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Capital & Class

http://cnc.sagepub.com/ The Death of Class


Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters Capital & Class 1997 21: 192 DOI: 10.1177/030981689706200114 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/21/2/192.citation

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192 Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters

Capital & Class #62

The Death of Class


Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 1996. pp.vii+173. ISBN 0-8039-7838-3 (hbk) 37.50 ISBN 0-8039-7839-1 (pbk) 12.95

Reviewed by David Harvie


Pakulski and Waters are ambitious, aspiring to both sound the death knell of class and to write its epitaph. The central argument of The Death of Class is that classes are dissolving and that the most advanced societies are no longer class societies (p.4). The authors begin, in chapter 1, by describing class theory and class analysis, as they understand them. In each of the following six chapters, which form the bulk of the book, they take a particular aspect of society and attempt to demonstrate how the category class, and class theory and class analysis are no longer relevant and useful. They conclude by suggesting alternatives to class for analyzing and understanding society. The first chapter, in which Pakulski and Waters outline their understanding of class, is critical to their thesis. Explicitly rejecting E.P. Thompsons argument, in the Preface to The Making of the English Working Class, that class is something which happens, Pakulski and Waters instead insist that the most salient feature of class theory is its economism. Following from this basis are the propositions of groupness ([c]lasses are real features of social structure having quite clear boundaries that set up the main lines of cleavage in society. [They] are socially distinct from one another and social relationships and associations tend to be exclusive); behavioural and cultural linkage ([class] determines political preferences, lifestyle choices, child-rearing practices, opportunities for physical and mental health, access to educational opportunity, patterns of marriage, occupational inheritance, income, and so on); and, transformational capacity (pp.8-10). Somewhat softer than class theory is class analysis, which, they suggest, is sceptical about the transformative capacity proposition, concentrating instead on the group formation, behavioural linkages and class mobility aspects of class. Pakulski and Waters target both class theory and class analysis. However, they argue that since the presuppositions of class theory include all those underlying class analysis, if we can show that this less ambitious class analysis is inadequate then class theory also fails (p.11). For Pakulski and Waters then, the starting point is the economy, and, in particular, the sphere of production, defined traditionally in the sense of the production of physical goods. The economy is taken as given, predetermined. From this given economic structure follow the separation of humanity into classes (or not, as they argue in this book); class membership in turn determines consciousness, identity, politics, behaviour, culture, and so on. The limitations of this understanding of class, its economic determinism, the absence of any considerations of categories such as work, value and

Book Reviews
alienation, and the treatment of struggle as something which is only introduced at the end of the analysis, as something which may only happen as a result of class, should be clear, especially to readers of Capital & Class. Suffice it to say that, unfortunately, E.P. Thompsons two paragraphs contribution to this book, dismissed so decidedly by the authors, remain for me one of its highest points. Following chapter 1, Pakulski and Waters argument proceeds by taking their idea of class and showing how it is no longer applicable to contemporary society. Thus, for example, they cite evidence which suggests a dissolving connection between class and voting behaviour: i.e., the British working class is less likely to vote for the British Labour Party than it once was, with similar results for other industrial countries. But quite apart from the problems with class, this evidence would also be consistent with a lessening of the (working-)class nature of the Labour Party, as well as with the reduced signicance of class. Pakulski and Waters do not mention, let alone explore, this alternative explanation. Other patterns of human behaviour which class is no longer helpful in accounting for, thus adding more nails to its own coffin, include: marriage-partner choice, interior-design tastes, occupational (im)mobility and home-ownershipI nd it amazing that Pakulski and Waters can seriously put forward the argument

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that increasing home-ownership is evidence of redistribution of property and therefore of the decline in class (p.76). Any notions of class composition, reand de-composition, of class/labourpower distinctions are missing in Pakulski and Waters text. Thus they nd Bowles and Gintis suggestion that schooling reproduces class by fragmenting it (in Schooling in Capitalist America) bizarre (pp.102-3). Later they suggest that [w]ithout institutionalized means of social reproduction, classes cannot survive! (p.133, my emphasis). In the books final chapters Pakulski and Waters suggest alternative social referents. For example, generations : [t]he carrier of new values in the developed West is the post-war generation that shares the formative experience of the long boom (p.142). But these experiences, the long boom and so on, can (must) be explained in terms of struggles over money and work which of course takes us back to class. Pakulski and Waters suggest the explanatory deficiency [of class] is particularly apparent when we try to understand changes in work structure and employment, post-Fordism and exible specialization, globalization and the so-called Asian tiger economies, the history of the welfare state and the changing political landscape (p.151). Again, I am amazed. I do not understand how these things can be explained without class.

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