[Vivek Chibber — Rescuing Class From the Cultural Turn](https://cataly... (@f.....d)

Vivek Chibber — Rescuing Class From the Cultural Turn

For more than a generation now, class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” Although the specific claims attached to it tend to vary across the disciplines, its practitioners share a set of baseline intuitions. Chief among these is the view that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry with them—their subjective understandings of their place in the world. Social action is fundamentally meaning-oriented, which implies that theories of class have to attend to the ways actors subjectively interpret their social situations and how the frames they utilize are constructed in the first place. While this insistence on the interpretive dimension of social action is a pillar of the cultural turn, it is not the only one. The focus on ideas and meaning has encouraged a turn away from structural analysis and toward the valuation of contingency of social phenomena, and further, an insistence upon the local and particular, as against the more universalizing claims of traditional class theory.

A natural consequence of this shift has been the declining influence of the idea that class is fundamentally about interests and power, and a corresponding turn away from the macro-level class analysis associated with Marxian theory. In the disciplines of history and anthropology especially, but even in sociology, class has increasingly become viewed through the contingencies of its cultural construction rather than as an obdurate structural fact; its relation to social action is seen as working through the construction of agential identities, not via the operation of their objective interests. The transformation has not been total, of course. In the English-speaking world, the work of Erik Wright and Charles Tilly in the United States and John Goldthorpe in Britain has sustained a vital tradition of materialist class analysis. Still, the broad thrust of intellectual production has for some time now veered decidedly away from this approach.

But there are signs now of a growing unease with the all-encompassing embrace of culture. In an era when capitalism has spread to every nook and cranny of the world, subjecting labor and businesses to the same market-based compulsions; when patterns of income distribution have followed similar trends across a large number of countries in the Global North and South; when economic crises have engulfed almost the entire planet twice in less than ten years, bringing country after country to its knees; and when a broad shift in distributive inequalities has occurred across dozens of economies across the continents — it seems odd to remain in the thrall of a framework that insists on locality, contingency, and the indeterminacy of translation. It has become increasingly obvious to many that there are pressures and constraints that stretch across cultures and, more importantly, that these constraints are eliciting common patterns of response from social actors, regardless of culture and geography.

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