Our social class influences our chance of:
- Being born alive
- Surviving the first year of life
- Reaching adulthood
- Going to university
- Being unemployed
- Divorcing
- Reading certain newspapers
- Living in certain neighbourhoods
- Holidaying – if at all – at certain places
- Voting in a certain way
In the listing above, some factors are influenced by one’s class of origin and others more by one’s class of destination. Also, some factors are life chances (that is statistical likelihoods of something happening – for example likelihood of being born dead) and others are more personally selected matters of life style, the manner in which an individual or group lives (for example the newspaper one reads). However, thinking about lifestyle questions (perhaps how one votes) does help us recognise that people often change their behaviour if and when they have changed their class.
According to Moore (1996), although it is agreed that social class influences our lives in many ways, there is less agreement about what social class actually is and what its origins are. The two sociologists who first discussed social class in the last century, Max Weber and Karl Marx, have left behind quite distinct sociological traditions.
The Marxist view of social class is that in every society one group emerges which gains control of the economy (in Britain today, industry and commerce; in the pre-industrial Britain, it was the land). Marx calls these the bourgeoisie, and they arrange society to their own benefit using their enormous wealth and power. There are only tiny fractions of the whole population, no more than 5 per cent. Everyone else in society works for these people, making them richer.
Of course, there are massive differences between those people who work for the bourgeoisie, some are managers earning very high salaries, and others may be manual workers who earn very little. However, they all share one fundamental link. They do not own in any significant way the industry or the commercial institutions. These people are called the proletariat.
Marxists today stress that there are many superficial distinctions between the various groups in society, but point out the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of very few people in contemporary Britain. In order to understand our society with its social problems and great differences in wealth and quality of life, Marxists points to the power of the bourgeoisie to manipulate the rest of the population to work for them and to accept this situation as being quite correct.
Critics of Marx have pointed out firstly it is possible to be socially mobile and to become successful in ‘capitalist’ society. Secondly, they have pointed to the collapse of communist regimes, such as the USSR, which claimed to follow Marxist ideas, where those in power controlled the population for their own benefit in a far more ruthless way than in capitalist Britain. Thirdly, they have also argued that modern society has developed in a more complex way than Marx foresaw, writing a hundred years ago, and the idea of there being only two classes bourgeoisie and proletariat, is simply inaccurate.
Another theoretical perspective is the so-called Weberian approach to social class was pioneered by Max Weber, writing a little later than Marx. While Weber agreed with Marx that the major divide in capitalist societies is between the property-owning capitalist class and those who have to sell their labour to survive, he did introduce additional ideas. In particular, he argued that a person’s class position – for that majority of the population not part of the employing, property-owning class – is also affected by their ‘market situation’. In other words, for most of us, our market situation depends upon skills, qualifications and other qualities we bring to the job market. That will determine the rewards we receive in terms of earned income, job security, various ‘fringe benefits’ or perquisites (‘perks’), opportunities for advancement, provisions for retirement and so on. The stronger the person’s market situation, the greater the rewards. But these differences do encourage a greater sense of distance between different groups of workers – between workers with different skill levels and between manual and non-manual workers – which Marx seemed to minimise. Weber also introduced the idea of status groups, that is, groups of people who are similar in terms of their lifestyles and patterns of consumption. Different status groups can be seen to exist within each social class.
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Define poverty and the effects of poverty on children using a theoretical explanation.
With reference to the BBC ‘Eyes of a Child’ video, highlight the way in which poverty has restricted the life chances of the children, and demonstrate class differences and how they may be improved for a better future.
