As Andrew Sayer declares in The Moral Significance of Class, “class matters because it creates unequal possibilities for flourishing and suffering” (218). It is for this reason that the work's main topic, the subjective experience of class, is an important one. His recognition of the interplay between the forces that shape us, as well as the agency we exercise in response to these structural forces, gives the work a refreshing complexity without sacrificing its sharp focus on the topic at hand. However, the work loses some of its potential force when advancing the argument that recognition of “gender, race, and … other differences … has come at the expense of interest in class.”
The work is most valuable in its strong interrogation of the politics of “recognition” and the priority this concept has been given in political philosophy in recent decades. Sayer agrees that recognition is important to individuals and groups who may suffer from either a lack of such recognition or indeed from “systematic misrecognition.” Yet the primacy given to recognition has been convenient for the neoliberal project in that the use (and abuse) of this term has obscured the need to address real inequalities.
Sayer attacks this justification from a number of angles. The first is by advancing a realist argument against extreme versions of social constructionism. That concepts such as morality and class are socially constructed does not mean that they do not lead to real human “flourishing and suffering.” For: “All construction uses materials, and a necessary condition for the success of attempts at construction is that they use the materials according to their properties—properties that exist largely independently of their constructors and are not merely a product of wishful thinking” (11).
Nor will these properties cease to exist as a result of wishful thinking against them. Inequalities inherent to the existence of class do real harm to people and they cannot be remedied through verbal or symbolic recognition. This is notwithstanding the fact that such recognition may be desired and therefore should be fought for. But inequalities, as Sayer points out, can only be remedied through redistribution.
Secondly, Sayer points out that, given the reality of inequalities, any meaningful recognition would necessitate some degree of redistribution. A recognition of others’ common humanity, combined with a recognition of the arbitrariness of the “natal lottery” of class (in which certain individuals are born into a life of greater material resources), would logically lead to altering inequalities through redistribution. As he puts it, “important though recognition undoubtedly is, there is a danger of focusing too much on recognition itself and not enough on what it is for” (54).
To illustrate the point, Sayer uses the example of the politics of New Labour in Britain. He argues that their posture of recognition combined with their failure to enact redistributive policies seems to imply that simply rejecting prejudices will suffice to bring about fairness. Their emphasis on the role of “social capital” further serves to shift the responsibility for alleviating poverty onto the poor themselves rather than onto the government or the wealthy. (226)
Sayer's concern with the “visible and hidden injuries of class” leads to an analysis of how class is experienced and interpreted by lay actors. His initial step in this task is to draw upon Bordieu's concept of habitus, but to correct what he sees as its weaknesses and inaccuracies. Habitus is defined as “deeply ingrained dispositions which are the products of socialization” (22). Habitus, then, can be useful in understanding how class exists as an identity. What Sayer adds is an insistence that while we may develop habitus through socialization, we are also reflexive beings who interpret our situations and consider various ways to respond to them. He does not claim that these interpretations are always consistent or that they inevitably lead to the best choices, simply that we are not robots mindlessly playing out our ascribed roles of race, class, gender, and other identities. It is only though acknowledgment of these interpretations and considerations that we can understand how resistance to our ascribed roles is possible. And it is only by acknowledging their fallibility that we can understand why resistance is not inevitable.
Of course, it is not just false consciousness that prevents resistance. Sayer emphasizes that people's responses to their class positions can be “good” or “bad” (i.e., alleviate or cause harm in the short run), and that they can either reinforce or challenge the existence of these positions. Sayer emphasizes that there can be no one-to-one mapping in which actions taken by the privileged are necessarily bad or those taken by the oppressed are necessarily good, nor can there be any assumption that good responses are those leading to resistance while bad ones prevent resistance. For example, working-class pride can be considered “good” but it may in some cases encourage “acceptance rather than contestation of class” (182).
From the beginning, Sayer fails to define the book's geographic scope, which appears to be the “developed world.” This can be inferred from statements such as “class consciousness and collective action on the basis of strong class identities…have declined” (15); because whether this has occurred in the “developed world” may be arguable, but if the claim is assumed to be global then it is broad and unsubstantiated to an almost absurd degree. Similarly, when Sayer states that quality of work is more important than money for most people, “with the exception of the poor,” one can only imagine he is limiting his scope to areas where the poor are a minority, for treating them as an “exception” is otherwise ludicrous. A study of the moral significance of class within the “developed world” is a perfectly legitimate endeavor, but the scope of the work should be made explicit. For potentially untenable shifts in focus can occur, as when reference is made in the last chapter to globalization's “race to the bottom” where the poor and working classes of the world are suddenly brought into the picture without any prior attention throughout the work.
While combating determinism through recognition of the diverse ways in which people may act in a given situation, at many points The Moral Significance of Class makes unsubstantiated generalizations about how people do in fact act. A lengthy description, for example, is given of how “elderly British lower middle class and working class women” view their relationships with medical doctors. (178–180) Yet it is not made clear if Sayer is citing his own research, or someone else's work, or whether he is basing his hypothesis on a chat he had with his mum. Such generalizations also extend to the upper classes, such as when he states that they are prone to “avoidance of strong facial expressions and displays of emotion,” a claim which may be true but again is not given any basis through which the reader can assess its veracity. (164)
While these examples may seem trivial, the unsubstantiated claims in the book are more significant when they pertain to those he refers to as the “subaltern” (though the term “subaltern” here is used in a way that it could easily be substituted with “the oppressed” or “the disadvantaged”). Hence, when he discusses instances in which people may feel shame for various reasons, he claims that “misplaced” and “unjustified” shame (as opposed to a lack of shame or shame “warranted” by acknowledging what has been wrong in one's own behaviour) are “most common among the subaltern” (158). Later in discussing various responses to class, he claims—somewhat condescendingly—that “the subaltern, in particular, are likely to slide from one response to the next” (169). Yet these assertions are not justified, so developing theory and practice based on a belief in their veracity is a questionable enterprise.
The critical fault of the Moral Significance of Class, though, is its view of race, gender, “sexualities,” and “other identities.” As signified by the quote above, indicating his view that interest in these identities has come “at the expense of” interest in class, Sayer seems to believe that there is some sort of zero-sum game in which if race (or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or migrant status) wins, then class loses, because we cannot perceive of these realities at the same time. But why can't we?
For Sayer, these realities must be viewed separately because of key differences in them. First, he claims that while all other identity groups are “clamouring” for recognition, the poor want “to escape or abolish their class position rather than affirm it” (52). But here, and throughout the book, Sayer confuses what is meant by recognition of differences. For the struggle to recognize what is uniquely valuable in the cultures of racialized groups does not preclude the struggle to abolish racial categories themselves (and this is also true for struggles of other identity groups). The converse is also true, that the struggle to escape or (perhaps even better) to abolish class positions does not preclude celebration of what is valuable in working-class and poor cultures.
Sayer further argues that patriarchy (and by extension, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia) can be “gradually eroded from within the micro-politics of everyday life” (170). while class structures cannot. “If men and women were to disregard gender norms, gender differences would fade, but economic class positions can be reproduced even in the absence of symbolic domination and hostility between the classes” (170).
In fact, if men and women simply disregarded gender norms rather than actively combating them, how could the status quo be changed? One thinks of male soldiers returning home to the US from the Second World War to claim the jobs that women had been so graciously performing for them in their absence. For even if gender norms had been disregarded at that moment in time, the task of distinguishing the validity of these rival claims to the same jobs would not have been an easy one. Sayer seems to be critiquing identity politics without even an adequate understanding of the difference between nonracist, nonsexist, nonhomophobic, nonxenophobic behaviour and antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, antixenophobic behavior. For example, he states: “ … while sexism and racism are not unusual in education, many teachers try not to be sexist or racist in their treatment of pupils and parents. At least some actors try to behave in a way that is indifferent to these divisions” (49).
This misses a critical point. Racism and/or sexism can exist in a variety of forms within the classroom. One example would be racist or sexist sentiments being made explicitly by students, which an antiracist, antisexist teacher would intervene to address. More subtly, it may take the form of privilege or entitlement by white, male students. Moreover, some students may have internalized racist or sexist messages coming at them from all directions outside the classroom, negatively affecting their self-image. Indifference to “these divisions” does not necessarily imply actively working with pupils to help them counteract the effects that racism and sexism have or have had on them. Nor does it necessarily imply that the teachers will engage in the struggle over which students end up in which classrooms to begin with (for example, in the US, by addressing school funding formulas) and with what expectations they end up there (for example, by addressing the types of products marketed differentially to young boys and girls). These struggles over systemic rather than individual racism and sexism are more typically antiracist and antisexist as opposed to nonracist and nonsexist.
Sayer moves on to theorize that class differentiation occurs through “both mechanisms that are sensitive to actors’ identities and those that are neutral or indifferent to them” (71). While housing discrimination on the basis of race may be an example of the former, Sayer claims that deindustrialization is an example of the latter, because consumer tastes change without respect to the identities of the workers producing the goods. He is forced to admit that deindustrialization has identity-sensitive effects, but argues that this is a result of separate, noneconomic processes. (87–88) The causality is important in this instance because it supports Sayer's assertion that “capitalism does not depend on employing workers from certain gender or ethnic groups” (90).
But in fact capitalism has always depended on using, reinforcing, and expanding divisions of identity in order to justify inequalities, even if these divisions can be characterized as culturally determined. The expansion of capitalism to its present scope leapt forward through the wide-scale imposition of slavery in the New World. And this was only possible through the racialized “othering” of Africans who were subjected to slavery. Sayer is arguing against whole bodies of literature which make this and related points, but he does not choose to directly engage these.
When Sayer asserts that the relationship(s) between racism/sexism and capitalism are not necessary, but rather contingent, it seems that he is saying that capitalism could have progressed differently. But this is always the case looking backwards. It is as if, were somebody to stave off hunger by eating bread, Sayer would argue that the bread was only contingent, not necessary, because she could have eaten cake. It is true that we can imagine a capitalism without racism or sexism, though I would argue that it has never existed. So perhaps we need to respond to Sayer by qualifying statements such as, “Capitalism depends for its existence on racism and sexism” and instead insist that, “The growth of capitalism as we know it has depended on racism and sexism.” But dependence it has been.
If The Moral Significance of Class contributes to a revitalized attention to issues of class and of redistribution, it will be a worthy achievement. For this attention is needed, given the scope and trajectory of extreme inequalities in today's global economic order. If it does not accomplish this, however, it may be because the book has set up a false opposition between attention to class oppression and “other” forms of oppression.
