Hello, my name's Tom and welcome back to my channel where I talk a little bit about
theatre, a little bit about being a PhD student, and a little bit about those
two things kind of crushed together in a vice. Today, I wanted to add to my series
What the Theory? in which I do some introductory videos on some
critical concepts within the humanities. And today, we are going to look
at class.
Broadly speaking class, or social class, is a way of breaking down society
hierarchically so we can compare how much power an individual or group of
people has in comparison to another group or individual within the same
society. Colloquially and in political discourse we often hear terms like
middle class or working-class thrown around. But what I wanted to do today was
foreground two particular theories which provide a theoretical underpinning for
that notion. Now, it's worth saying that class has
taken many different forms across time and across geography so today I'm
primarily speaking about class as it relates to contemporary capitalist
societies. Feudal systems, caste systems and those involving slavery all have a
deep intersection with class but they sit slightly outside my field
of knowledge so I will leave it to someone else to create a wonderful
YouTube video about those. A useful place to start with class in contemporary
society then, is with Karl Marx. Marx saw class not just as a theoretical concept
or social construct but as the defining tension of the capitalist system. History,
as he had it, was the long struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. The distinction between where one sits within Marx's framing is
in what one's relationship is to the means of production. The proletariat, then,
are the working classes, those who earn a living by performing a task--whatever
type of task that might be--in return for a wage. The bourgeoisie are those who,
under a capitalist system, own the means of production which might be a factory,
it might be a patent for a particular technology, or it might be land. Their
money is made through speculation, profit, rent and interest. For example, a member
of the bourgeoisie might own all or part of a company through which they employ a
number of proletarians or workers to create, design and then market and
deliver an object. The company then sells that object for more than the cost of
the materials used to make it and the cost of paying the workers to do all
that previously mentioned work to provide a nice tidy profit for our
capitalists. So, while the worker must spend quite a lot of what they earn on
food and housing and the necessities, our capitalist has quite a lot of money left
over after fulfilling those desires. As such, they are able to go away and invest
in further projects therefore increasing the amount of profit they will make in
the future. Thus the bourgeoisie have a significant
power advantage over the working class. When profits start to fall at a particular
company, we quite often see that it's those jobs at the very bottom of the
ladder that start to go first. Our capitalist, with their abundance of
capital, might just decide to diversify their interests slightly. Familial
inheritance is really important here too, with the bourgeoisie leaving quite a lot
of their wealth to the next generation and therefore giving their next of kin a
head start which is not available to those further down the class system. In
Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty gives a really insightful
(if slightly dense) rundown of how capital has accumulated into fewer and fewer
hands over the last 200 years or so. The crux of Marx's argument, then, is that the
bourgeoisie continue to grow their wealth through interest, profit, rent and
inheritance so their power within society grows and they are able to
influence political policies and parties. To Marx, then, class, social power and
social standing are very much rooted in the amount of financial capital an
individual or a group has. Notably, this is a very binary system and although Marx
does mention the existence of the so called petty bourgeoisie, or middle class,
he doesn't flash this idea out fully beyond suggesting that they might be
small business owners or those very highly paid professionals. To find a
more granular system of analyzing class, then, we might turn to the French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu suggests that social class is made up of three contributing factors:
economic capital, social capital and cultural capital. This is a slightly more
complex system but allows us for a slightly more specific analysis than the
orthodox Marxist approach. Economic capital works much the same as it does
in Marx's system, recognizing how much economic power an individual or group
has within society. Social capital, then, acknowledges
the social and familial relationships that an individual or group might have that
might give them a certain advantage in life. For example, having a friend of the
family work at a particular firm who can introduce you or perhaps get you a job
might count as being an aspect of social capital. Cultural capital is perhaps the
most complex notion within Bourdieu's theory and refers to how the aesthetic
tastes that we are taught by the society around us as we are young
subconsciously guide us towards a certain position in life. Certain activities are
related to certain social classes, for example, in the UK going to live football
might be deemed to be a working class activity whereas going to the Opera
might seem like quite a bourgeois activity. There's a similar distinction
between hip-hop and classical music but we can also extend this notion beyond to
potentially the clothes that people wear, the way they talk, their accent, or the
food that they choose to eat. All of these things count as class markers on a
person. For example when someone might describe something as being a little bit
middle class or a little bit common. Bourdieu's argument is that by learning
these behaviors and learning to preference these particular activities
we learn what class we're meant to be in and therefore we decide which social
groups to exist within and therefore what jobs who might be available to us
in the future. Broadly speaking, then, when Marx
emphasizes economic capital and suggests that that grows to have an influence on
culture, Bourdieu suggests that our individual cultural capital has an
impact on how much economic capital we might earn. Bourdieu is less interested
in our relationship to the means of production than with class as a social
phenomenon. Both Marx and Bourdieu, however, are very clear that
socio-cultural capital and economic capital have an impact on one another.
And, if you'd like to unpack that notion a little bit more, I did a video on the
concept of hegemony a little while ago which you can go and find. However
much it's argued that class is potentially a thing of the past, I think,
by using some of the methods that I've brought through in this video, we can see
that it's actually at the very heart of contemporary society.
Financial inequality is indeed growing across the globe and, with it, the
distinction between classes. Therefore in any critical approach to the humanities,
to culture or the social sciences, I think class has to be in there
somewhere and it's really key to unlocking the empowerment or otherwise
of an individual or group within society. Thank you very much for watching this
video, I hope this has given you a few tasters of some concepts of class
and maybe some ideas of where to go off and look for some slightly more deeper
reading somewhere else.Thank you very much for watching, if you've enjoyed
this video please do give it a thumbs up or let me know down below if there's any
subjects you'd like me to cover in the future as that's always super, super handy.
Thank you very much for watching and have a great week!