On Classism and Inequality

Posted by Keith Tidman

In various forms, and to many degrees, classism, meaning prejudice against people belonging to a particular social class, and social inequality are pervasive, pernicious, and persistent. And they are unbreakably bound: classism and inequality engage one another in a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship. The two phenomena are therefore best explored together.

The casualties of classism, predominantly poorer, less educated, working-class people, not uncommonly internalise the discrimination, resenting and yet accepting censure at the same time. The victims may find it difficult to dismiss the opprobrium as unjust — they might, in resignation, wrongly see it as fitting to their station in life. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to rationalise why, dismissively stating that: 

 “The order of castes is merely the ratification of an order of nature.”

At the same time, class has appeared hard-wired across generations within families. For many, there are no or few available strategies to exit the cycle they’re caught up in. Measures of influence, power, wealth, job status, and knowledge — along with verdicts about decency, heritage, behaviours, habits, and who deserves what — are the filters through which stereotypes and biases pass. Identity, labels, entitlement, and rationalisation are among the tools instigators use to perpetuate classism. Their claim to merited privilege becomes the normative standard. That standard, however, can run into the immorality of social and economic inequality that’s arbitrary, often non-merit based, and stems from self-indulgence.

Appropriately, the 18th-century Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith pushed back against Nietzsche’s dismissiveness, laconically offering the optimistic, affirmative view that:

 “... the  difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of.” 

A notion that all people, of all classes, can build on. 

Yet classism and inequality aren’t figments; they are real social constructs that bear concretely on citizens’ lives. Certain groups, believing their economic and sociopolitical advantages endow them with higher class rankings, enjoy yet another consequential privilege: they get to pull the levers on how government, the law, institutions, entitlements, and cultural foundations are designed and operate, and whom those levers favor. This instrumentalist perspective serves as a means to acquire additional benefits. The privileged are adept at influencing the running of nations and leveraging the hand they get to play. They project their influence on society in ways that primarily attend to self-interests, with modest resources to be shared among the rest.

The effect of those residual resources doesn’t make inequalities right, or more bearable or fixable; the effect is duplicitous. In a paradoxical way, the privileged exert a powerful, dominant grip, while dexterously advancing their interests. The exercise of power often happens veiled — though it needn’t always do so, as out-in-the-open brazenness is no barrier to political manipulation. An offshoot among the privileged is increased self-determination and sovereignty over choice — their own and their nation’s. Distrust of the financially oiled powerbrokers — among those who feel disenfranchised and denied fairness and opportunity — emboldens disunity and strident polarisation. Sometimes the outcome is the rise of extreme factions on both the left and right of politics, clashing over matters of both policy and heart-felt beliefs.

The underprivileged classes see that, in an increasingly and perhaps irresistibly and irreversibly globalised world, there’s merely a larger platform on which those already holding capital, and the levers of influence that accompany it, extend their gains all the more. The so-called common good isn’t always seen as an enlarging, sharable pot — where zero-sum resources go only so far and are seen to be acquired at the expense of other groups. The less-advantaged members of society might question whether equality and merit really matter, as opposed to an unfair 'legacy' grip on claims to influence, wealth, and power. 

Liberal economics promises the opportunity to rise among the ranks, though serving as more an aspirational, albeit elusive, brass ring. Identity — such as race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, language, and history — is integral. Identity serves as a means to decide how to share access to rights, choice, fairness, justice, goods, safety, and well-being — and ultimately recognition and legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas — according to the governing arrangement. Yet inequality endangers these benefits.

As an ideal, the observation by the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is still highly relevant to the debate — duplicated around much of the world — over class, inequality, the public good, sociopolitical advantage, and nations’ responsibility to rectify egregious imbalances:

“It is therefore one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor.”

Yet, the reality — whether in liberal democracies or in patriarchal autocracies, and most systems of governance and social philosophies in-between — has seldom worked out that way. Classism and inequality continue to march conspicuously in unison and without remedy, their rhythms bound irremediably together, each still used to justify and harden the shape of the other.