Basic Concepts of Class Formation - Lecture Notes | SOC 621, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download Basic Concepts of Class Formation - Lecture Notes | SOC 621 and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Lecture 15 Sociology 621 November 7, 2005 BASIC CONCEPTS OF CLASS FORMATION I. Stating the Problem 1. Structures and People It is sometimes thought that the study of class structure revolves strictly around positions, whereas the analysis of class formation and class struggle centers on people, on the actual practices of real individuals confronting the world. This is not an adequate way of drawing the distinction. Both analyses revolve around people, but viewed from different vantage points. The analysis of class structures views individuals as incumbents of relationally defined positions; the analysis of class formation views them as participants in collective actions. One of the central objectives of class analysis, then, is to understand is how individuals-as-incumbents in positions are organized, disorganized and reorganized into individuals-as-participants in struggle. This is the process of class formation. 2. Potentials for constructing class formations So far, our main preoccupation has centered on the class structure side of this process. The crucial way in which class structure bears on the problem of class formation is by defining a terrain of material interests upon which collective actors are formed. More specifically, for every person, the objective, material interests defined by the class structure determines three potential categories of actors: a) actors who share the same class-based material interests as oneself (i.e. who face the same trade-offs and strategies: have to do the same things to improve material welfare) b) actors who have antagonistic material interests to one’s own, and c) actors whose class interests may not be identical to one’s own, but whom nevertheless may have sufficiently overlapping interests to form the basis of class coalitions. Class structures thus determine: • one’s potential friends, • one’s potential enemies and • one’s potential allies: “Class consciousness is knowing what side of the fence you are on; Class analysis is knowing who’s there with you” Lecture 15. Class Formation: Basic Concepts 2 3. The Interest Logics of class formation Most discussions of class formation of oppressed classes and groups have overwhelming stressed two kinds of determinants of class formation: 1. the interests of the oppressed in collectively organizing. Basically the thesis is something like: the more oppressed is a group, the more likely it is that it will organize for collective resistance. 2. the interests of the oppressor in preventing collective organizing by the oppressed. The core thesis is something like this: the more the interests of oppressors are threatened by challenges, the more they will attempt to repress collective organization. Two foundational causal relations: The interests of oppressed/exploited classes ÿ oppositional class formation; The interests of dominant/exploiting classes ÿ repression of class formation. While this is a simplification, this does capture the central thrust of most historical arguments about class struggles and class formation. Now, these aspects are, in a way, the transparent issues: no one can doubt that interests & repression shape profoundly collective action. The map of interests in the class structure analysis thus generates a map of potential collective formations, and these potential class formations, in turn, help explain potentials for struggles. This causal process can be represented as follows: class formationclass structure class struggle limits transforms Lecture 15. Class Formation: Basic Concepts 5 what follows we will examine the essential logic of game theory and show how it is relevant to the problem of class formation. 1. Game theory as a way of thinking about class struggle and class formation To many radicals it is outrageous to consider “game theory” as an appropriate basis for studying class formation. Game theory is closely associated with neoclassical economics and conveys an image of rational, selfish actors pursuing their own interests in an atomistic world. Furthermore, the simplifying assumptions needed to construct the formal mathematical models that are the preoccupation of game theorists are seen as so unrealistic as to render the resulting models useless for social analysis. This result is that game theory is seen as involving both an ideologically-tainted view of human action and a radically impoverished method for studying class formation and class struggle (and anything else for that matter). 2. An Example: the Prisoner’s Dilemma We will discuss the prisoner’s dilemma game a bit more in the next lecture, since it is bound up with the analysis of solidarity, but let me illustrate it here just to tell you what “game theory” look like. The story: two actors confronting each other in a setting in which each makes a choice with consequences for both of them. They cannot communicate with each other; they just have to make a choice. Here is the story: if prisoner 1 defects (i.e. rats on the other) and prisoner 2 does not, prisoner 1 goes free, prisoner 2 gets ten years. If they both defect they get 5 years prisoner. If neither defects they each get 2 years. They are only interested in their own welfare. What choice do they make? Answer = the both confess and thus both get 5 years, which is clearly suboptimal, since they both would prefer 2 years (neither defects) to five years. Reason for this outcome = whatever the other person does, it is always rational for prisoner 1 to defect. If prisoner 2 defects, prisoner 1 gets ten years if he does not defect and five if he does; if prisoner 2 does not defect, prisoner 1 gets 2 years if he does not defect and zero years if he does. This is a simple game with a powerful solution, which turns out to have quite a lot of relevance for many explanatory situations. 3. Radical Theorists Objections to Game Theory The hostility of many Marxists to game theory, rational choice theory and related approaches, comes in part, as was suggested above, from its close association with neoclassical economics. This association leads many people to believe that game theory implies that actors are egoists, that they are hyper-rational, and that actions must be explained primarily in terms of intentions. In fact, game theory need not imply any of these things for actual explanations of social phenomena. 1. Egoism. There is no assumption in game theory that people are factually selfish, that they are motivated only out of personal material interests. While it may be a methodological postulate that the sensible place to begin analysing a system of strategic interaction is with assumptions of egoism, this is strictly a simplifying heuristic device. Strategic action models can be developed Lecture 15. Class Formation: Basic Concepts 6 with any kinds of preferences on the part of actors, but it is easier to understand the nature of those nonegoistic models against a background of pure egoism. 2. Rationality: There is also no assumption in game theory that people in fact act rationally, that nonrational and irrational cognitive processes of various sorts are empirically unimportant. The claim is merely that in order to understand the actual explanatory importance of irrationalities it is necessary to begin with models of rational strategic action. As in the case of egoism, rationality serves as a simplifying assumption to make formal model building tractable. These models do not prejudge the question of the causal importance of irrationalities; they simply facilitate our ability to specify their effects. 3. Choice vs. constraint. Finally, game theory does not imply that the most important explanations for variations across time and place in class formation and class struggle (or anything else for that matter) are variations in the choices, intentions and strategies of actors rather than variations in the social structural constraints within which they they make these chices. It is even possible that in specific cases the objective constraints determining the feasible set of possibilities faced by actors is so narrow that choosing becomes virtually irrelevant. The postulate is merely that strategic choice-within-constraint is the framework within which specific explanations must be generated. It is only through the development of theoreticl models of such strategic action that it becomes possible to sort out in an effective way the relative importance of constraint and strategy in explaining particular historical outcomes. The use of strategic action models to understand class formation, therefore, does not imply a commitment to egoism, rationality or voluntarism in social explanations. What it does imply is a particular logic of theory construction in which we begin with simple models built around assumptions of egoism and rationality and then gradually relax the assumptions of the model in order to generate more powerful explanations of specific phenomena. 4. Modes of Explaining social action To understand the value of a game theoretic approach to class formation, it is useful to contrast three ways of understanding human action in general, and the participation of individuals in class struggles in particular: 1. Action is scripted. People are socialized in ways which deeply instill various norms and values. With these inculcated norms, people fill roles in society in which their actions are essentially dictated by the nature of the norms that govern the roles. Once properly “programmed” through socialization, people basically act through habit, ritual, routine, convention. Our experience of making choices is thus largely an illusion. Participation in collective struggles, therefore, must be explained by the ways different kinds of norms and values govern people’s behavior, not by the process by which people deliberate and consciously make choices. Lecture 15. Class Formation: Basic Concepts 7 2. Action is intentional. People make choices under constraints, and their actions must be viewed as at least partially explained by their intentions. These choices may be norm-driven or goal-driven, but the action that occurs is consciously chosen rather than programmed as ritual or habit. (By “goal-driven” I mean that the choice of action is made instrumentally to accomplish some goal; by norm-driven I mean that the choice of action is made to conform to some normative condition). For our present purposes, the crucial thing about models of simple intentional action is that the constraints under which people act can in general be viewed as parameters of choice: they are objectively given and fixed. Action is thus intentional and rational, but not strategic. 3. Action is strategic. People make choices under constraints in a world in which they know that other actors make choices under constraints. Our choices therefore take into conscious consideration in one way or another the likely choices of others. That is: we are strategic actors, not just rational actors. “Game theory” -- or perhaps what might more appropriately be called strategic action theory -- adopts the third of these views. If one believes that actions are the result, at least in part, of the intentions of actors in which the mental processes of deliberation are more or less rational, and if one believes that in such deliberations people take into consideration the likely choices of other actors, then game theory is a natural idiom for studying class struggle and class formation. 5. The essential logic of strategic action Game theory, then, is based on the view of human social practice as radically interdependent strategic actions. The object of analysis is to study this interdependency and its consequences. Jon Elster has elaborated the logic of these interdependencies in a particularly clear way in his essay “Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory” (reference in readings). Imagine a strategic interaction -- a game -- in which people make choices and as a result of the resulting interactions, they receive various kinds of “rewards”. These rewards can be anything: material welfare, feelings of pride, good feelings towards others, or whatever. Three kinds of interdependencies among these choices and rewards, Elster argues, are particularly important in such strategic interactions: 1. The reward of each is dependent upon the choice of all. This reflects the diverse ways in which the welfare of each player in the game depends not simply upon his or her own choices, but upon the choices of all others. The “tragedy of the commons” -- in which each person abuses resources held in common thinking that this will benefit them, but because everyone makes the same choice, the commons are destroyed and everyone suffers -- is a vivid example of this kind of interdependency. 2. The reward of each depends upon the reward of all. In many situations, each individual’s welfare depends, in part, upon the welfare of others, not simply their own condition taken separately. This is true, for example, in the case of altruism, where one’s own well being