Singh - "Class" in Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022)

Penultimate Proof of: 1 O O FS Devin Singh, "Class," in Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics, edited by William Schweiker, et al, Wiley-Blackwell, 2022, 1068-1076. Class Devin Singh PR Introduction R R EC TE D In this entry, I review attempts to describe and analyze class in relation to common metrics such as income, wealth, earning potential, and economic mobility. Rather than simply by quantitative indices, I claim that class should be defined primarily by the forms of economic power and privilege accessible to a given subset of society. Such power and privilege can be further understood by the relationship to labor and the means of production, and by the capacity or lack thereof to realize the economic interests of a given social subset. Such positionality is deeply imbricated in culturally specific markers of status, intellectual and cultural capital, and other forms of symbolic power. It also intersects crucially with categories of race, gender, and sexuality and requires intersectional analysis. I consider matters of class consciousness and relate this to discussions of the epistemic privilege of the poor and marginalized. I then explore what class means for religious ethics, asking how religious and ethical concerns (informed primarily by Christian traditions) interact with the question of class. I offer outlines for a normative framework for approaching the question of class within religious ethics, informed by liberationist perspectives, womanist traditions of social ethics, and an ethics of care. O What is Class? U N C While any given society is multiform, and social groupings are crisscrossed with a variety of differentiating factors and markers, for heuristic and socio‐analytic purposes, not to mention the needs of demography and policy, class distinctions are typically based on economic factors (Wright 2005; Rieger 2013). Class is a term used, often vaguely, to capture the level and form of economic power and privilege accessible to particular segments of society. While this is not all that one might mean, this dimension of economic power is significant and even central to understanding the category of class. Such economic power is signaled by indicators like wealth and income level, as well as earning potential and economic mobility. Yet attempts to delineate class neatly with quantitative metrics such as income or education levels are usually inadequate for providing a meaningful descriptor of class identity. Class also signals one’s positionality with regard to labor power, and the ability one has to command and enjoy the fruits of labor. Class location and mobility are often a function of education or forms of cultural and intellectual 0005074735.INDD 1 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM 2 Class U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS capital, such as skill, training, and experience, and often run together with other social factors such as one’s relational network and the opportunities that arise because of one’s affiliations. This is why multidimensional and intersectional analyses are typically necessary when class is under consideration, since many social and cultural factors are at work in determining class identity and the mobility one might have within and out of a class. Demarcating class based on simple quantitative metrics may be useful from a technocratic perspective of social policy and planning, but it is rarely socially explanatory. It may also lead to interesting tensions depending upon the metrics used. Consider the option of basing class distinctions on either education level or income level, both common metrics used in the United States. In an oft‐cited comparison between university professors and tradespeople such as construction workers and electricians, professors may be in a “higher” class relative to tradespeople when education level is considered, but in a “lower” class relative to tradespeople when income level is considered. Beyond the potentially contradictory policy proposals that might originate from such a case, depending upon what measure is used, such metrics consider class identity in a vacuum, evaluating a single variable that on its own yields little insight. One influential way to delineate class draws upon classical Marxian categories (Marx 1976). Class figured centrally in Marx’s analysis of capitalist society and indeed was extended to various other periods and economic formations. Arguably, “[c]lass is the focus of Marx’s work not because he assigns it a greater explanatory role in human history than other aspects of society, but rather because it has been repressed from consciousness generally and from the consciousness of capitalism’s critics in particular” (Wolff 2013, 30). Class thus emerges as a pivotal explanatory lens in part as a corrective to regnant forms of social analysis blind to its importance. His approach defines class in terms of the mode of production and one’s location within the particular relations of production within that mode. One can delineate and assess segments within a society based upon how they operate within the specific mechanisms of power that sequester labor and use it to generate value through the engines of production. Within capitalism, the major class distinction is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The former class owns the means of production and hence retains control over technology, machinery, land, and all elements used by labor to create value and produce goods. Members of the latter class own only their labor power and must sell this labor to the bourgeoisie in exchange for a wage. The wage is therefore used as a demarcator of labor and signature of value. Class belonging here thus defines where one stands in this broad economic schema. The bourgeoisie or capitalist class retains control over the means of production and various artifacts of congealed labor power such as machinery and other technology. The proletariat or working class retains control over its labor power, and is constrained to work for the capitalist class to generate the means of subsistence and social reproduction. Its labor also generates a surplus, however, and yet the mechanisms of capitalism allocate this surplus to the ownership of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class despite it stemming from the labor of the proletariat. This approach using classic Marxian categories is thus useful for understanding the allocation of power and access in a society, prompting questions of justice and resource distribution, such as whether the needs for survival and flourishing are being broadly met. The Marxian lens draws attention to two factors that remain central to class analysis: economic power and privilege and the fact that class is a relational category. As suggested at the outset, class remains meaningful when attending to economic dimensions primarily, even while intersectional realities must be kept in view. Beyond economic metrics, however, many of which take class as a static category, the significance of class analysis emerges when power and privilege are brought into view. Power is the capacity to realize one’s class interests and those interests are often conflictual and agonistic with respect 0005074735.INDD 2 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM Class in Society 3 PR O O FS to other classes. Therefore, power includes the capacity to influence and direct the will and actions of other classes. Class thus pertains to the types of economic power that a certain subset of society is able to exert on other segments of society, with privilege indexing the particular advantages a class has in exercising said power. Most complex societies involve divisions of labor, with subsets defined by the types of labor they perform, the differential values placed on that labor, and potentially but not necessarily different allocations of the fruits of such labor. Group levels of economic power and privilege are modified and conditioned by the group’s location in a social network. Such levels are dynamic and processual, and best captured not in isolated or fixed indices but in analysis of the entire network and of the operation of the parts in relation to the whole (Thompson 1964). Class is thus a relational term, addressing classes in distinction from one another and in terms of their respective forms of agency and effects on each other (Aronowitz 2003; Zweig 2004). This is why class is less helpfully demarcated in purely quantitative terms – such as income level, net worth, or years of education. It requires additional evaluation in qualitative terms – the forms of economic power a particular social subset is able to exercise as well as the types of economic power to which it is subjected (Rehmann 2013). D Class in Society U N C O R R EC TE Because class is a relational category and involves group location in a social network relative to other groups, the category of social capital offers important resources for class assessment. Here I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who extended Marxian categories to account for cultural and relational aspects that remain critical for grasping the dynamics of economic power in societies. His analysis of the forms of capital and the nature of distinction and symbolic power are particularly relevant in this regard (Bourdieu 1986; Bourdieu 1998). Bourdieu’s approach draws attention to the relational aspect of capital, which in turn connects with class as a relational category. His theory is also useful in helping to conceptualize the signals and symbols that mark class, the ways symbolic power and cultural methods of distinction figure into class agency and privilege. This also sheds light on how other social categories may be indexed or cross‐referenced with class and modulated based on class position. Bourdieu explains that capital can take on various modes in society, outlining three main forms: financial, social, and cultural capital. Financial capital deals with material wealth and typically economic dimensions. Such a lens pertains most directly to dominant conceptions of class, calibrated as class tends to be to “properly” economic factors. Social capital indicates the benefits that come from membership within a group, however we define such benefits and however we demarcate group belonging. Such benefits stem from formal and informal relational networks within a social grouping, and provide a member access to other benefits enjoyed by group members, many of which are economic. These benefits may also be symbolic, wherein being marked as a group member alone affords advantages and privileges in a society that ascribes honor, status, and power to such group identity. Cultural capital speaks to resources of intellect, education, and artistic and cultural formation afforded certain group members that provide unseen advantages in negotiating a society’s particular challenges and opportunities. Bourdieu notes that capital exhibits fluidity and a capacity for conversion: one form of capital may transmute – or transubstantiate, to use his intentionally theological terminology – into another. This is why it is common that access to one form of capital often affects one’s capital levels in its other forms. 0005074735.INDD 3 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM 4 Class U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Social capital signals that there is a kind of capital that inheres in belonging to particular social groups. By necessity, social capital thus understood requires differentiation and exclusion. Without boundary markers, such group membership is meaningless. In other words, if belonging to a certain group means social status and advancement, such capital would evaporate if the barriers to entry were eliminated and anyone could become part of the group. By its very nature, then, social capital requires forms of distinction, exclusion, and boundary maintenance, however arbitrary. Observers concerned with matters of justice and equality, as well as deleterious effects of segregation and marginalization in society, have thus highlighted the exclusionary dynamics of social capital’s operations. Because of the need for distinction and group boundary maintenance, groups develop symbolic markers and signals of group belonging. Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) classic study of the leisure class offers a glimpse into the ways classes differentiate themselves from one another. In this case, ruling class belonging is marked by the forms of conspicuous consumption and leisure exhibited by group members. He also demonstrates how such practices are at times emulated by those outside the class, in an attempt to signal belonging or enjoy aspects of the privilege afforded such a class. Yet because groups are highly effective at policing their boundaries and forms of social distinction, such emulation is typically discernible, meaning it does not lead to seamless inclusion within the dominant group. Indeed, the emulated group may then modulate its practices, as in the case of the wealthy adopting forms of modesty and occlusion of affluence, while the less wealthy exhibit types of ostentation in an effort to mimic a now obsolete set of aristocratic practices. The insight from studies such as Veblen’s is that class belonging, while centrally a factor of the type of economic power and privilege enjoyed by that group, is also bound up with sets of practices and symbolic markers that indicate access and can transfer the privileges of group belonging. Whether or not symbolic differentiation is intentional, such distinction is often nevertheless at work in societies, as groups based on class factors of economic power and forms of labor often accrue other cross‐ references such as race, gender, sexuality, and ability. It has long been observed that class is racialized and gendered, with growing recognition that sexuality, too, factors in. Since labor power figures centrality in class identity, matters of ability are also clearly indexed, as barriers to and constraints around work influence one’s ability to sell labor power. This means that categorization within particular identity groups in society has a consistent, observable bearing on one’s class designation. This can be documented in the statistically significant absence of women and racial/ethnic minorities among the class of owners of the means of production. The long history of legal barriers to property ownership for such groups is one of several clear causal factors for such disparity. Therefore, both because of the group tendency to differentiate and police boundaries, and the historical legacy of eliding class with other markers such as race, gender, sexuality, and ability, intersectional analyses are called for (Crenshaw 1995; Collins 2000). At the most fundamental level, this means that when assessing class, that is, when evaluating the factors that forge differences among social subsets based on economic power and privilege, looking for “purely economic” factors is insufficient. Examining the existence of class also requires attending to the reproduction of classes, and thus matters of social reproduction and affective labor must also be considered (Bhattacharya 2017). Answers to the why, how, whence, and whither of class differences will therefore come from analyzing these other important identity markers and social categories that transcend the economic, narrowly construed. 0005074735.INDD 4 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM Class Consciousness and Epistemic Privilege 5 Class Consciousness and Epistemic Privilege U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS In assessing the presence and persistence of class differences in society, one is led to ask whether a society and its various classes are aware of and recognize such differentiations, and what such knowledge means for these allocations of economic power. Marx observed that members of the proletarian class had differing levels of awareness of their social location or of the existence of their class at all, their class significance, and their capacity to change their class status. This awareness has been termed “class consciousness.” Such capacity for recognition is historically and economically conditioned (Marx 1963; Jameson 1981). One of the paradoxical benefits of capitalism is that the forces of abstraction and reification that form commodities can also contribute to a critical distance that enables a class to recognize itself, in ways that may be distorted but can be clarified (Lukács 1971). The Marxist tradition generally seeks to transform the consciousness of the proletarian class from mere self‐recognition (“class in itself”) to united solidarity and action against capitalism (“class for itself”). A broader tradition of the sociology of knowledge stops short of advocating a specific political program while recognizing more generally that class location will affect one’s perspective and view of reality (Mannheim 1959). Class consciousness can be related to what has been called the hermeneutical or epistemic privilege of the poor and marginalized, a principle taken up in liberation theology (Boff 1993; Singh 2017). This notion builds upon the biblical sense of God’s favor upon and presence among the poor (e.g. Matthew 25:31–46), as well as the Catholic magisterial principle of the “preferential option for the poor.” The position extends the idea of such prioritization of the poor to a claim about where truth, clarity, and, in some cases, revelation, are to be found. The claim is that the realities of the world and society are seen most clearly from the vantage point of the poor. Those who would have eyes to see must adopt a position alongside the poor and marginalized in order to grasp the truth of the situation. Not only can the world be glimpsed more clearly, but divine truths apprehended more accurately from this perspective. For instance, the establishment of base ecclesial communities in Latin America – centered upon reading scripture closely with members of impoverished and exploited classes – was fueled by the quest for a clarity of mind and heart that was enabled by this lens of poverty and exclusion. Reading the Bible and society “through the eyes of the poor,” then, proclaimed the belief that one’s particular social position in relation to economic power and privilege served or inhibited one’s access to the truth (Sobrino 1984). Those of wealthy and privileged backgrounds had skewed views of reality. Aligning themselves with the poor was a way not only to serve and show solidarity, but to seek their own epistemic salvation and interpret the world, themselves, and God correctly. We can see how this coincides with the idea of proletarian class consciousness. The latter asserts that a class for itself understands its position in society, the reasons for this location, and the mechanisms that need to be changed in order to establish more just and equitable socio‐economic relations. Such a class has achieved a kind of enlightenment, a heightened awareness of social realities, and a sense of the course that must be plotted for liberation. Such awareness is not idealistic, however, remaining in the realm of thought alone. Rather, it is manifested in praxis, in concrete action and effort to change class distinctions. The class sees and acts clearly, and presumably any who join in solidarity with its struggle and position come to see clearly as well. 0005074735.INDD 5 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM 6 Class Class and Religious Ethics U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS These matters of solidarity and alignment with marginalized classes raise ethical issues around class. While class analysis may be done for the ostensibly neutral concerns of demography and social investigation, typically, when class is invoked, conversations about the appropriate individual and communal responses to class tensions and inequities quickly follow. Already implicit in many of the approaches cited above, ethical concerns abound concerning the nature of power differentials, inequities of privilege and access, and the relative agency of certain classes with regard to others. Marx set his sights on a classless society, free from the injustices engendered by class distinctions and differences. Working within a Marxist trajectory, Bourdieu’s analysis of social capital also explores ways to overcome class power differences, in part through the reallocation and redistribution of capital, often in its non‐economic forms, such as changes to education systems that prevent the ossification and exacerbation of cultural capital inequities. What might it mean to think about class from the perspective of religious ethical theory? A number of ethical theories and frameworks may be relevant to assessing class and responding to moral challenges raised by the realities of class difference and disparity. At the outset it is important to recognize that class location itself shapes religious ethical theory, both in the decisions about which approaches to adopt and in the forms it takes, including which norms and goals to establish. Stemming from the aforementioned insights about class consciousness, social location, and perspectivalism, we must continually keep in sight the reality that class location influences how we might view the moral quandaries raised and what shape responses take. In an effort to establish a minimal basis for a normative framework, my intervention is informed by womanist social ethics and feminist ethics of care. Womanist ethical approaches lend themselves to and interface directly with questions of intersectionality implicated in class analysis. Womanist scholars were some of the first to point out that the class interests advanced by white feminists, even when inflected with religious concerns, may be at odds with the needs and concerns of black women (Grant 1989). This reveals that class analysis is neither neutral nor purely objective, but involves the subject positions of the analysts and activists involved, including embodied matters of race, gender, and sexuality. The fact that white and black women concerned with class inequity could devise projects that were not in alignment revealed that race remained a critical modulator. Similarly, black women challenged the gender blindness of black male theologians, whose projects left patriarchy unaddressed, revealing that challenges to class inequity could not ignore gender. Poor, black and brown women thus provide a unique paradigmatic position for considering the multiple levels and directions of oppression and domination within contemporary society. A class analysis that employs a womanist lens and framework will thus ideally remain held accountable by these dimensions and avoid some of the typical and recurrent blinders that emerge even when liberationist and progressive class interests are advanced. Womanist ethics attends to the whole person in conscious resistance not only to the forces of abstraction in capitalist society but to the dehumanization of marginalized peoples. Such a wholistic approach seeks to overcome the fragmentation of existence that is the result in part of the instrumentalization of certain segments of society for the purposes of labor. Implicit, then, is a resistance to considering people solely on the basis of class allegiances, even while economic injustice remains a central object of concern. Yet this challenge opens up into a broader and more thoroughgoing critique of at least two dominant ethical theories: utilitarianism and deontology. While theoretical purists may resist the implication, utilitarian frameworks can result in the use of others for one’s pleasure or utility maximization. The 0005074735.INDD 6 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM Class and Religious Ethics 7 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS abstraction of class further enables this, where an entire social segment of laborers excluded from ownership from the means of production comes to serve the needs and desires of another governing class. Deontological ethics within a Kantian tradition, which propose a categorical imperative that remains binding on all agents when certain conditions are met, also run into tensions with womanist priorities. Such an approach evinces a universalism that imagines abstract human needs and ethical concerns regardless of history and context, let alone embodiment and materiality. The situated, perspectival approach of womanist ethics raises concerns about the hidden assumptions of white, male perspectives masquerading as neutral standards for all times, places, and peoples. Therefore, the womanist challenge to abstraction and to disembodied and instrumentalist views of humanity that figure into class inequity also ends up challenging dominant strands of ethical theory, revealing the mutual implication of ethics and class. Womanist ethicists and theologians question the centrality of suffering in Christian narratives of salvation, specifically challenging the role of surrogate suffering (Townes 1993). Surrogacy in this case denotes suffering on behalf of another, and has been elevated based on a particular interpretation of atonement theology that presents Christ’s suffering as redemptive for humanity. In light of the role that black women have played in America, often serving as nannies and wet nurses, laboring and toiling on behalf of their white masters or employers, womanist thinkers critique the supportive role that Christian thought has played in this problematic arrangement (Williams 1993). From the perspective of a religious ethics of class, then, womanist thought issues the caution that Christian narratives of redemptive suffering, which have influenced the development of policy, politics, and economy in the West (Singh 2018), may be at work supporting a system that makes one class toil, labor, and suffer to support another. The ethics of care is an ethical approach that centers relational existence and assesses morality in terms of one’s fulfillment of various relational obligations. It focuses on the needs and concerns of those with whom one is relationally connected, emphasizing the particularity of the needs of others in their specific social and historical contexts. Virginia Held (2006) offers the care of a child as a paradigmatic instance to think through such concerns. Acting morally and ethically in such a scenario stems from vulnerability, affective bonds, relations of mutual dependence, and other senses of obligation that may precede and exceed universalized and abstract maxims of moral virtue. Despite utilizing the child as an exemplary case, an ethics of care is not to be relegated simply to the familial, personal, or private sphere, but has bearing on broader publics including the national and international level. It also bears on matters of justice, and while care and justice cannot be collapsed together, they refine and shape one another in significant ways. Care and concern for specificity of actors and contexts will emphasize restorative and redistributive forms of justice more than retributive. Beyond models of simple fairness or balance, care will emphasize corrective and ameliorative measures that may look imbalanced when contextual differences are ignored. In this way, a care ethic also coincides with the preferential option for the poor introduced above, prioritizing the vulnerable and marginalized as those in need of special attention and protection. The ethics of care emphasizes relational existence and eschews atomism and individualism. Not only does ethical formation not happen in isolation, but the ethical as such is relational. Such ethical relationality puts this view into tension with virtue ethics, which at times imply internalized and individually construed paths of moral formation. The ethical individual – and, originally, the virtuous man [sic] – were the paradigm to attain, as opposed to ethical postures of relatedness and ethical social networks as such. In attending to the specificity and particularity of ethical others, the ethics of care also pushes back against the universalism of typical deontological approaches. Maxims such as the categorical imperative commend a universalizable course of action that intentionally denudes the ethical actor of history, society, and 0005074735.INDD 7 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM 8 Class U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS culture – not to mention biographical particularities including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Rather, an ethics of care emphasizes that moral action necessarily varies across time and space, that context and the specific needs of the other dictate what the ethical looks like in each situation. Furthermore, religiously inflected ethics of care derive injunctions to care for the poor and vulnerable from religious traditions in ways that resonate powerfully with the normative vision of this ethical system. Given its attunement to relational dynamics and the variability emerging from specific relational encounters, an ethics of care is particularly suited to class ethics. Because class can be defined by the forms of economic power exerted and experienced by particular social groupings, agonistic relations between and within classes can benefit from an ethical vision that keeps such relationality central. In this regard, an ethics of care can provide systemic critique of the relations among classes, and call for care and concern for the classes rendered vulnerable or precarious. Moves toward restoration and redistribution will also challenge the differences and disparities in economic power and privilege. At the same time, an ethics of care recognizes particularity and the unique differences of those within relations. In terms of class, this means the vision need not entail the erasure of qualitative differences such as the division of labor, but seek to rectify quantitative differences where some are barred from access to the goods of life. These approaches offer a variety of moral attunements that remain crucial for constructing a religious ethic of class. An overall posture informed by liberationist ideals that give priority to the poor and marginalized means that the exploitation and abuse of classes with less economic power and privilege must be kept in view. Furthermore, a liberationist lens converges with Marxian analyses of class that prioritize the economic mode of production as a central framework for understanding class structure in a society. Womanist ethics refines the general liberationist impulse by situating its analysis more self‐reflexively within the intersecting matrices of domination that impose upon poor black women. Assessing and challenging class disparity by examining economic power and privilege alone gives way to a richer lens attuned to the ways racial, gendered, and sexualized differences play into class distinctions and inequities. Womanist thought also casts a critical eye upon the notion of suffering as labor, as productive, particularly on behalf of a more powerful and privileged other. It refutes the ways religious thought has valorized such productive suffering, recognizing how such associations have contributed to the view that enforced labor or labor as drudgery are somehow purifying and redemptive for the exploited worker. Finally, the ethics of care provides an ethical vision situated within relational networks, enabling assessments of class that recognize how various social positions and relations inflect what the moral thing to do is in any given situation. Surpassing individualistically and universally construed moral frameworks that may be blind to the communal and social realities that bear upon the moral problems raised by class, it offers a way to speak about ethical challenges of class with more faithfulness to the actual realities of the situation. Such views thus provide a set of baseline attunements to construct ethical frameworks and interventions on the basis of class. References Aronowitz, S. (2003). How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bhattacharya, T. (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Boff, C. (1993). Epistemology and Method of the Theology of Liberation. Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology. J. Sobrino and I. Ellacuría: 57–84. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 0005074735.INDD 8 02/11/2021 6.55.28 PM References 9 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. 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