Diana Coole

The title of my paper surely sounds strange. Statistics abound to reveal the intransigence and even enhancement of class differences across the industrialized world. There are few, if any, distinctions whose differential effects have been better recorded or empirically verified. So, at first sight, it would seem naive even to be asking whether class makes a difference. Reading currently fashionable literature about difference, however, one might be forgiven for wondering about the significance of class because if it is even mentioned in the capacious lists of significant differences, it is rarely discussed further. Indeed much of my title's awkwardness arises from the fact that we are unaccustomed to addressing questions of class in the language of difference. It seems at best ironic. It is, then, in the context of this hiatus that I want to raise some questions about class in relation to what I shall call discourses of difference. The first part of my paper will sketch out these two terms as I shall be using them; the second will consider what happens when the former is articulated in terms of the latter.

Class
I want to begin by defining class as neutrally as possible. In particular, I do not want to start by situating myself on a Marxist or post-Marxist terrain because of all the theoretical baggage this carries. Provisionally, then, I define class in the following way: Class refers primarily to material differences between groups of persons, where these differences are stable over time and reproduced within a group whose membership is also relatively stable (i.e. it is not like a bus, a container for different individuals who simply pass through it). Material differences include measurable indices that can be summarized as life chances (income and wealth, job security, mortality rates etc.). In addition, although less crucially, these material differences sometimes correspond with cultural differences: values, perspectives, practices, self-identity. But the major phenomenon with which I want to associate class is that of structured economic inequality.

This is the sort of definition that sociologists used to give, as for example in a standard introductory textbook published in 1981, which explained that (in Britain at least),

opportunities for health, long life, security, educational success, fulfilment at work and political influence are all unequally distributed in systematic ways. Values and patterns of behaviour are equally affected: for example, not only can social position strongly predict voting behaviour but also, some would claim, whether the person prefers to make love in the dark or with the light on!

Few would confidently ascribe such predictive power and homogeneity to class today; yet, so far as its material indicators are concerned, these have actually become more pronounced over the past fifteen years or so - that is, during the period in which class has been discursively eclipsed in favour of difference. The recently published Rowntree Inquiry into Wealth and Income revealed a particularly marked widening of the gap between rich and poor in Britain, where since 1977 the proportion of the population with less than half the average income has trebled. Similar, if somewhat less dramatic, trends are also apparent in other developed countries.

Given this rather stark example of difference, how is it then to be articulated? This is the central question I want to address. For while on the one hand Marxist and sociological accounts seem anachronistic, on the other it is far from clear that the discourses of difference which are currently hegemonic in debates about diversity have the discursive resources to convey this stubborn and systematic economic division.

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