At the micro-level: It consists of three constituent concepts • Class consciousness: ….. • Preferences: Knowing a person’s perceptions and theories is still not enough to explain a particular conscious choice, …it is necessary to know their preferences, that is their evaluation of the desirability of those consequences.” These evaluations are not confined only to “selfish and egoistic evaluations” at individual level, but they may “involve deep commitment to the welfare of others based on a sense of shared identity and meaning.” (Wright, 1997, P. 386) • Class practices: It refers to “activities engaged in by members of a class using class capacities in order to realize at least some of their class interests.” (Wright, 1997, p. 381)

19. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At the micro-level: It consists of three constituent concepts • Wright further specifies that these three constituent concepts are related in transforming, limiting and selecting ways, as indicated in Figure 13.8.

21. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At macro-level: As individuals’ class locations, class consciousness and class practices are aggregated or even organized into collective and macroscopic level, they form another three corresponding concepts. • Class structure: It refers to “the overall organization of class relations in some more macro–level of analysis, typically an entire society.” (Wright, 1997, P. 379) To apply the Weberian, more specifically Giddens’, conception of class structuration to the analysis, class structure should represent the macro-level structure and process of how economic classes, which are numerous in number, are aggregated into social class, which are limited in number and more importantly meaningful within a general theoretical perspective of society, such as the Marxism or Weberian perspective.

22. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At macro-level: …. • Class formation: As specified above class formation refers to the process through which social force are collectively formed within class structures in pursuit of commonly shared class interests. Wright has further specified that three are three mechanisms, which may limit or facilitate class formation. They are • Material interests: It refers to “the nature of material interests generated by class structures.” (Wright, 1997, P. 395) According to Marxian conception, the nature of material interests of course refers to the economic inequality resulting from the exploitation of the dominant class imposed on the dominated class. Furthermore, the greater the economic and social inequalities are the more intensive the class antagonism will become and the more likely that class formation will constitute.

23. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At macro-level: …. • Class formation: … • Identity: It refers to the sense of belonging and commitments of members of similar class positions share. Furthermore, it indicate the readiness that members are to participate in class action or to scarify their personal interest for the collective interest of the class or even to the course of class revolution. • Resources: It refers to “the nature of the resources distributed in the class structure which make certain potential alliances across locations in the class structure more or lea attractive.” (Wright, 1997, P. 395) These resources are not limited to financial resources, they also include social and political resources, such as leadership, organization or sheer numbers of people.

24. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At macro-level: …. • Class struggle: It refers to the confrontational actions that a class or class alliance are ready to wage against the oppositional class. According to tradition Marxism, the outright and final class struggle is of course the full scale class revolution.

26. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At macro-level: …. • Class struggle: ….. • However, Erik O. Wright in his recent writing has differentiated three types of politics of class conflict/struggle in accordance with the Marxian, Weberian and Durkheimian approaches. (Wright, 2015, O. 120)

27. (Wright, 2015, O. 120)

28. From Class Structure to Class Formation • Wright’s model of class-formation model: • At micro-level: … • At macro-level: …. • Furthermore that micro-level and macro-level of class formation, according to Wright, are related in mediating and constituting ways as shown in Figure 13.8.

30. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’smethodological stance in class analysis “The construction of the theory of the social space presupposes a series ofbreaks with Marxist theory. • It presupposes a break with the tendency to emphasize substances — here, real groups whose number, limits, members, etc. one claims to be able to define — at the expense ofrelations and • with theintellectualist illusionwhich leads one to consider the theoretical class, constructed by the social scientist, as a real class, an effectively mobilized group; • a break with economics, which leads one to reduce the social field, a multi-dimensional space, to the economic field alone, to the relations of economic production; and

31. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s methodological stance in class analysis “The construction of the theory of the social space …. • a break, finally, with objectivism, which goes hand in hand with intellectualism, and which leads one to overlook the symbolic strugglesthat take place in different fields, and where what is at stake is the very representation of the social world, and in particular the hierarchy within each of the fields and between the different fields.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 229; my numbering)

32. Pierre Bourdieu, (1930-2002)

33. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s theory of social space • Concepts of social space and field • Social space: “The social worldcan be represented in the form of a (multi-dimensional) spaceconstructed on the basis of principles of differentiation and distribution constituted by the set of propertiesactive in the social universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force or poweron their possessor in that universe. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions in this space. Each of them is confined to a position or a precise classof neighbouring position.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 229-230)

34. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s theory of social space • Concepts of social space and field • Field and field of force: “In so far as the properties chosen to construct this space are active properties, the space can also be described as a field of forces: in other words, as a set of objective power relations imposed on all those who enter this field, relations which are not reducible to the intentions of individual agents or even to direct interactions between agents.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230)

35. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s concept of capital: • “The active properties that are chosen as principles of construction of the social space are the different kinds of power or capital that are current in the field.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230, my underline)

36. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s concept of capital: • Definition of capital: “Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its 'incorporated', embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enable them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society—not least, the economic game—something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibilityof a miracle.”(Bourdieu, 1997, p. 46)

37. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s concept of capital: • Forms of capital • Economic capital “is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights.” • Cultural capital can exit in three states (1997, p. 47) • embodied state, i.e. in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; (1997, p. 47) • objectified state, i.e. in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc. • institutionalized state, i.e. in the form of educational qualifications (1997, p. 47)

38. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Bourdieu’s concept of capital: • Forms of capital • Social capital “is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital. (1997, p. 51) • “Symbolic capital commonly called prestige, reputation, fame, etc.” (1991, p.230)

39. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of the “space of positions”: As each forms of capital establishes itself as the active property in a particular a field of force, “a multi-dimensional space of position” is formed. Agents are thus be distributed in this space of positions in two dimensions, “in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of capital they possess, and, in the second dimension, according to the composition of their capital – in other words, according to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital in the total set of their assets.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 231)

40. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of the “space of positions”: • …..Subsequently, Bourdieu reformulates the fundamental dimensions in the constructing space of positions into three. In his own words, “one can construct a space whose three fundamental dimensions are defined by volume of capital, composition of capital, and change in these two properties over time.” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 114)

41. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class: “On the basis of knowledge of the space of positions, one can crave out classes in the logical sense of the word, i.e. sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being place in similar conditions and submitted to similar types of conditioning, have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 231)

42. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Concept of habitus as methodological device synthesizing the controversy between methodological objectivism and idealism and as one of the essential constituting concept of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice/Logic of Practice.

43. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: … • Definition of habitus: It can simply be “defined as a system of dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 214) found in practices of agents and group of agents. More specifically, it refers to • "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively regulated and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing (orchestrating) action of a conductor” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53; 1977, p. 72)

44. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Definition of habitus: …. • “The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions to the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.” (1977, P.78)

46. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Habitus and history: Bourdieu conceives habitus as “a product of history”. • “The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 54)

47. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Habitus and history: Bourdieu conceives habitus as “a product of history”. • “The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted and acting, which functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history and so ensure the permanence in change that makes theindividual agent a world within the world.” (Bourdieu, 1990, P. 56)

48. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Habitus and institution: • Bourdieu indicates that history is not only objectified in habitus and also in institution. He underlines that within the logic of practice, there are “two objectifications of history, objectification in bodies and objectification in institutions.” (1990, p. 57) • The dialectic between habitus and institution: These two modes of objectified history are related in a dialectic way. It is within the logic of practice, there lies “the dialectic between habitus and institutions, that is, between two modes of objectification of past history, in which there is constantly created a history that inevitably appears …as both original and inevitable.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 57) On the one hand, institution or collective history are inculcated, appropriated and socialized into individual and constituted her habitus and individual history. On the other, it is in habitus and its generated practices that institution will find its way to reactivate and realize in daily human practices.

49. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Concept of class habitus: • Concept of class habitus: • One of the primary institutional and historical site in which habitus of agents and groups of agents are formed is class condition. In Bourdieu’s own words, “the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus.” (1990, p. 53) • “Class habitus, that is, the individual habitus in so far as it expresses or reflects the class, could be regarded as a subjective but non-individual system of internal structures, common schemes of perception, conception and action, which are precondition of all objectification and apperception; and the objective co-ordination of practices and the sharing of a world view could be found on the perfect impersonality and interchangeability of singular practices and views.” (1990, p. 60)

50. Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice • Class practice and lifestyle: • In one of his major empirical work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu demonstrates that the most distinct practices among social classes are to be found in the arena of consumptions, more particularly cultural consumptions. These consumptions will not be confined to “canonized forms of culture” such as art, literature, music, theater, etc. but also include consumptions in food, sport, newspapers and magazines, clothing, etc. (Bourdieu, 1987; and Weininger, 2005) • The distinction in class practices can also be revealed in difference in “lifestyle” or “stylization of life”, which can generally be characterized as “the primacy of form over function.” (Bourdieu, 1978, p. 176) • Other distinct class practices can be found in language use and body languagecomposure. (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 176-177)