4-03-07, 9:41 am
Inequality isn't a matter of bad luck or misfortune. Social class and other socially significant categories like race and gender are the hidden hands that determine one's life chances, future prospects, and current living conditions. The myths of individual striving and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps are basically bunk, according to the recently published collection of essays entitled Inequality: Social Class and Its Consequences.
This excellent book is a comprehensive collection of up-to-date academic studies, expert analysis, journalistic reporting, and political opinion on different aspects of social class in the U.S. Readers will find a useful survey of the composition of and economic struggles facing the U.S. working class by economist Michael D. Yates. Education expert Richard Rothstein, in his carefully argued essay, examines the role of class in shaping how young people learn and perform in schools, literally leaving an imprint on their future prospects from a very early age. Independent journalist Beth Schulman provides a stereotype-breaking snapshot of America's hardest group of working people, its low-wage workers, their growing numbers and the structural barriers to their advancement.
Essays in this book take on some of the most pressing issues of our day. Journalist Lila Guterman, for example, acknowledges the correlation between possession of wealth and the likelihood of better health, but adds the twist that even in a rich country like the U.S., income inequality and social class reduce the quality of collective public health and cause great harm – even for those who live at the wealthy extreme. Scientist Robert Sapolsky argues that it is possible that economic insecurity, the consequent instability of communities, and growing inequality produce a psychosocial stress that harms individual and group relations with the society that has a negative impact on public health. In other words, class hurts in a very real and direct way.
Other essayists look at the role of class in the criminal justice system and its pervasive inequalities, the uneven distribution of resources to protect the environment and the location of facilities (factories, plants, dumps, etc.) that harm the environment, and the relationship between racial discrimination and social class.
In a section on 'progressive solutions' to inequality, the editors challenge the ultra right's free market ideology, its obsessions with tax cuts for the rich and privatization, and its support for inequality. The essayists argue for increasing the government's role in subsidizing social programs aimed at reducing poverty and inequality.
This book is an excellent resource and can be used by both academics and progressive activists to get a better handle on the facts about the conditions most working families face. It brings together an array of issues that deserve careful scrutiny.
I would take issue with the book on one of its basic premises, however. The editors define class by its effects without reference to how capitalism as a system has constructed class. In my view, possession of resources or social power, access to services and goods (e.g. health care and education), and shared values, culture, and politics do not by themselves tell us everything there is to know about class, as the editors suggest. They are the social manifestation of a class relationship.
On a fundamental level, class is defined by the capitalist system of production: private appropriation of socially produced goods, or making goods and services for a commodity market. Or to be blunt and perhaps overly general: do you sell your labor power (worker) in order to make a living, or do you buy someone's labor power (capitalist) to make your living?
I applaud the call for progressive reforms that require greater social intervention to reduce inequality and its harmful effects rather than simply allowing it to grow and fester in the name of the free market. A great deal of good could be done; an enormous burden could be lifted off of the backs of working families with universal health care, adequate funding for quality education, better funded anti-poverty programs and the like. We should all be involved in or support the movements that are trying to win these reforms.
But, it is also worth pointing out that a more basic change should take place in order to make sure that inequality is ended permanently. As the editors note, shifting political momentum to the right between the 1970s and the present, enabled the right wing to kill or maim most social programs, leading to current levels and conditions of inequality. Changing the more basic feature of capitalism – the inherently unequal relationship between workers and capitalists – is the best means of permanently eliminating the negative social consequences of class. Indeed, changing this basic relationship may be necessary not only to protect the 3 billion poor people globally but also to reverse the threat of human destruction through capitalism's unchecked abuse of our planet and the perpetual threat of nuclear war.
The basic concept of democracy says that the majority should have the greatest say, not just about one or another policy, but also how the system is organized. Socialism, as a system and as a government led by working people, would create a more equal basic relationship in the system of production with more socially beneficial outcomes.
There is no blueprint for how such a system would be constructed, but the more people, labor unions, political groups, faith communities, social justice and democratic-minded organizations, and social movements that are involved, the more likely this basic change could be accomplished in a fair and peaceful manner that respects and builds on the political diversity, cultural complexity, and fierce sense of independence we share as Americans.
--Clara West is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine.
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