Why "Class" still matters

Perhaps my question whether the PMC notion is a useful one was not the right one. Perhaps the more appropriate question is whether it matters - does it change anything? I've just done a Ngram on "class" - to discover that (in the English-speaking world at least) its use peaked in 1914 but stayed reasonably high until dropping significantly after 2000 and is now at the levels last used in 1860!! Use of "Working class" peaked in 1970 and is now at 1955 level with references to the "ruling class" being fairly similar. But the notion of there being a "professional - managerial class" seems confirmed – there being almost no of the term until 1966 and then a huge rise peaking in 1997 but still holding up. And it was a new phrase for me – but one that made sense given the increased awareness of the blight of managerialism which has been evident in posts over the past decade.

My initial thought is that class DOES matter – I’ve been floundering in the attempts I’ve been making since 2000 to make sense of what seems to be a new system of capitalism – with the decline of industry and financial services and monopoly rents (in the sidest sense of that word) now making the running. We all know that inequality is at obscene levels which have rarely been experienced – but the world seems just to accept that.

I’ve now downloaded various books and articles on the subject of CLASS – most of which I find tortuous and unreadable. Most of the writing is by sociologists such as Ralf Dahrendorf (much more accessible), John Goldthorpe, Ray Pahl, Goran Therborn, John Westergaard and Erik Olin Wright. One of few readable (and mercifully short) pieces was Therborn’s tribute to the life and work of EO Wright. And Therborn’s New Left Review articles – such as here and here – are highly readable presumably because of the high editorial discipline NLR imposes. But I simply don’t have the patience to wade through the 30 pages of Jakovich’s 2014 paper on The Concept of Class or even the 21 pages of Goldthorpe's 1992 The Promising Future of Class Analysis.

This Swiss economic sociologist's Contemporary class analysis (EC 2022) for me cut through the guff with his blistering 27 pages critique of some of the nonsense recently produced by economists on the subject. The last decade has seen a lot of talk about the "squeezing of the middle-class" and the purpose of Daniel Oesch's paper – commissioned by the EC – is to demonstrate that it is the working-class which has suffered the decline. Although noone knows how AI will in the future impact the middle-class, some dire predictions have been made about the scale of its impact on many traditional professions - with only those in the "personal care" system likely to benefit. 

So noone can really anticipate how our social structures will develop and how wealth will be distributed- about the only thing I can say is that

• "middle class" has little meaning – it's vasically an aspiration

• PMC is also vague – straddling those who command both deference and power

• working class power seems suddenly to be alive and kicking - with the "public" amazingly supportive

Gluttons for punishment might look at a couple of books about "class"

• Approaches to Class Analysis ed by Erik Olin Wright (2005) - probably the best on offer with each chapter being written from a different perspective – whether neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian, neo-Durkeimian, Bourdieu, "post-class" or Wright's synthesis

• Anthropologies of Class – power, practice and inequality ed by Carrier and Kalb (2015) a collection of anthropological essays on the subject which I suspect might offer more insights than the sociological?

UPDATE; Have just read a fascinating article in the current NPlus by Gabriel Winant - the Professional-Managerial Chasm which contains this superb quote from EP Thompson

Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion—not this and that interest, but the friction of interests—the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time—that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.