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Class & Inequality

MLHY

CLASS

a system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources

SOCIAL STRUCTURES

Egalitarian society:

  • a group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence

Reciprocity:

  • the exchange of resources, goods, and services among people of relatively equal status; meant to create and reinforce social ties

Ranked society:

  • a group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are

Redistribution:

  • a form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern
  • Potlatch

KARL MARX

MAX WEBER

LEITH MULLINGS

THEORIES OF CLASS

PIERRE BOURDIEU

KARL MARX

Bourgeoisie

  • capitalist class
  • owned the means of production
  • the factories, machines, tools, raw materials, land, and financial capital needed to make things

Proletariat

  • working class
  • owned their labour
  • exchanged their labour in return for wages

Labour

the key source of value and profit in the marketplace

How do the bourgeoisie increase their profit without increasing their cost?

Marxism today

Today, what makes up the bourgeoisie class?

  • financial sector
  • manufacturing sector
  • small-business owners
  • farmers

- Do the latter two groups possess the same access to capital as the former two?

Today, who makes up the proletariat class?

  • white-collar workers vs. blue-collar workers

- divided by race, gender and ethnicity

Communist Manifesto

a political pamphlet urging workers to recognise their exploited class position and to unite in order to change the relations between proletariat and bourgeoisie emerging in the capitalist system

problem: Class Consciousness

  • how does the bourgeoisie keep the proletariat divided?

MAX WEBER

expanding Marx's concern for economic stratification of wealth & income

  • prestige: the reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups
  • life chances: an individual's opportunities to improve quality of life and realise life goals

Class position - relative wealth, power, and prestige - determines access to these resources

Weber adds that class stratification doesn't just happen

  • the state holds the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and class-based societies and elite control of the means of production would not be possible w/out the exercise of state power through police, tax collectors, and even the military

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PIERRE BOURDIEU

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Education is considered the key to upward social mobility within stratified societies

social mobility: the movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in stratified societies

  • it should be driven by meritocracy...but why not?

social reproduction: the phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next

  • family's economic circumstances
  • habitus: the self-perceptions, sensibilities and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it
  • cultural capital: the knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society

LEITH MULLINGS

Intersectionality: an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification

  • The Harlem Birth Right Project: study the impact of class, race, and gender on women's health and infant mortality
  • infant mortality rates in Harlem x2 the rate of NYC
  • all class levels African American women > problematic birth outcomes than white women of similar class
  • the Project revealed the following factors had to be taken into account as well:
  • conditions of housing
  • employment
  • child care
  • environmental factors
  • quality of public spaces, parks, grocery and retail stores

What makes class and inequality largely invisible?

Consumer culture

Media - largely ignore the existence of the poor and working class and the gaps between wealth and poverty

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