Spectres of Marxism: a comment on Mike

Savage’s market model of class difference

Alberto Toscano and Jamie Woodcock

Abstract

This article is a critique of Mike Savage’s ‘From the “problematic of the proletariat”
to a class analysis of the “wealth elites”’. It first rejects the notion of the ‘problem-
atic of the proletariat’ – the importance of a dividing line between the working and
middle class – instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class
analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and finan-
cialization, alongside a consideration of class globally. It stresses the importance of
exploitation for understanding class and inequality, rather than moving to the no-
tion of ‘advantage’, as proposed by Savage, which expels an understanding of power.
While the focus on elites in class analysis is welcomed, it is argued that there is a
continuing interdependence between classes and that race and gender must also be
considered.
Keywords: Marxism, class, exploitation, class analysis

There is a vital if truncated intuition at the heart of Savage’s article, namely

that analyses of class tend to differ from studies of stratification and inequality
by foregrounding politics. This intuition is vital because, whilst the current
concern with inequality in the social sciences, most prominently crystallized
in the ‘craze’ following the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st
Century (2014), registers the political contestation of the rule of the ‘1%’, the
link between political agency and social divisions remains all too hazy. While
in the political arena the kind of strategic populism evinced by formations like
Podemos is very promising in advancing projects of social justice long aban-
doned across the political spectrum, scholarly treatments of inequality such
as Piketty’s, for all of their political goodwill, tend to rely on organizationally
thin if rhetorically ample conceptions of democracy. The intuition is truncated
because the particular hybrid of economic and cultural class analysis articu-
lated by Savage and his colleagues downplays the antagonistic politics of class
formation as well as the intrinsically political character of class exploitation.
Divorced from the idea of a politics immanent to class formation (which is
not to say that this politics is not ambiguous or indeterminate) the result is a
The Sociological Review, Vol. 63, 512–523 (2015) DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12295

C 2015 The Authors. The Sociological Review C 2015 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published

by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
 Spectres of Marxism

taxonomic exercise that is only political – in the sense of providing elements for
a reflection on political strategy and resources for critique – at the upper level
of its spectrum of positions, in the identification of elites. The very proposal to
refocus away from the supposedly traditional obsession of class analysis with
the boundaries and intermundia between working and middle classes towards
the dynamic recomposition of elites speaks to the limits of this project, which
risks repeating the elite fantasy that their rising fortunes are not interdepen-
dent with the dire straits of the lower orders, that, to paraphrase Mario Tronti
(2006) capitalists have at last emancipated themselves from workers. At the
crudest and most simplistic level a politically oriented analysis of class is con-
cerned with the dynamics of this interdependence. A shift from a relational
analysis of class to a taxonomic one risks, like much of contemporary writing
on inequality, however critically intentioned, to sunder the question of class
from that of power. It is our contention that only retaining the centrality of
exploitation – while enriching this notion to incorporate, for example, contem-
porary mechanisms of financial expropriation (Lapavitsas, 2012) – can make
good on the promise of a revival of class analysis that foregrounds its political
stakes.
It is ironic, if perfectly understandable, that despite Marx’s famous
protestations about the fact that it was not he but rather French counter-
revolutionary historians that pioneered class analysis (in the 1852 letter to
Joseph Weydeymeyer), talk of class in sociology so often requires the need to
demarcate oneself from Marx and Marxism. The spectacle is one of repeated
exorcism (not dissimilar from the unedifying one of Piketty repeatedly explain-
ing why his own Capital bears little relation to Marx’s, and how he hasn’t really
read it, and how the Soviet Union failed, etc.) which one can be forgiven from
at times finding rather symptomatic. In Savage’s article we get an extremely
streamlined picture of the Marxist legacy in class analysis, which is boiled down
to two elements, both of which a truly contemporary class analysis would be re-
quired to jettison: (1) the ‘problematic of the proletariat’, understood to involve
an abiding concern with the ‘dividing line’ between working class and ‘middle
classes’; (2) linking class and inequality through the concept of exploitation
understood in line with the labour theory of value. Now, though Savage is in
his rights to compress the complexity of the Marxist debate on class from the
1970s to the present, his choice of the figure of the ‘dividing line’, taken from
Goldthorpe, is itself problematic. Not discounting that the cultural borders be-
tween commoners and gentry remain an abiding political unconscious or overt
obsession of British social scientist, the Marxist concern with that dividing
line – notwithstanding Thompson’s salutary focus on the history of working-
class experience and self-formation – was above all political. The problem of
class fractions, intermediate strata, contradictory class locations, and so on,
emerged from the need to frame the strategic conundrum of the workers’
movements and their trade-union and party organizations (Poulantzas, 2008;
Wacquant, 1992). Considering the fissiparous nature of Marxism and its aca-
demic offshoots, formulations of this problem (or family of problems) took


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a bewildering array of forms. It could be argued that they were all haunted
by two opposed issues, that of co-optation (or internal division) and that of
alliance (or external connection).
The notion of the labour aristocracy was an attempt to understand co-
optation, trying to explain how and why European working classes, under the
leadership of social democracy, could be enlisted in the carnage of imperial-
ist war. There were related debates about division with the ‘salaried classes’
(Kracauer, 1998) and ‘brain workers’ (Bologna, 2007) within the interwar Left.
On the issue of alliances there were investigations of the ‘new petty bour-
geoisie’ in the 1970s (Poulantzas, 2008), amid divergent strategies (Eurocom-
munist, ‘workerist’) to bring these strata into projects of democratic socialism
and social transformation. Savage’s simplification of this history, while neces-
sary for his purposes, has serious drawbacks. It is problematic to argue that
throughout the 20th century the dividing line between the middle and working
class was a fundamental preoccupation of the workers’ movement, and that its
leaders and theorists held that the working class was the majority of the popu-
lation. The Bolsheviks, for one, were painfully aware that this was anything but
the case – not only did the October Revolution take place in a country made
up 80 per cent by peasantry, but the civil war itself led the likes of Bukharin
to observe that the Russian working class had de facto disappeared (Cohen,
1980). The entire problem of alliances and hegemony that preoccupied Euro-
pean Communist parties throughout the 20th century would have been otiose
had such a belief in the majoritarian character of the working class actually
held. It could even be argued that the theory according to which the major-
ity of the population of advanced countries belonged to the proletariat was
itself a minority position, articulated for instance in Ernest Mandel’s (1978)
critique of Eurocommunism. Holding on to this position, moreover, involved
proposing a concept of exploitation that did not simply involve the extraction
of surplus value from the labour power of productive labourers, and thus a con-
ception of the proletariat that was not directly articulated onto a labour theory
of value (very little of the classics of Marxian class analysis sought to directly
map class onto the relation between value and price, and the ‘transformation
problem’ seems an odd angle through which to claim the obsolescence of that
perspective).
Leaving this (very proximate) ‘prehistory’ aside, the schematic way in which
Savage presents the Marxist legacy misses some of the most vital contribu-
tions to class analysis that grew out of the immanent critique of the Marxian
paradigm. In the end, the ‘dividing line’ that mattered most was not the one
between the working class and its cultivated other, but the one within the prole-
tariat. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois’s analyses of the colour line severing black
worker from white worker, this has been a crucial theoretical and practical
question, which Marxists ignored at their peril. The work of C. L. R. James
(1997), Noel Ignatiev (2008), David Roediger (1991), the Birmingham Centre
for Cultural Studies (Hall et al., 1978) and many others showed the need to
‘stretch’ Marxist categories (to adopt Fanon’s phrase) to take on the fact that

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class was organized, experienced and internally divided by and as ‘race’. In

the British context the vitality of this research programme was exhaustively
demonstrated by Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978) – a landmark in thinking
about culture and class which was certainly not about the ‘problematic of the
proletariat’ or consumption as conceived by Goldthorpe or Savage. The ‘divid-
ing lines’ of gender and sexuality have been equally significant to the critical
reinvention of class analysis, to expand our conception of exploitation, labour
and value to include the domestic sphere and the gendering of social reproduc-
tion (here the work of Selma James, 2012; Leopoldina Fortunati, 1995; Silvia
Federici, 2012, and others continue to be extremely generative). And, without
calling upon liberal theories of intersectionality, we should also acknowledge
the ways in which the complex over-determinations of race and gender must
transform our perspectives on class (as shown long ago by Angela Davis, 1982).
These dividing lines still remain unattended to by much mainstream sociology,
and by the vast majority of class analysis, as testified by Savage’s own work –
where for the most part elites, service workers and proletarians alike appear
perplexingly ‘unmarked’ – as though race and gender could be at best consid-
ered as variables, perhaps to be factored in later, rather than as constitutive of
class formation and experience, not to mention of the politics of class.
None of these debates around class analysis and class politics – which ex-
panded upon, criticized and innovated the Marxist tradition – depended on a
mechanical translation of the labour theory of value into empirical studies of
class formation (which arguably involves a misunderstanding of Marx’s method
of abstraction, and little reflection on how, for instance, the theory of value in
Capital relates to the ‘sociological’ inquiries into struggles over the working
day – in other words, not mechanically). Savage writes as though the labour
theory of value hadn’t been in dispute since the late nineteenth century, as
though the ‘transformation problem’ had been discovered in the 1970s. (In this
light, there is insufficient recognition in his work that the defeat of Marxism
in British academia is primarily a political and not a theoretical or empirical
fact.) It is incorrect to say that ‘the labour theory of value has largely fallen
into abeyance due to problems in linking price (in terms of the actual monetary
price of labour and commodities) to value (seen as an underlying force which
ultimately drives prices)’. That the measurement of prices in terms of labour-
time is at the core of the obsolescence of the proletarian paradigm strikes us
as a very limited perspective, which mistakes a Marxian theory of value as a
social form, with an accounting perspective that would take labour as a so-
cial substance. It is worth noting here that a lively and complex debate exists
on this issue between two wings of contemporary Marxism: on the one hand,
the ‘post-Workerist’ tendency associated with the names of Antonio Negri,
Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, Carlo Vercellone, and others, which stip-
ulates that the historical crisis of the labour theory of value (which was but is no
longer valid) has led to epochal changes in the technical and political compo-
sition of the working classes, giving rise to the figures of ‘cognitive capitalism’
and ‘immaterial labour’, and foregrounding rent as a directly political form of


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exploitation; on the other, theorists of the value-form have argued that this
critique of the labour theory of value misunderstands the level of abstraction
at which it operates in Marx’s own work (Heinrich, 2012; Henninger, 2007).
Even if we turn to the more familiar figure of E. P. Thompson, invoked by
Savage as somehow paradigmatic of the British problematic of the proletariat,
matters are more complex than Savage’s summary would allow one to suspect.
The key legacy of Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is not
to be found in an exclusive focus on working-class culture. As Thompson (1991:
213) famously argued: ‘The making of the working class is a fact of political
and cultural, as much as of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous
generation of the factory system . . . the working class made itself as much as it
was made.’ Thus the processes of class formation were brought to the forefront.
This took an approach that was neither solely economic, nor solely cultural,
to class analysis. This is an important departure from the orthodox Marxist
position that an individual’s class is determined by their role in the process
of production and their subsequent class consciousness develops from this
point. Instead, Thompson suggests that that class consciousness pre-exists the
exploitation relations in the productive process. Mario Tronti later developed
a similar position:
We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and
workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head,
reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the
class struggle of the working class. (Tronti, 1964)

The significance of this innovation in the understanding of class formation

is the radical assertion of a heterodox Marxism that focuses on the dynamics
of struggle from below. Rather than studying class statically or schematically
it interrogates the processes of composition and decomposition that are con-
tinually taking place. The Autonomist Marxist tradition(s) have produced a
number of investigations of class in different contexts that shed important light
on these dynamics of class composition. This has involved the introduction of
the particularly persuasive notion of analysing it in terms of two components.
First, the political composition: the way in which workers struggle against
capital, something that is subjected to a continuing process of recomposition.
Second, the technical composition: investigating the labour process, the use of
technology, and the techniques and strategies of management.
It is puzzling that Savage chooses to ignore contemporary strains of Marx-
ism in his critique of other theories, choosing instead to argue against out-
dated forms. However, class formation is also a central concern for orthodox
Marxism, as well as the Weberian traditions, yet it is remarkably absent from
Savage’s argument. While a descriptive account or a classificatory proposal has
some merit, it is not an analogous project. A classificatory exercise without
a sense of the social conflict, however muted, that is crucial to the notion of
class, or its contradictory lived experience and consciousness, runs the risk of
proliferating class categories which mimic those of marketing in representing a

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bundle of somewhat arbitrarily chosen attributes rather than being grounded

in political contestation and social ontology. This becomes particularly prob-
lematic when considering the social landscape of the UK that Savage briefly
surveys. It appears as though the past thirty years – despite the brief mention
of neoliberalism – provides only a backdrop for rising income inequality. It is
far more useful, drawing on David Harvey’s (2005: 3) notion of neoliberalism,
to consider how this has entailed programmes of ‘deregulation, privatization,
and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision’. In the broad-
est terms, neoliberalism has involved ‘the restoration of class power’, but has
‘not necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same people’
(Harvey, 2005: 31). This conceptualization makes it possible to connect class
to the question of class struggle, even when the latter is essentially unilateral
and taking place from above.
Moreover, the way in which class is to be situated within social relations
is significantly limited by the solely national context. This creates a twofold
distortion. First, the terms in which this problematic is defined are, to be blunt,
parochially British (or English). As such the debates that Savage chooses to
focus on are quite unrecognizable to those acquainted with debates on class in
mainland Europe – not to mention anywhere else – where issues of class experi-
ence, authenticity, class culture, and so on, are simply not articulated in the ‘pe-
culiar’ ways that they are in Britain (for reasons that the likes of Thompson, An-
derson or Ellen Wood sought to detail in contrasting ways). The notion that the
working class is a repository of authentic ‘values’ is accordingly rather alien to
important variants of Marxist discourse elsewhere – as well as within the United
Kingdom itself (Anderson, 1980). Furthermore, the subsequent analysis lacks
any reflexivity about how the history of English capitalism, politics and ideol-
ogy is determinant in the very parameters of the Great British Class Survey.
The second distortion is that the analysis is cut short at the national bound-
ary. The national account provided by the GBCS could be developed signifi-
cantly with even a cursory glance at the global picture. It is easy to reject what
Savage calls the ‘industrial paradigm’ when looking at only the UK. This is not,
of course, an attempt to assert that nothing has changed in the last forty or
so years. Rather, that it is not possible to draw broader analytical conclusions
based on the numerical decline of workers engaged in a particular form of pro-
duction in a single country. A much more convincing analysis can be attempted
by expanding class to a global dynamic of capital accumulation. Suddenly, that
‘industrial paradigm’ appears to be very relevant in many respects, particu-
larly when considering the dynamics of exploitation at a global level and the
role that labour arbitrage has in shaping working classes across the globe. For
example, Foster and McChesney highlight how:

Despite the massive labour input of Chinese workers in assembling the final product,
their low pay means that their work amounts only to 3.6 percent of the total manu-
facturing cost (shipping price) of the iPhone. The overall profit margin on iPhones
in 2009 was 64 percent. If iPhones were assembled in the United States – assuming


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labour costs ten times that in China, equal productivity, and constant component
costs – Apple would still have an ample profit margin, but it would drop from 64 to
50 percent. In effect, Apple makes 22 percent of its profit margin on iPhone pro-
duction from the much higher rate of exploitation of Chinese labour. (Foster and
McChesney, 2012: 140)

This example highlights how there have been both considerable shifts and
a continuing significance of the paradigm of proletarian exploitation.
The analysis of the contemporary dynamics of capital accumulation becomes
more confused on the issue of financialization. The financial crisis that began
in 2007 did not emerge directly from production, but that does not mean it
had nothing to do with workers. As Lapavitsas (2012: 15) argues, the crisis
was ‘precipitated by housing debts among the poorest US workers, an un-
precedented occurrence in the history of capitalism’. Therefore, the crisis is
‘directly related to the financialisation of personal income, mostly expenditure
on housing but also on education, health, pensions and insurance’. This has
taken place within an expanding system of credit, a response to stagnating
workers’ wages since the 1970s. The failure to understand this results in the
conceptualization of financialization as deus ex machina – and the imprecise
notion of a ‘financialized elite’ – that Savage tries to deploy. Instead, it is far
more fruitful to try and organically link the issue of exploitation to that of
financialization. Lapavitsas’s (2012: 16) concept of ‘financial expropriation’, or
the process of ‘extracting financial profit directly out of the personal income
of workers and others’, signals the possibilities of how this can be achieved. In
these terms, financialization can be analysed as part of the processes of capital
accumulation, linking the astronomic house prices of London to the people
forced to live on the streets, and bonuses in the city to individuals borrowing
on high interest credit cards to make ends meet.
The thrust of Savage’s argument is for a new orientation on studying the
elite which is to be achieved by returning again to the GBCS. This study –
and its combination with the GfK survey – has come under a range of criti-
cism elsewhere (Bradley, 2014; Dorling, 2014; Rollock, 2014; Mills, 2014). Of
these, Mills (2014: 443)(see this volume) is the least forgiving: ‘the GBCS is a
fiasco. It is so theoretically and methodologically flawed that it can contribute
little of value to our understanding of the structure of systematic social in-
equality in the UK.’ While there are concerns with the ‘mountain of highly
self-selected poor quality data sitting on top of a molehill of (slightly) better
quality data’ (Mills, 2014: 439), this critique takes aim specifically at the the-
orization of the elite that Savage is proposing. In some ways it is admirable
to take one of the problems that has been identified in the GBCS – the over-
representation of managers and professionals – and try to turn this weak link
into the stronger part upon which to hang a new analysis. The proposal identi-
fies an important gap as academic research has historically paid less attention
to the elite. In part this is due to the problems of identifying and explor-
ing the composition of the elite through representative data sets. A renewed

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sociological focus on the elites is to be welcomed. Savage et al. (2014: 2) previ-

ously posed the question of whether researchers should ‘refuse to have anything
to do with data that departs from the “gold standard” large-scale nationally
representative data sets’ or whether to ‘try and make the best of what we
have and explore using innovative methods to deploy it to its best advan-
tage’. The weakness of the data aside, the main problem is the new analysis
proposed.
Savage suggests that the elite can be understood by rejecting exploitation
and favouring instead the notions of ‘privilege’ and ‘advantage’. This distorts
the analysis and relations between classes. The elite does not exist in a social
vacuum – even despite the attempts at geographic isolation, seen for example
in the rise in gated communities in England (Atkinson and Flint, 2004) –
but have to be produced and reproduced by and within social relations; a
manager ceases to be one if they do not have any workers to manage. Although
Savage only briefly mentions Erik Olin Wright, further engagement with his
arguments on class is illustrative of this point about class relations. Despite the
schematic nature of his analysis, Wright (2005: 23) articulates the importance
of ‘the inverse interdependent welfare principle’ for understanding exploitation
and class. This principle explains how the ‘material welfare of the exploiters
causally depends upon the material deprivations of the exploited’. Therefore
the relations between classes are ‘not merely different, they are antagonistic’.
What Savage suggests instead is to shift the analytical lens onto how different
‘capitals, assets and resources’ can be used to accumulate advantages (Savage
et al., 2005). This combination of Marx and Bourdieu supposedly frees class
analysis from the limitations of having to understand class relations in terms of
a zero-sum game.
The problem with moving from exploitation to advantage is the loss of the in-
terdependence between classes based on exclusion (which should also include
an understanding of expropriation, dispossession, racialization and gendering,
as practices and ideologies of exclusion). The mobilization of capital – whether
it is economic, cultural, or social – takes place within antagonistic class relations
and is used to enforce systematic exclusion, rather than simply granting advan-
tages to individuals. Wright’s (2005: 23) principle is achieved with two further
important components: ‘exclusion’ of ‘the exploited from access to certain pro-
ductive resources’ and on that basis allowing the exploiter to ‘appropriate the
labor effort of the exploited’. The distorting effect of rejecting the dialectical
interplay of exploitation and exclusion can be elaborated further by referring
again to the categories in the GBCS. It is far from clear how the social and
cultural variables included in the GBCS confer advantages, and moreover why
these are preferable to exploitation for understanding social class. In particu-
lar the social component – collected by counting the number of people known
in different occupations – is a crude measure. It cannot consider the strength
of these social connections, something that is surely critical for converting a
relationship into something that can confer a tangible advantage. For exam-
ple, it is difficult to see how the worker on a zero-hour contract with a broad


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number of acquaintances gains an advantage over the investment banker who

only socializes with other people in finance.
The conversion of social or cultural capital into tangible advantages does
not occur in a vacuum. The ‘professional-executive elite’ who mobilizes their
resources to gain an advantage over the member of the ‘precariat’ and other
classes does so in an exclusionary manner. As Bourdieu (1984: 227–228) writes,
those engaged in ‘symbolic appropriation’ view the process ‘as a kind of mys-
tical participation in a common good of which each person has a share’.
This is distinguished from ‘material appropriation, which asserts real exclu-
sivity and therefore exclusion’. As an example, it could be argued that ev-
eryone is able to appreciate fine art. However, Bourdieu argues that cultural
capital:

only exists and subsists in and through the struggles of which the fields of cultural
production (the artistic field, the scientific field etc.) and, beyond them, the field of
the social classes, are the site, struggles in which the agents wield strengths and obtain
profits proportionate to their mastery of this objectified capital, in other words, their
internalized capital. (Bourdieu, 1984: 228)

In this quotation it might be possible to take a notion of cultural capital as

an advantage, something that can be used to get an edge over others. How-
ever, Bourdieu continues to argue that ‘these products are subject to exclusive
appropriation, material or symbolic, and, functioning as cultural capital (ob-
jectified or internalized), they yield a profit in distinction . . . and a profit
in legitimacy’. Even in Bourdieu’s terms, it is not possible to consider the
‘professional-executive elite’ as a group of advantaged individuals that have
gained these advantages without forms of exploitation, expropriation and dis-
possession. The professional-executive is engaged in a form of work that can
only exist because of the division of labour in society. The distinction that sets
the elite apart from the rest of society is only possible with continuing inter-
dependence (and overt or implicit antagonism). Savage et al. (2014: 7) confuse
this issue by arguing that class struggle ‘is a relational contest in which some
groups have unusually marked opportunities to accumulate and hence gain
increasing advantages over those who do not’.
This conceptualization of a relational struggle has more in common with
some kind of competitive game than an analysis of class in the UK today. It
is a vision of class that betrays a market model of class difference. It is worth
returning again to Harvey’s (2005: 159) understanding of neoliberalism. The
‘main substantive achievement of neoliberalization . . . has been to redistribute,
rather than generate, wealth and income’; Harvey articulates how this has
involved a range of different processes captured under the term ‘accumulation
by dispossession’, an updated understanding of the ‘primitive’ or ‘original’
practices of accumulation during the rise of capitalism that Marx had identified
in the first volume of Capital. Members of the ‘professional-executive elite’ are
currently engaged in a sustained collective project of privatization, austerity,

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 Spectres of Marxism

and attacks on workers’ pay and conditions (their class consciousness is not in
doubt). Although the analysis proposed by Savage could include a focus on the
strategy and tactics of the elite – how they gain an advantage over others – it
obscures a sociological sensitivity to the capacity for non-elite (class) resistance.
If exploitation is no longer necessary to get ahead, why do millions of people
still have to face supervisors and managers cajoling them into working harder?
Instead of resisting those attempts to intensify the labour process, maybe they
simply need to accumulate more ‘advantages’ . . .
The questions of race and gender are visibly absent from Savage’s analysis.
Previously, Savage et al. (2014) had noted the importance of research on the
gendering of class (Skeggs, 1997, 2004) and on its racialization (Hall, 1980).
Yet there appears to be no engagement with either of these in the GBCS
analysis. This is highly problematic given that Savage condemns the older
theories of class analysis as economistic and reductive, and then proceeds to
reproduce, or indeed intensify, a (non-Marxist) class reductivism in his own
approach. To put it simply: it is not sufficient just to mention race and gender
when undertaking research on class today. This would mean that all forms
of exploitation are removed from Savage’s analysis and oppression too. Any
understanding of contemporary capitalism that does not take into account
either of these is severely limited in its explanatory capacity. It is unable to
speak to the experiences and struggles of the majority of society, as well as
some of the constitutive vectors of class formation, something that surely should
carry great theoretical importance for the composition of elites. Perhaps the
extreme homogeneity of the latter in the contemporary UK has played a role
in this elision.
Savage’s argument would lead one to conclude that there is no interdepen-
dence, no conflict, between classes today, and that advantage and privilege
can take place independently of practices of exploitation, expropriation and
dispossession. The ‘advantaged class’ cannot ‘secure its advantages’ without
engaging in practices that increase the rate of exploitation of workers and dis-
possessing or excluding the poor and surplus populations in general (Denning,
2010), deploying strategies deeply cognizant of the axes of gender and race
(Dymski, 2009). Savage is certainly right that class has not gone away, but that
is because class relations marked by antagonistic interdependence continue to
structure our social world, no matter how much our elites may try to eman-
cipate themselves from labouring and unemployed populations increasingly
envisaged as a surplus humanity (Davis, 2007). The spectres of such Marxist
theses are now stalking the mainstream. While contemporary sociologists may
try to sideline exploitation and struggle as obsolete tools, it is increasingly
clear that our contemporary European crisis, both economic and political,
requires polishing and cutting some old lenses. We will leave the last word
to a non-Marxist economist’s reflections on the ongoing agon over Greece’s
attempt, after Syriza’s electoral victory, to escape the clutches of endless finan-
cialized expropriation, or ‘fiscal waterboarding’, as their finance minister has
described it.


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I am hesitant to introduce what may seem like class warfare, but if you separate
those who benefitted the most from European policies before the crisis from those
who befitted the least, and are now expected to pay the bulk of the adjustment costs,
rather than posit a conflict between Germans and Spaniards, it might be far more
accurate to posit a conflict between the business and financial elite on one side (along
with EU officials) and workers and middle class savers on the other. This is a conflict
among economic groups, in other words, and not a national conflict, although it
is increasingly hard to prevent it from becoming a national conflict. (Pettis, 2015;
Klein, 2015)

Goldsmiths, University of London

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