Globalization, Capitalism and Social Inequality
In the past years, inequalities in most societies and on a global scale have increased rapidly. This tendency is especially alarming in emerging societies. Large numbers of citizens of these societies have seen their living conditions improve very much and average income has thereby increased even on a global level. However, poverty persists, lower middle classes can often be considered to be working poor and the rich have become excessively wealthy by any standard, especially in emerging societies. These observations have become common knowledge. Less is known about the causes and dynamics behind increasing inequality. The paper enquires into the link between globalization, capitalism and increasing inequality in emerging societies. It argues that in each society, older local, regional and national social structures persist that shape inequalities. The ranks and classes in these older structures transform into capitalist classes or milieus by changing their daily life and activities while at the same time reproducing their relative social position. The leading milieus partly embrace capitalism and partly try to resist globalization by drawing on older national traditions. This leads to specific configurations of social structures, capitalisms and globalization that differ from one society to the next.
A phenomenon that worries conservative politicians, liberal economists and radical activists alike is the recent increase of socio-economic inequality (Stiglitz 2012). While it has been difficult to judge whether inequality has increased over the twentieth century, there seems to be a consensus that it has become a serious problem during the past decade. Most researchers agree that inequality has increased since the turn of the century within most nation states and on a global level (Jomo and Baudot 2007). It is less certain if inequality between nation states has been rising or declining over the past decades. However, there is hardly any doubt about a small number of individuals getting excessively rich and a large number of individuals not improving their lot across the globe. A lot of anger has been voiced about this, from international organizations like UNDP to transnational movements like Occupy to academics across the board. The statistics support their case. The absolute number of poor has remained almost unchanged over the past few decades, while the wealth accumulated by the richest individuals has risen to unprecedented levels, and multinational corporations report record profits virtually every year (Milanovic 2005: 149; Kaplinsky 2005: 31). There seems to be a consensus that these trends are alarming by most standards. Milanovic (2005: 108) has calculated the Gini index for the global population at 64, for the US at 80 and for the countries of the world taken as a whole at 53 for the year 1998. And it has been increasing in most countries, including Thailand and many European countries. In the year 2000, the 358 richest individuals had an income that was equivalent to the entire collective income of the poorest 45 % of the world population. The richest 10 % of all countries scored an average income that was 122 times higher than that of the poorest 10 % of all countries. And while the relation of the GDP of the richest 20 % of all countries to that of the poorest 20 % of all countries was 3 to 1 in the year 1820, it was 75 to 1 in the year 2000. In spite of the general awareness of these facts and the clear visibility of the corresponding realities in everyday life, these trends have not been reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. And the causes of these trends remain unclear as well. It is evident that they are connected to global capitalism but it is less evident why inequality increases and why the rich get richer and the poor remain poor. This paper inquires into these issues. First, it offers an interpretation of contemporary globalization, then it looks at the spread of capitalism and at the political economy of inequality. The final sections of the paper discuss the sociology of inequality and the options of public action against inequality in the framework of contemporary globalization.
1 Globalization and the Multicentric World
It has become a commonplace that globalization means increasing interconnectedness. One of the main debates about the more precise interpretation of this concerned the causes and the results of the interconnectedness. While some interpretations attributed globalization to advances in the realm of technology, others found the core of globalization in the realms of culture, society, or the economy. The globalized world was interpreted by some as a homogenized and Americanized entity, while others emphasized its hybrid and localized character. By now, some of these debates have become outdated as the globalized world is taking a clearer shape. Nobody would talk about an “Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000) or an “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) any more. Neither would anyone insist on a single cause and a single explanation of globalization at this point. The new world is characterized by the end of colonialism, the emergence of new powers, especially China, and the constitution of new centres and new networks.
However, much of this is not new but has characterized most of world history. Until 1750, China had a higher per-capita income than England, until 1850 a higher GDP and until 1860 a higher share of world production (Hobson 2004). Until the late seventeenth century, Southeast Asia played a similar and an equally important role that it has acquired in the past decades (Reid 1993). The same is true for India and Central Asia. Of course, the Americas and Australia have been added to the picture but the structure of the contemporary world resembles the world of the remote past more than that of the recent past. Even if the conventional Western parameters are used, it is impossible to deny the rise of the global South. China has become the world’s factory while other important hubs of production have shifted from Western Europe and the US to Brazil, Vietnam or Eastern Europe. China has also become the world’s most important trading nation. Additional support comes from the data about financial flows. While Europe and the US are struggling to repay or at least sustain their debts, the treasuries of China and India, Venezuela and Abu Dhabi abound with money. No important decision in international politics can be taken without these powers any more. And this trend is going to continue if we consider education policies and demography. Consequently, the rise of the global South has to be seen as the most important process associated with contemporary globalization (Nederveen Pieterse 2009). This entails the return of the multicentric world and the end of two centuries of Euro-American domination. However, we are slow to understand its significance as sociology has been developed precisely during these two centuries and has taken Europe (and in the past decades the US) as its object and model. A new orientation of sociology is necessary if it intends to make sense of our contemporary world – and of the times before European hegemony as well as the areas outside of European hegemony. This is a very difficult task because we are used to the Eurocentric concept of sociology that has been developed during the past two centuries (Alatas 2006). In fact, we do not have an alternative concept. But the cornerstones of the concept have crumbled. The present is not the end or the goal of history. History is not a linear evolution. Europe is not the sole model for society. Western society is not the only way to wealth and modernity. Western democracy is not the only possible political organization. In spite of these tendencies that challenge the Eurocentric social sciences there seems to be one major characteristic of the globalized, multicentric world which confirms our classics of sociology and the hegemony of the West. That, of course, is the globalization of capitalism. Possibly, capitalism is a Western project that can be explained on the basis of classical Western theories. And if the recent increase of inequality is linked to the global spread of capitalism, it would be likely that we can understand inequality in this framework as well
2 The Spread of Capitalism
As prophecized by Adam Smith (1776/2008) and Karl Marx (1885/1953), we are witnessing the global spread of the capitalist market. Both, Smith and Marx, agreed that the capitalist market entails a great increase in productivity. However, an increase in productivity may not only lead to lower prices but will at some point also entail overproduction. One of the main consequences of overproduction is unemployment. Actually, unemployment has risen in most countries, including China (Dicken 2011). While in the West, industries have shut down, industrial production in Asia has at once spread and become more productive. This has not been coupled by an appropriate increase of employment in other sectors. Unemployment has even been increasing in highly qualified professions. Due to the transnationalization of the high-end labour market, competition has become global and precious jobs in the West are increasingly taken by applicants from emerging societies. Increasing productivity also entails a rising demand of raw materials and energy. Food production has to give way to the delivery of raw materials and energy, which leads to an eviction of petty and subsistence farmers. This in turn means a further increase in unemployment as well as in food prices. All emerging societies face rural crises and the flow of landless rural dwellers into urban areas. A third consequence of increasing productivity has been analyzed by Marx. This is excess capital. The extraordinary increase of free capital in the world and the diminishing returns on investment in industry have led to the fantastic boom of the financial markets and their creative instruments. Speculation has been paralleled by the erosion of capital control and borders. Financial capital has become extremely mobile and volatile, while it is increasingly detached from any type of real economy. The general interconnectedness, which includes not only the flow of capital but also the acceleration and the fall in prices of communication, renders any attempt at protectionism by a nation state rather difficult. A few powerful states succeed in sustaining borders in some regards, especially against labour immigration, but in many fields, a detachment from economic globalization has become impossible. We have seemingly entered Adam Smith’s liberal world. Thus the question arises: Are we living in a globalized Western capitalism?
3 Political Economy of Inequality
According to Smith’s liberal theory, everybody should profit from increasing productivity, i.e. falling prices, improved infrastructure and mass production. That seems to be the case. But the rich profit more than the poor because they are more mobile, have better access to information and more capital. Therefore, they are in a position to take advantage of the best conditions, which the poor are not.
This is an important reason why inequality is growing at least at the same pace as GDP. Liberal theory presupposes high employment rates and uniform market conditions (including equal access to information). These presuppositions are not part of the real world. Smith and Marx have been aware of these issues and sought solutions for them, Smith inside and Marx outside of liberal capitalism. One might want to think that the globalization of liberal capitalism is a consequence of the neoliberal project conceived by the “Chicago boys”, put into practice by Reagan and Thatcher and universalized by IMF, World Bank and WTO (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 2004). From the perspective of their proponents, this project has been rather successful. A closer look reveals, however, that neoliberalism has been adopted and adapted by rich and dominant groups rather than exported as a pure model. While China’s and Thailand’s may have equally capitalistic economies, nobody would call China a neoliberal state, which could be an apt description of Thailand. And while India may still flirt with neoliberalism, most of Latin America has dumped it. The main point about contemporary capitalism is that there is no group or class of global capitalists In each nation state, there is a group of capitalists that often form a plutocracy. And all of these groups of capitalists share similar goals and strategies as well as economic ideologies. Finally, most of them act globally and are interconnected. But they do not form a global class and due not pursue a common, organized agenda. Neither do they construct nation states with identical cultures and institutions. We need to distinguish between the network structure of global capitalism, neoliberalism as an ideology and national capitalisms. The global economy resembles the world of Smith and Marx only on a rather thin surface because it is rather restricted. First, only about 20 % of the world population participate in the capitalist market economy. The old, the young, many women, unemployed, informal labourers, subsistence farmers and a lot of other groups stand outside of what we call “market economy”. The same is true for many regions, increasingly even in the West. In some areas of the American rust-belt, land is no longer a commodity because there is no demand and therefore no market . The state gives away real estate as communal land to those who are willing and able to use it – just like in Southeast Asia before colonialism. Capitalism is a game that is played between a few global nodes, transnational corporations and state
4 Sociology of Inequality
In order to understand why the poor remain poor, why the excluded remain excluded and why the rich get richer, it is not sufficient to study the political economy of inequality. The reproduction of inequality needs to be studied by sociology because it refers to social structures. Inequality is a structure. In some places, in some families or in some groups, there are more relevant resources than in others. However, there is not one global or model social structure but local and national structures persist to a certain degree even in a globally interconnected world. As I pointed out above, the national elites adopt capitalism – not merely to become even richer but mainly to reproduce their social position. There is no global capitalism as a project of world domination by a small group of Western elites. Capitalism has become global for several reasons, ranging from technology and efficiency to political and ideological factors, that jointly make up the present configuration. An important aspect of this configuration is the appropriation of capitalism by national elites in emerging societies. Thereby, capitalism at once becomes global and localized. These elites embrace capitalism because they gain much more from it than from competing projects, such as socialism, social democracy, or indigenous traditions. They have to compete against those parts of older elites that lose their dominating position or are not able to reproduce their position within the capitalist framework. Global capitalism consists of many local and national capitalists seeking national domination and transnational business opportunities. In non-capitalistic societies, access to activities was either very informally regulated or based on a person’s rank. We focus on capitalistic societies but we have found out that we have to understand non-capitalistic forms of inequality as well. The first hypothesis of the project, which has already been confirmed in several countries, is the persistence of earlier social structures. Forms of village structures (such as the extended family), of patrimonialism, of ranks or of guilds still play an important role in most societies from Laos to Germany. They assign individuals a place in a group and the group a certain place in society, which comprises both status and life chances. In some village structures, the individual’s place in society partly depends on his or her age and therefore changes over time. Rank, guild and patrimonial relations are less dynamic, sometimes even unalterable in the individual’s life course. We call the persisting structures “sociocultures” (Rehbein 2007). In the West, class society was the last form of a clearly ranked social structure. In the framework of capitalism and democracy, classes, ranks and strata continue to persist but become less relevant for everyday interaction and life-styles. Capitalism and democracy lead to a stronger standardization or “normalization” (Foucault 1977) of individuals but at the same time dissolve clear-cut boundaries between social groups. The clearly ranked social order is replaced by inequalities in possession of resources relevant to carry out socially valued activities. However, these inequalities reproduce a structure that resembles classes. In spite of the formally equal organization of Western societies, all sociological research points to the fact that almost every individual ends up in a social position that resembles that of his or her parents (cf. Rehbein 2011). Even though technological change has become rapid, the world has become interconnected, activities have become transnational and young people have entirely different life courses and qualifications from their parents, their relative position in the social structure is identical – because all other social groups change their life courses and qualifications accordingly (cf. Vester 2003). Parents from dominant groups are in a position to hand down to their children resources that are relevant for the present and the future, while those from lower social groups neither know what these resources are nor have access to them. In a capitalistic democracy, there may be a bit more social mobility than in other types of society but empirically speaking, this mobility is extremely low. This assessment is based on empirical research in Brazil, Germany, India and Laos conducted by multinational research teams (cf. Rehbein and Souza 2014). These teams pursued a largely qualitative methodology following Bourdieu (1984) and Vester (2003), which was tested and improved in the different cultural settings until local particularities and general characteristics were acknowledged to the same degree. We have found an almost identical class structure emerging in all of these countries after the transformation to capitalism and in all of them it is legitimized and rendered invisible by the same mechanisms. These mechanisms point to the important role of the symbolic sphere, which has not been studied sufficiently by any of the previous authors. The division of socially relevant resources is reproduced in capitalistic society from one generation to the next by the coherence of social groups, institutions and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1984). Symbolic violence combines with the discourses of equality and meritocracy that make the individual responsible and capable of determining his or her own fate (Souza 2011). Therefore, we have to analyze the mechanisms and the manipulation of symbolic violence. Meritocratic language is linked to the idea of equality of opportunities. This language determines the discourse but not social reality. It is characteristic for capitalistic society that the actual criteria for inequality in the division of resources and the division of activities remain opaque and not visible for the individuals. In other societies, inequality is the norm and its criteria are explicit. However, the extreme and substantialist inequality of the twentieth century may have been only produced by colonialism – trying to stick to clear systems of classification and to distinguish the colonized society from one’s own society conceived of as free and equal.
The dominant groups in society can reproduce their dominant position only within the nation state. An aristocratic title or massive wealth do not open a Thai access to the French upper class. Even though Thaksin may be a rich man even in his British exile, he will never be member of the Britisch elite. The same is true for any other elite member. It is not the case for other social groups, however. While power elites have to reproduce their leading positions within the framework of the nation state, all other social groups are increasingly able to reproduce their social position in another nation state. This creates a new situation for resistance and critique. Social movements are in a position to connect transnationally or even globally. They can mobilize most of the world population for certain causes, which the elites cannot. Dam projects in India, logging in Brazil or killing in the Middle East have been stopped due to transnational movements. These movements could draw on a support and on public visibility that the respective national elites could not counter. Anti-elite movements have more leverage than before – probably for a very short historical time only. Most movements do not reach their goals. Failure is often due to a lack of visibility and transnationalism. Sometimes it is also due to an inappropriate view of the contemporary world. Resistance and critique that are geared towards the world of the twentieth century and that attack either the West or a global capitalist class are bound to fail. It is necessary to understand the multicentric world and to act accordingly. The most relevant question in this regard refers to alternatives to Western models including capitalism. To a certain degree, Asian capitalisms are alternatives to Western capitalism in themselves because they seem to value stability more than growth. This could be an interesting lesson for the West to learn. Furthermore, Asian nation states have a stock of historic experiences that is different from the Western states. It could be used to explore alternatives. Finally, Asian transnational movements could develop entirely new interpretations of the globalized world and alternatives to an unequal, capitalistic world.
A phenomenon that worries conservative politicians, liberal economists and radical activists alike is the recent increase of socio-economic inequality (Stiglitz 2012). While it has been difficult to judge whether inequality has increased over the twentieth century, there seems to be a consensus that it has become a serious problem during the past decade. Most researchers agree that inequality has increased since the turn of the century within most nation states and on a global level (Jomo and Baudot 2007). It is less certain if inequality between nation states has been rising or declining over the past decades. However, there is hardly any doubt about a small number of individuals getting excessively rich and a large number of individuals not improving their lot across the globe. A lot of anger has been voiced about this, from international organizations like UNDP to transnational movements like Occupy to academics across the board. The statistics support their case. The absolute number of poor has remained almost unchanged over the past few decades, while the wealth accumulated by the richest individuals has risen to unprecedented levels, and multinational corporations report record profits virtually every year (Milanovic 2005: 149; Kaplinsky 2005: 31). There seems to be a consensus that these trends are alarming by most standards. Milanovic (2005: 108) has calculated the Gini index for the global population at 64, for the US at 80 and for the countries of the world taken as a whole at 53 for the year 1998. And it has been increasing in most countries, including Thailand and many European countries. In the year 2000, the 358 richest individuals had an income that was equivalent to the entire collective income of the poorest 45 % of the world population. The richest 10 % of all countries scored an average income that was 122 times higher than that of the poorest 10 % of all countries. And while the relation of the GDP of the richest 20 % of all countries to that of the poorest 20 % of all countries was 3 to 1 in the year 1820, it was 75 to 1 in the year 2000. In spite of the general awareness of these facts and the clear visibility of the corresponding realities in everyday life, these trends have not been reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. And the causes of these trends remain unclear as well. It is evident that they are connected to global capitalism but it is less evident why inequality increases and why the rich get richer and the poor remain poor. This paper inquires into these issues. First, it offers an interpretation of contemporary globalization, then it looks at the spread of capitalism and at the political economy of inequality. The final sections of the paper discuss the sociology of inequality and the options of public action against inequality in the framework of contemporary globalization.
1 Globalization and the Multicentric World
It has become a commonplace that globalization means increasing interconnectedness. One of the main debates about the more precise interpretation of this concerned the causes and the results of the interconnectedness. While some interpretations attributed globalization to advances in the realm of technology, others found the core of globalization in the realms of culture, society, or the economy. The globalized world was interpreted by some as a homogenized and Americanized entity, while others emphasized its hybrid and localized character. By now, some of these debates have become outdated as the globalized world is taking a clearer shape. Nobody would talk about an “Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000) or an “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) any more. Neither would anyone insist on a single cause and a single explanation of globalization at this point. The new world is characterized by the end of colonialism, the emergence of new powers, especially China, and the constitution of new centres and new networks.
However, much of this is not new but has characterized most of world history. Until 1750, China had a higher per-capita income than England, until 1850 a higher GDP and until 1860 a higher share of world production (Hobson 2004). Until the late seventeenth century, Southeast Asia played a similar and an equally important role that it has acquired in the past decades (Reid 1993). The same is true for India and Central Asia. Of course, the Americas and Australia have been added to the picture but the structure of the contemporary world resembles the world of the remote past more than that of the recent past. Even if the conventional Western parameters are used, it is impossible to deny the rise of the global South. China has become the world’s factory while other important hubs of production have shifted from Western Europe and the US to Brazil, Vietnam or Eastern Europe. China has also become the world’s most important trading nation. Additional support comes from the data about financial flows. While Europe and the US are struggling to repay or at least sustain their debts, the treasuries of China and India, Venezuela and Abu Dhabi abound with money. No important decision in international politics can be taken without these powers any more. And this trend is going to continue if we consider education policies and demography. Consequently, the rise of the global South has to be seen as the most important process associated with contemporary globalization (Nederveen Pieterse 2009). This entails the return of the multicentric world and the end of two centuries of Euro-American domination. However, we are slow to understand its significance as sociology has been developed precisely during these two centuries and has taken Europe (and in the past decades the US) as its object and model. A new orientation of sociology is necessary if it intends to make sense of our contemporary world – and of the times before European hegemony as well as the areas outside of European hegemony. This is a very difficult task because we are used to the Eurocentric concept of sociology that has been developed during the past two centuries (Alatas 2006). In fact, we do not have an alternative concept. But the cornerstones of the concept have crumbled. The present is not the end or the goal of history. History is not a linear evolution. Europe is not the sole model for society. Western society is not the only way to wealth and modernity. Western democracy is not the only possible political organization. In spite of these tendencies that challenge the Eurocentric social sciences there seems to be one major characteristic of the globalized, multicentric world which confirms our classics of sociology and the hegemony of the West. That, of course, is the globalization of capitalism. Possibly, capitalism is a Western project that can be explained on the basis of classical Western theories. And if the recent increase of inequality is linked to the global spread of capitalism, it would be likely that we can understand inequality in this framework as well
2 The Spread of Capitalism
As prophecized by Adam Smith (1776/2008) and Karl Marx (1885/1953), we are witnessing the global spread of the capitalist market. Both, Smith and Marx, agreed that the capitalist market entails a great increase in productivity. However, an increase in productivity may not only lead to lower prices but will at some point also entail overproduction. One of the main consequences of overproduction is unemployment. Actually, unemployment has risen in most countries, including China (Dicken 2011). While in the West, industries have shut down, industrial production in Asia has at once spread and become more productive. This has not been coupled by an appropriate increase of employment in other sectors. Unemployment has even been increasing in highly qualified professions. Due to the transnationalization of the high-end labour market, competition has become global and precious jobs in the West are increasingly taken by applicants from emerging societies. Increasing productivity also entails a rising demand of raw materials and energy. Food production has to give way to the delivery of raw materials and energy, which leads to an eviction of petty and subsistence farmers. This in turn means a further increase in unemployment as well as in food prices. All emerging societies face rural crises and the flow of landless rural dwellers into urban areas. A third consequence of increasing productivity has been analyzed by Marx. This is excess capital. The extraordinary increase of free capital in the world and the diminishing returns on investment in industry have led to the fantastic boom of the financial markets and their creative instruments. Speculation has been paralleled by the erosion of capital control and borders. Financial capital has become extremely mobile and volatile, while it is increasingly detached from any type of real economy. The general interconnectedness, which includes not only the flow of capital but also the acceleration and the fall in prices of communication, renders any attempt at protectionism by a nation state rather difficult. A few powerful states succeed in sustaining borders in some regards, especially against labour immigration, but in many fields, a detachment from economic globalization has become impossible. We have seemingly entered Adam Smith’s liberal world. Thus the question arises: Are we living in a globalized Western capitalism?
3 Political Economy of Inequality
According to Smith’s liberal theory, everybody should profit from increasing productivity, i.e. falling prices, improved infrastructure and mass production. That seems to be the case. But the rich profit more than the poor because they are more mobile, have better access to information and more capital. Therefore, they are in a position to take advantage of the best conditions, which the poor are not.
This is an important reason why inequality is growing at least at the same pace as GDP. Liberal theory presupposes high employment rates and uniform market conditions (including equal access to information). These presuppositions are not part of the real world. Smith and Marx have been aware of these issues and sought solutions for them, Smith inside and Marx outside of liberal capitalism. One might want to think that the globalization of liberal capitalism is a consequence of the neoliberal project conceived by the “Chicago boys”, put into practice by Reagan and Thatcher and universalized by IMF, World Bank and WTO (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 2004). From the perspective of their proponents, this project has been rather successful. A closer look reveals, however, that neoliberalism has been adopted and adapted by rich and dominant groups rather than exported as a pure model. While China’s and Thailand’s may have equally capitalistic economies, nobody would call China a neoliberal state, which could be an apt description of Thailand. And while India may still flirt with neoliberalism, most of Latin America has dumped it. The main point about contemporary capitalism is that there is no group or class of global capitalists In each nation state, there is a group of capitalists that often form a plutocracy. And all of these groups of capitalists share similar goals and strategies as well as economic ideologies. Finally, most of them act globally and are interconnected. But they do not form a global class and due not pursue a common, organized agenda. Neither do they construct nation states with identical cultures and institutions. We need to distinguish between the network structure of global capitalism, neoliberalism as an ideology and national capitalisms. The global economy resembles the world of Smith and Marx only on a rather thin surface because it is rather restricted. First, only about 20 % of the world population participate in the capitalist market economy. The old, the young, many women, unemployed, informal labourers, subsistence farmers and a lot of other groups stand outside of what we call “market economy”. The same is true for many regions, increasingly even in the West. In some areas of the American rust-belt, land is no longer a commodity because there is no demand and therefore no market . The state gives away real estate as communal land to those who are willing and able to use it – just like in Southeast Asia before colonialism. Capitalism is a game that is played between a few global nodes, transnational corporations and state
4 Sociology of Inequality
In order to understand why the poor remain poor, why the excluded remain excluded and why the rich get richer, it is not sufficient to study the political economy of inequality. The reproduction of inequality needs to be studied by sociology because it refers to social structures. Inequality is a structure. In some places, in some families or in some groups, there are more relevant resources than in others. However, there is not one global or model social structure but local and national structures persist to a certain degree even in a globally interconnected world. As I pointed out above, the national elites adopt capitalism – not merely to become even richer but mainly to reproduce their social position. There is no global capitalism as a project of world domination by a small group of Western elites. Capitalism has become global for several reasons, ranging from technology and efficiency to political and ideological factors, that jointly make up the present configuration. An important aspect of this configuration is the appropriation of capitalism by national elites in emerging societies. Thereby, capitalism at once becomes global and localized. These elites embrace capitalism because they gain much more from it than from competing projects, such as socialism, social democracy, or indigenous traditions. They have to compete against those parts of older elites that lose their dominating position or are not able to reproduce their position within the capitalist framework. Global capitalism consists of many local and national capitalists seeking national domination and transnational business opportunities. In non-capitalistic societies, access to activities was either very informally regulated or based on a person’s rank. We focus on capitalistic societies but we have found out that we have to understand non-capitalistic forms of inequality as well. The first hypothesis of the project, which has already been confirmed in several countries, is the persistence of earlier social structures. Forms of village structures (such as the extended family), of patrimonialism, of ranks or of guilds still play an important role in most societies from Laos to Germany. They assign individuals a place in a group and the group a certain place in society, which comprises both status and life chances. In some village structures, the individual’s place in society partly depends on his or her age and therefore changes over time. Rank, guild and patrimonial relations are less dynamic, sometimes even unalterable in the individual’s life course. We call the persisting structures “sociocultures” (Rehbein 2007). In the West, class society was the last form of a clearly ranked social structure. In the framework of capitalism and democracy, classes, ranks and strata continue to persist but become less relevant for everyday interaction and life-styles. Capitalism and democracy lead to a stronger standardization or “normalization” (Foucault 1977) of individuals but at the same time dissolve clear-cut boundaries between social groups. The clearly ranked social order is replaced by inequalities in possession of resources relevant to carry out socially valued activities. However, these inequalities reproduce a structure that resembles classes. In spite of the formally equal organization of Western societies, all sociological research points to the fact that almost every individual ends up in a social position that resembles that of his or her parents (cf. Rehbein 2011). Even though technological change has become rapid, the world has become interconnected, activities have become transnational and young people have entirely different life courses and qualifications from their parents, their relative position in the social structure is identical – because all other social groups change their life courses and qualifications accordingly (cf. Vester 2003). Parents from dominant groups are in a position to hand down to their children resources that are relevant for the present and the future, while those from lower social groups neither know what these resources are nor have access to them. In a capitalistic democracy, there may be a bit more social mobility than in other types of society but empirically speaking, this mobility is extremely low. This assessment is based on empirical research in Brazil, Germany, India and Laos conducted by multinational research teams (cf. Rehbein and Souza 2014). These teams pursued a largely qualitative methodology following Bourdieu (1984) and Vester (2003), which was tested and improved in the different cultural settings until local particularities and general characteristics were acknowledged to the same degree. We have found an almost identical class structure emerging in all of these countries after the transformation to capitalism and in all of them it is legitimized and rendered invisible by the same mechanisms. These mechanisms point to the important role of the symbolic sphere, which has not been studied sufficiently by any of the previous authors. The division of socially relevant resources is reproduced in capitalistic society from one generation to the next by the coherence of social groups, institutions and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1984). Symbolic violence combines with the discourses of equality and meritocracy that make the individual responsible and capable of determining his or her own fate (Souza 2011). Therefore, we have to analyze the mechanisms and the manipulation of symbolic violence. Meritocratic language is linked to the idea of equality of opportunities. This language determines the discourse but not social reality. It is characteristic for capitalistic society that the actual criteria for inequality in the division of resources and the division of activities remain opaque and not visible for the individuals. In other societies, inequality is the norm and its criteria are explicit. However, the extreme and substantialist inequality of the twentieth century may have been only produced by colonialism – trying to stick to clear systems of classification and to distinguish the colonized society from one’s own society conceived of as free and equal.
The dominant groups in society can reproduce their dominant position only within the nation state. An aristocratic title or massive wealth do not open a Thai access to the French upper class. Even though Thaksin may be a rich man even in his British exile, he will never be member of the Britisch elite. The same is true for any other elite member. It is not the case for other social groups, however. While power elites have to reproduce their leading positions within the framework of the nation state, all other social groups are increasingly able to reproduce their social position in another nation state. This creates a new situation for resistance and critique. Social movements are in a position to connect transnationally or even globally. They can mobilize most of the world population for certain causes, which the elites cannot. Dam projects in India, logging in Brazil or killing in the Middle East have been stopped due to transnational movements. These movements could draw on a support and on public visibility that the respective national elites could not counter. Anti-elite movements have more leverage than before – probably for a very short historical time only. Most movements do not reach their goals. Failure is often due to a lack of visibility and transnationalism. Sometimes it is also due to an inappropriate view of the contemporary world. Resistance and critique that are geared towards the world of the twentieth century and that attack either the West or a global capitalist class are bound to fail. It is necessary to understand the multicentric world and to act accordingly. The most relevant question in this regard refers to alternatives to Western models including capitalism. To a certain degree, Asian capitalisms are alternatives to Western capitalism in themselves because they seem to value stability more than growth. This could be an interesting lesson for the West to learn. Furthermore, Asian nation states have a stock of historic experiences that is different from the Western states. It could be used to explore alternatives. Finally, Asian transnational movements could develop entirely new interpretations of the globalized world and alternatives to an unequal, capitalistic world.
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