Social Identity and Class Consciousness

Abstract

The current economic crisis proves how deep the contradictions inherent in contemporary capitalism really are. At the same time it is evident that the financial crisis goes hand in hand with a social crisis, since an increasing number of people lost trust in governments, trade unions, and other representative institutions. A main reason why the European Left nevertheless faces severe challenges in attracting supporters seems to be an experienced loss of what has been called ‘working class identity’ in earlier times. This development has been fueled by the continuing debate on ‘identity constructions’ as proposed, e.g. by post-modernist scholars referring to ‘fluid’ and ambiguous concepts of identity and strictly denying any social categorization. So, there is a gap between the loss of working-class identity on one hand and the focus on merely social identities on the other hand. To bridge this gap the two trajectories have to be linked. Thus, it is proposed to reflect the whole discussion on ‘working class identity’ in the light of exploitation referring to classical political economy, but additionally to integrate social identity constructions by reviving the concept of alienation.

Keywords:

• diversity
• exploitation
• identity
• working class
• alienation

Notes

¹ John Roemer (2010) points to the fact that also in the US the economic crisis goes hand in hand with an upswing of right wing ideology.

² The major authors of classical political economy considered here are Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and to some extent Karl Marx. They mostly were writing their theoretical works having in mind the development of the English economy between 1750 and 1848, a period labeled industrial revolution by economic historians (compare Landes, 1969).

³ With respect to progress the classics differed from the earlier group of economists, the physiocrats (e.g. Francois Quesnais), which laid emphasis on the regularities of the circular flow of commodities in a country. For the latter the understanding of reproduction of society and its class structure was the object of study (they were part of the feudal class), while the classics were about to study change. It is interesting to see how John-Maynard Keynes in troubled times updated physiocratic flow analysis to understand how to maintain capitalist class structure by state intervention (Keynes, 1937/1973).

⁴ An appraisal and some critique of this structure of classical political economy can be found in Marx (1964).

⁵ The idea that contradictions are the productive force behind evolution can be traced back at least to the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, e.g. Descartes, and later was brought to German-speaking scholars by Hegel. Central economic activity, the political entity under consideration coincided with the territory under the control of a given feudal class. Exploitation could be stylized as the appropriation of corn and cattle on this territory by the ruling classes.

⁶ A concise treatment of Marx‘ approach from the point of view of modern mathematical economics can be found in Morishima (1973). It shows how a consistent framework for his view could look like, and it also contains a precise definition of the rate of exploitation. In Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger (2003), Morishima’s framework is extended to include gender exploitation and exploitation of the third world. Nevertheless, it must immediately be noted that Morishima—as well as Roemer (1981) generalizing this approach—only grasp what Marx took from English political economists, and completely neglect his ability to combine it with Hegelian dialectics.

⁷ The feudal class, of course, already had a longstanding and well-organized ideological task force: the Catholic Church.

⁸ In this respect Marx still is a proponent of French Enlightenment. ‘All you have to do to make petrified circumstances dance is to confront them with their own tune’, he wrote. For further discussion see also Vester (2008).

⁹ The three major proponents of this school in 1874 were spread all over Europe: Jevons in England, Menger in Austria, and Walras in France and Switzerland.

¹⁰ Note also that from a feminist point of view this also marked the division of production and reproduction field assigning men to the former and women to the latter. The bourgeois family model became the norm after WWII including unpaid work of wives and the breadwinner model (see Thompson, 1964).

¹¹ Marx work not only is complicated and hard to understand without an appropriate intellectual background, it also is incomplete with respect to many of the most pressing questions concerning the implementation of communist institutions (see Foley, 2006, pp. 86–154).

¹² The interpretation of these historical facts, of course, has led to a wider range of theories; see e.g. (Wippermann, 1997). Some more formal treatments of fascist mechanisms can be found in Eatwell (1992) or Hanappi and Horak (2000).

¹³ From this time onward Western leaders could always point at the Russian example to show where a communist revolution could lead to. As long as there seemed to be a need for a mild version of socialism to pacify Western workers, this became the raison-d’être of social democratic parties in Europe.

¹⁴ A whole set of other economic policy measures—including a boost in trade integration, an extension of the credit system, and the acceleration of exchange rate exploitation of third world countries—fostered this ‘growth miracle’. At its beginning the politically induced support of the Marshall Plan aid from the USA played a pivotal role too (see also e.g. Kolko & Kolko, 1972).

¹⁵ In economic theory the correlating strand of theory has been called the ‘neo-classical syntheses’. It chose John Maynard Keynes as its originator (it still is the question if this does justice to Keynes) and was accepted by workers and capitalists as the doctrine allowing state intervention to guarantee a smooth growth of capitalism. Despite its weak theoretical basis it appeared to be a quite useful and adaptive rule set, making it easy for the social democratic leaders to substitute it for any kind of non-modern Marxist class analysis.

¹⁶ The force of visions in political economy has been treated more detailed in Hanappi (2011).

¹⁷ In Marx‘s language postmodern thought would be an example of complete theoretical alienation.

¹⁸ Note that the term ‘race’ cannot be translated in German as ‘Rasse’ due to the Nazi connotation of this term preventing that human beings could be classified based on biological traits. Instead, the according German meaning usually used is ‘ethnicity/skin color’—nevertheless being aware that no socio-psychological skills can be derived from this.

¹⁹ The EU anti-discrimination guideline, e.g. forbids discrimination in the work context based on gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

²⁰ This legal right to be given equal access to the pool of potential employees historically extended to a similar right to be given access to the pool of potential buyers of a commodity. For example, black US citizens in Southern US states have to be given the right to enter shops that white US citizens are allowed to enter.

²¹ A far more general framework for the concept of diversity has been proposed in Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger (2001).

²² Hanappi-Egger and Ukur (2011) e.g. highlight the diversity context of Kenya and show the irrelevance of certain social categories such as sexual orientation—representing a highly tabooed topic. On the other side ‘tribes’—a category not at all considered in a ‘Western’ context is a highly influential aspect in social life in Kenya.

²³ Hanappi-Egger (2011) emphasizes the role of educational systems and textbooks in myth-building and in creating taken for granted knowledge to maintain the ideology of capitalism in particular in business education (see also Althusser, 1997; Zizek, 2011).

²⁴ Note that Fraser’s notion of distribution has to be enlarged: While Fraser is referring to secondary distribution in the discourse on mal-distribution from the point of view of classical political economy this omits all other aspects of the primary metabolism, e.g. primary distribution.

²⁵ This question is elaborated in more detail in (Hanappi & Hanappi-Egger, 2012).

²⁶ It is tempting to consider an analogy between data and processes in the social sciences and space and time—and its unification—in modern physics. But this is an issue that goes far beyond the scope of this paper.

²⁷ Pierre Bourdieu also considers these trajectories of individuals in an n-dimensional space of directions (here called traits), and proposes to summarize certain sets of values at a certain point of time as something he names ‘capital’ (economic capital, social capital …). Though, like political economists, he also uses this term for certain stock variables it would be confusing to adopt this usage in the current context.

²⁸ Consumption only entered this picture when Thorstein Veblen explored the direct links between the consumption behavior of a ruling class (conspicuous consumption of the leisure class) and consumption of the exploited classes (subsistence consumption): ‘As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and achievements which characterize a life of leisure, and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit’. (Veblen, 1899, p. 44).

²⁹ In Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger, (2012) we intend to provide an important piece for the mosaic of contemporary class analysis.

³⁰ Alienation on the one hand is a necessary consequence of increasing division of labor in all commodity producing societies: the world of commodities encounters its own individual producers in their consumption process as an alien set of products and services—the set of production processes is too complicated to be understood by a single producer. On the other hand, a more specific experience of alienation takes place in a capitalist mode of production, where workers experience that part of their life time, transmitted as labor time, is taken away by an alien force (capital) and materializes as profit, as social value that is at the disposal of an alien group, a ruling class.

³¹ This progressive character can even be revived many decades later—as the human rights movement in the USA did show.

³² Notably Pierre Bourdieu (1985) developed a new class concept, which promised to provide more adequate descriptions of actual behavior. Unfortunately, it concentrated on sets of behavioral rules (practices), and did not link up to economic processes proper. An interesting survey of this and other concepts of class can be found in (Wright, 2005).

³³ Even when Ricardo compared relative cost structures of two states to argue for free trade, the assumed two states were typical European examples. Marx theory of exploitation was not extended to cover large-scale exchange rate exploitation, his interest in the topic only reached to some remarks on an ‘Asiatic mode of production’.

³⁴ Some of the most outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the twentieth century—Lukasz, Benjamin, and Adorno—have been the prophets of this development. To some extent—and with limited success—so-called ‘cultural Marxism’, e.g. Stuart Hall (compare Johnson, 2014), has taken up the political dimension of this line of research.

³⁵ Contrary to his (implicit) scientific approach, in his role as revolutionary activist Marx propagated that in the near future the class structure will collapse into the fight between two classes (capitalists and workers), and that the latter as the only necessary class for the primary metabolism will thus in the end be the carriers of the unique and adequate, common consciousness—communism. This forecast, though useful as a political program of the nineteenth century, proved to be wrong.

³⁶ One of the most dangerous viruses of this kind has been ‘microeconomic theology’ (compare Hanappi, 1994), which indeed managed to seduce some of the brighter minds in academia—and to some extend has to be held responsible for the dispersion and endurance of the current global, economic crisis. A crisis that will persist even if some making up of investment demand held back since 2009 pretends recovery. 

³⁷ In Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger, (2013) and Hanappi, (2014b) the necessity to study also the recently emerging factions of the ruling class is highlighted. This not only concerns the distinction between different national classes but also between firm owners, financial intermediaries, and those executing capitalist state power.