SOC100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Petite Bourgeoisie, Karl August Wittfogel, The Communist Manifesto
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SOC 100H1F
Sociology
Chapter 9: Classes and Workplaces
Introduction: How Work, Class, and Inequality Are Related
• Class is an exclusive concept, but even though it’s hard to define, it has important effects on
people’s health, on crime, and on intergroup conflict.
• Social classes - sets of people with different life chances.
• Class socialization: the process of teaching, learning, and passing on patterns of fashion and
consumption.
• The Globe and Mail reports that in 2011, the top 1 per cent of Canadian income earners amassed
10.6 per cent of the country’s total income, according to data provided by Statistics Canada.
• That has declined from a peak of 12.1 per cent in 2006, but it’s still higher than the 7 per cent
share taken home by Canada’s top 1 per cent in the early 1980s.
• The top 5 per cent of Canada’s income earners, suggesting that people who reach that position
seldom move out.
• Any discussion of class must take into account class conflict, which normally results from
diverging economic interests.
Class: as defined by Marx, a set of people who share the same relationship to the means of production; as
defined by Weber, a set of people with a common economic situation, based on income, property, and
authority (among other things).
Marx and Class Conflict
• Karl Marx co-authored with Engels The Communist Manifesto, a public declaration of political
principles.
• He was convinced that by developing an understanding of history, he would be able to see the
contours of the future and prescribe remedies for the present.
• As the Marxist theorist Karl Wittfogel pointed out in Oriental Despotism, civilizations based on
farming large rice paddies depend completely on irrigation systems.
• This means that so-called “oriental despots,” who control the irrigation system and the water
flowing through, are able to control society.
• Capitalists (or the bourgeoisie) and the workers (the proletariat) are the two key classes in
capitalist’s industrial society, through there are other classes as well, including landlords, petty,
bourgeoisie, peasants, and lumpenproletariat - what we today might call the “underclass.”
• Landlords, as the name suggests, own land, which was the source of all wealth and power in pre-
capitalists agricultural society.
• In due course, some of these great landlords convert their landed power by becoming
industrialists or investors, and thereby converting their land into capital.
• The petty (or petite) bourgeoisie is what we might call the middle or lower middle class today,
made up of shopkeepers, small farmers, artisans, and self-employed professionals, for example.
• Peasants, sometimes counted as petty bourgeoisie, likewise own some property - chiefly, some
land - and work the land with the help of family members and hired workers.
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• This binary - consisting of the “haves” and “have-nots” of society - is fundamental to all social
relations and all class conflict, since these two classes have different interests and are therefore
permanently locked in conflict.
• To say that the proletariat is exploited is to say that the worker is paid less than the price of the
finished product, such that the capitalist is able to take the surplus value and make a profit.
• To say that the proletariat is alienated is to say that the labour process deprives workers of the
ownership of their own products and, worse, distances them from the productive process,
themselves, and others.
Exploitation by the bourgeoisie, involves three principles, outlined by Erik Olin Wright.
• First, according to the inverse interdependence principle, the economic well-being of capitalists
requires the economic deprivation and exploitation of workers.
• Second, according to the exclusion principle, capitalists must keep pressure on workers by
excluding them from access to benefits and productive resources - for example, by making it
difficult for them to get the capital necessary to set up their own businesses.
• Third, according to the appropriation principle, capitalists take advantage of the workers, by
buying their labour for a fraction of its real value.
• Marx says, Capitalism creates the seeds of its own destruction, in part because it creates the
conditions - especially exploitation, alienation, and class mobilization - under which a
revolutionary upheaval will develop.
• Marx proposed that class relations under capitalism are the cause of all conflicts within and
between societies.
• In this “contested terrain”, there can never be peace and co-operation because workers and
capitalists have opposing interests.
• Class action is often hindered by obstacles to the formation of class consciousness.
• Often, for these, and other reasons, workers are unable to understand that they are being
exploited.
Bourgeoisie: the capitalist class, which owns and controls the means of production, including factories,
banks, and labour.
Proletariat: the subordinate class in capitalist society, who work for wages from the bourgeoisie.
Capital: wealth in the form of money or assets, used or invested in the production of goods.
Petty Bourgeoisie: the lower middle class, made up of people who own the means of production on a
small scale, including artisans and owners of small shops.
Reserve Army of Labour: people who, because they are impoverished and often unemployed, form an
easily disposable workforce at the mercy of employers.
Class Consciousness: a social class’s awareness of their common interests, which typically generates a
commitment to work together to attain collective goals.
False Consciousness: a willingness to believe in ideologies that support the ruling class but that are false
and disadvantageous to working-class interests.
Weber and Class Conflict
• Weber defined class in terms of distribution. He linked class to what he called the market
situation, rather than in relation to mean of production.
• Where Marx viewed classes as mainly economic groups, Weber viewed classes as mainly power
groups.
• Weber distinguished economic class from two other sources of power: parties and status groups.
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• According to Weber, parties are associations and organizations that give people non-economic
power and influence.
• By status groups, Weber meant sets of people who share a social position in a society, with a
common degree of prestige, esteem, and honour.
• Their defining feature is that they practice exclusion to maintain the boundaries between their
group and others.
• To summarize, Marx provided the foundations of class analysis, and Weber built on them.
• Erik Olin Wright has reconceived the Marxist class system in a way that captures the modern
complexity of class relations.
In a present-day post-industrial society, Marx’s portrayal is too simple, for several reasons.
• First, today it is no longer necessary to own a business to control the means of production; it is
only necessary to manage the organization and/or serve on its board of directors. The effective
control of productive capital began to pass from owners to managers nearly a century ago, in a
process James Burnham influentially called “the managerial revolution.”
• Second, the working class today is international because of multinational ownership and global
competition. This “globalization” of work - an advanced version of economic imperialism
heralded by Marx and V.I. Lenin in their writings on capitalism - has introduced even more
difficulty into the mass mobilization of workers in any given country.
• On the other hand, it has been estimated that by 2015, 3.3 million jobs will have disappeared from
North America due to call centre outsourcing.
Post-Industrial: referring to an economic system based more on services and information than on
manufactured goods or primary production.
Functionalism
• Under capitalism, inequality comes to be defined as a graded ladder of people with different
occupational roles and income levels - what is usually called a stratification system.
• Functionalism assumes that people generally agree on the social value of an occupation and many
surveys around the world have demonstrated a high degree of consensus on job rankings.
• Doctoring requires a great deal of skill and expertise, so a physician needs many years of
education to develop his or her skills.
• From the functionalist standpoint, different kinds of societies have different kinds of class
structure and require different kinds of investments.
• Industrialization causes socioeconomic development, including more education and literacy, and
the rise of a large middle class.
• The functionalist also believes that everyone needs work. Thus, work has social as well as
economic benefits, since it provides a basis for social interaction, social solidarity, and cohesion.
Conflict Theory
• For conflict theorist, class is a very real concept: a relationship focused on the means of
production (for Marx) or power and the market (for Weber).
• Therefore, strategies of resistance are hard to establish and maintain.
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Document Summary
Bourgeoisie: the capitalist class, which owns and controls the means of production, including factories, banks, and labour. Proletariat: the subordinate class in capitalist society, who work for wages from the bourgeoisie. Capital: wealth in the form of money or assets, used or invested in the production of goods. Petty bourgeoisie: the lower middle class, made up of people who own the means of production on a small scale, including artisans and owners of small shops. Reserve army of labour: people who, because they are impoverished and often unemployed, form an easily disposable workforce at the mercy of employers. Class consciousness: a social class"s awareness of their common interests, which typically generates a commitment to work together to attain collective goals. False consciousness: a willingness to believe in ideologies that support the ruling class but that are false and disadvantageous to working-class interests. Weber and class conflict: weber defined class in terms of distribution.
