BiblioVault - Books about Social classes

A General Theory of Exploitation and Class

John E. Roemer

Harvard University Press, 1982

How can exploitation and even class division occur in socialist societies? The question is not merely embarrassing for Marxists and socialists. It is also a deep puzzle for economic theorists. In this original and powerful work, John Roemer proposes a general theory of exploitation which provides a game theoretic framework for expressing any conception of exploitation—feudal, capitalist, or socialist—in a standardized and explicit way, thus permitting a clear comparison of different ethical conceptions. As well as applying the general theory to an analysis of socialist society, Roemer uses it to contrast Marxian and neoclassical conceptions of exploitation. By placing the Marxian conception of exploitation in the context of a more general theory, Roemer provides fresh insights into classical questions, and resolves several old problems in Marxian economics.

The book also contains a formal theory of class formation. Once the behavior and institutional specifications of an economy are given, classes emerge endogenously in the model. In a major theorem Roemer relates the two key characteristics of a person in a given economy: his class position and his status as exploiter or exploited. Finally, he shows that the general theory of exploitation can be viewed as the formal translation into economic language of the theory of historical materialism. In its mathematical power and precision, its skillful use of general equilibrium and game theory, the book will become an important bridge between Marxist and neoclassical economics.

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Give and Take

Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan

Maren A. Ehlers

Harvard University Press, 2018

Give and Take offers a new history of government in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868), one that focuses on ordinary subjects: merchants, artisans, villagers, and people at the margins of society such as outcastes and itinerant entertainers. Most of these individuals are now forgotten and do not feature in general histories except as bystanders, protestors, or subjects of exploitation. Yet despite their subordinate status, they actively participated in the Tokugawa polity because the state was built on the principle of reciprocity between privilege-granting rulers and duty-performing status groups. All subjects were part of these local, self-governing associations whose members shared the same occupation. Tokugawa rulers imposed duties on each group and invested them with privileges, ranging from occupational monopolies and tax exemptions to external status markers. Such reciprocal exchanges created permanent ties between rulers and specific groups of subjects that could serve as conduits for future interactions.

This book is the first to explore how high and low people negotiated and collaborated with each other in the context of these relationships. It takes up the case of one domain—Ōno in central Japan—to investigate the interactions between the collective bodies in domain society as they addressed the problem of poverty.

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Globalized Authoritarianism

Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco

Koenraad Bogaert

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics

Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.

In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.

Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.

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Going North Thinking West

The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction

Irvin Peckham

Utah State University Press, 2010

A long-time writing program administrator and well-respected iconoclast, Irvin Peckham is strongly identified with progressive ideologies in education. However, in Going North Thinking West, Peckham mounts a serious critique of what is called critical pedagogy—primarily a project of the academic left—in spite of his own sympathies there.

College composition is fundamentally a middle-class enterprise, and is conducted by middle-class professionals, while student demographics show increasing presence of the working class. In spite of best intentions to ameliorate inequitable social class relationships, says Peckham, critical pedagogies can actually contribute to reproducing those relationships in traditional forms—not only perpetuating social inequities, but pushing working class students toward self-alienation, as well.

Peckham argues for more clarity on the history of critical thinking, social class structures and teacher identity (especially as these are theorized by Pierre Bourdieu), while he undertakes a critical inquiry of the teaching practices with which even he identifies.

Going North Thinking West focuses especially on writing teachers who claim a necessary linkage between critical thinking and writing skills; these would include both teachers who promote the fairly a-political position that argumentation is the obvious and necessary form of academic discourse, and more controversial teachers who advocate turning a classroom into a productive site of social transformation.

Ultimately, Peckham argues for a rereading of Freire (an icon of transformational pedagogy), and for a collaborative investigation of students’ worlds as the first step in a successful writing pedagogy. It is an argument for a pedagogy based on service to students rather than on transforming them.

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