Class - Gary Day ( Introduction)

#Gary Day 

-Gary Day is a principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Bedford. He is the author of Re-reading Leavis: ‘Culture’ and Literary Criticism and has edited a number of books on literature and culture. He has written books on F. R. Leavis, literary criticism and class, and is also co-editor (with Jack Lynch) for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Eighteenth Century Literature. Day held a satirical column in Times Higher Education for a number of years and now reviews television programmes for the same publication.

      

                   INTRODUCTION

•It traces the complex relationship between class, literature and culture from the medieval period to the present. 

•class still has a role to play in understanding the nature of literary works. The text shows that there is a link between the economic form of capitalism and ‘literary’ representation. 

• The author uses Karl Marx’s (1818–83) analysis of class but also look briefly at Max Weber’s (1864–1920) view of the subject. 

#Marxist approaches to ‘literature’

1) George Lukács’ claim that literature, particularly the novel, is able to penetrate the surface of society, highlighting hidden connections and identifying the underlying trends which may lead to its revolutionary transformation. 

2)Louis Althusser’s assertion (1966 & 1996) that ‘literature’ can make us aware of the ideological nature of our conventional conception of ‘reality’.

3) Lucien Goldmann’s idea (1964 & 1975) that literature represents the world-view of a particular group. 

4) Finally, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey (1978) argue that the education system reinforces economic divisions by restricting access to knowledge of the ‘literary’ canon.

Gary Day's focus is the relationship between ‘literature’ and exchange – basically the system of money, its meanings and its uses. This approach is that it brings together ‘literature’ and economics in contrast to current postmodern thinking which insists on their separateness.

#A BRIEF HISTORY OF ‘CLASS’

Class occurs across a range of disciplines – sociology, politics, cultural studies and ‘literary criticism’ – all of which give it different meanings, weightings and explanatory values. In broad terms, the word ‘class’ refers to divisions in society. The term did not exist in ancient Greece, the term genos was used instead of it. The city states of ancient Greece were divided into three main groups: citizens, metics (resident foreigners) and slaves. Citizens, the majority of whom were farmers, tradesmen or artisans, were distinguished from one another by how much land they owned or by which trade they followed. Citizens were distinguished from metics and slaves by their entitlement to participate in the state. Aristotle distinguished between citizens and slaves by saying that the former were ruled by their minds and the latter by their bodies (1962: 33) 

-the word ‘class’ from the Latin classis (plural classes).

-In Greek society the word used to describe these divisions was not classes but ordo which not only corresponds to the English order but also translates as ‘rank’ as in ‘the ranks of the armed forces’ (Calvert 1982: 41)

- In Europe  the word ‘station’ was the one more commonly employed to designate a person’s place in society. According to Peter Calvert, the word ‘station’ referred to a person’s employment as well as their specified location and it differed from ‘class’ in being ‘a concept essential to the individual rather than the collectivity’ (1982: 14).

-However,the more common word for referring to social divisions was ‘order’.

-The seventeenth-century puritan Richard Baxter said Christian societies could not tolerate idleness and this stress on the necessity for hard work justified the division of society into rich and poor: wealth, in puritan doctrine, was God’s reward for labour as well as a sign that a person was destined for heaven not hell. 

-It was in the seventeenth century that the word ‘class’ entered the English language for the first time.Thomas Blount, a seventeenth-century Catholic, recorded it in his dictionary, Glossographia (1656).

-The question arises as to why, at this point in English history, the term ‘class’ should start to displace the more common ones of ‘order’ or ‘station’. One explanation is that the act of classification was becoming increasingly important to the natural sciences. Its success in ordering the variety of the plant and animal world promised a more comprehensive account of the social order. Another explanation for the entry of ‘class’ into the English language in the mid-seventeenth century is that this was a decisive moment in the development of capitalism.The appearance of the word ‘class’, in other words, is linked to fundamental changes in the economy and to their effect on social relations. 

- In brief, the older vocabulary of ‘order’ and ‘station’ projected an essentially harmonious view of society whereas the new idiom of class was an expression of social conflict. 

#MARX AND CLASS

-Marx explained class in economic terms. Marx called the class who owned the means of production the bourgeoisie and the class who sold their labour power the proletariat

-Marx used the term ‘social relations of production’ (1859 & 1968: 181) to describe the ownership and non-ownership of the means of production. He went on to say that the sum total of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, ‘the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ (ibid.). In other words, the nature of the economy determines a society’s politics, laws, culture and education.

-The precise role of the economy in respect of culture has excited a great deal of comment. Does the economy wholly determine the nature of culture? Is it merely the expression of the ideas of the ruling class? Does culture have its own autonomy in respect of the economic base or is it entirely independent of it? 

-There is also the problem that Marx’s definition of class varies greatly and is ultimately inconclusive. Sometimes he says that society is composed of two classes and sometimes three, and he occasionally uses the term as a synonym for a faction or group without particular reference to its position in the mode of production. 

#CLASS AND STATUS

-Marx regarded the transition from capitalism to feudalism as crucial to his account of class. The ascendancy of the bourgeoisie showed that social position was no longer dependent on birth but effort. This change in the conception of the social order was captured by the appearance of the word ‘class’ which formed a dynamic contrast to the more static ‘order’or ‘station’ derived from the Latin stare, to stand. 

-The picture becomes more complicated after 1830 as the middle class and the working class not only begin to oppose one another but also to divide internally, with the former separating into lower and upper sections and the latter into skilled, semi-skilled and labouring ones. These intra-class relationships were based on status considerations such as dress, attitudes and behaviour and they contrasted with inter-class relationships based on an opposition of economic interests.

-Status and class are intimately related. Hence we can say that status, in so far as it was one of a complex of terms used to describe this society, differs from class in that it refers to social rather than economic groupings. The German sociologist Max Weber was interested in the relationship between class and status. Although he did not agree with Marx, he did acknowledge that ‘property and lack of property are the basic categories of all class situations’ (1948 & 1993: 182)

-In this sense, argued Weber, ‘class situation is ultimately market situation’ (ibid.: 182). Status, by contrast, is defined in terms of honour or prestige; hence it is perfectly possible for a profession to carry a high prestige factor, for example a priest, while at the same time having a low remuneration. 

-Traditionally the identity of status groups was expressed through ‘the privilege of wearing special costumes, [or] of eating special dishes taboo to others’ (ibid.: 191) and, while certain groups today also distinguish themselves by style of dress, status is more likely to be expressed through a whole range of activities and attitudes, making it synonymous with ‘culture’. 

-However, because we live in a consumer society, it is reasonable to assume that ‘status’ would be a more prominent term in social analysis than ‘class’. Status is associated more with a view of class as balance, culture with a view of class as struggle. 

#CLASS AND EXCHANGE

-The term ‘exchange’ is short for the exchange relation which, along with production, is the ‘foundation [on which] the bourgeoisie built itself up’ (Marx and Engels 1848 & 1968: 40). 

- According to Marx, the exchange relation, in its simplest form, is the process by which commodities are exchanged for money. Money provides a common measure by which commodities can be exchanged. It does so by representing commodities not as they are but by what they have in common, and what they have in common is the human labour that produced them.

-Money does not differentiate between different kinds of labour but views the variety of physical or mental work purely in terms of time. It is therefore an abstract system of representation dealing in quantities not qualities. 

- In 1998 David Cannadine claimed that ‘class as hierarchy’ was – and is – the most accurate description of the English social structure (1998: 22). Similarly, the major paradigm of cultural studies is a view of the social formation where dominant and subordinate groups contest the meaning of culture in its widest possible sense

-The link between exploitation and exchange is that each is market-based: both labour power and the commodity are sold for money. However, our focus will be the mechanism of exchange and its relation to literature.

#EXCHANGE AND ‘LITERATURE

-Both the exchange relation and literature are forms of representation: money represents commodities, literature ‘reality’. Although exchange and literature are forms of representation, they do not represent their respective objects in the same way. Money, it will be remembered, pays no attention to the unique qualities of the commodity, only to what it has in common with other commodities. The point is rather that both literature and exchange are forms of representation, ways of structuring and imagining the world, whose relationship is sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory. 

-We shift the focus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the relationship between ‘literature’ and exchange to the rise of the working class. The reason for this change of focus is that the Industrial Revolution has precipitated into existence a group whose interests are clearly opposed to those for whom they are forced to work in order to survive. 

-Andrew Milner goes further by suggesting that the politics of class have become ‘progressively' “decentred” by an increasing pre-occupation with . . . gender, race,ethnicity, [and] sexuality’ (1999: 7)

-Stefan Collini asserts that‘[i]n the frequently incanted quartet of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, there is no doubt that class has been the least fashionable . .despite the fact that all the evidence suggests that class remains the single, most powerful determinant of life chances’ (1994: 3) 

- In short, class provides an account of the origin of inequality from which other forms of oppression arise. ‘Literature’ is one of those forms of oppression, but it also has the potential to transcend the mechanism of exchange with which it is otherwise so unwittingly complicit.