Henning Melber’s last debate piece in ROAPE – ‘The African middle class(es) – in the middle of what?’ (Melber 2017) – presents a provocative argument about the role, in his view overestimated, that under-defined ‘middle classes’ play in Africa today. At the same time, however, Melber also calls for more class analysis to be brought into the middle-class debate. This short text is an attempt in that direction. In particular, I will show a few insights that could be gained from a Bourdieu-inspired class analysis, attentive in particular to combining objectivist and subjectivist views on class, as well as to a multidimensional approach to social positions.
But let us first get started with a review of Melber’s essential points. The African middle class(es), he argues, constitute ‘an ideological smokescreen’ (Melber 2017, 149), a floating signifier ready for questionable political (mis)uses. Melber points to the developmentalist teleological dimension underlying the promotion of the category in development research. He exposes the speculative political imagination behind the assumption that these middle classes would automatically deliver a democratic dividend and social progress – are middle classes necessarily politically virtuous and economically thrifty? In short, Melber deploys a sceptical argument on the relevance of the category of middle class to account for Africa’s key dynamics in the sphere of the political economy, also noting in passing how short the memory is of the current debate about the middle class(es) in Africa – could they not be, at least in part, the refurbished heirs of the not so distant politics of the belly? Or simply in the footsteps ‘of a traditional bourgeoisie, of a bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly, cynically bourgeois’, as Melber quotes from Fanon (Fanon [1961] 2001, 121)?
But Melber also addresses the issue of the ambiguous contours of the African middle class(es). Arguing in defence of an analysis of economic positions that goes beyond the mere distinction of income strata, Melber – following a Lukacs-inspired argument – suggests that the actual economic positions of the middle classes are too heterogeneous, and hence their social and political interests too varied, to allow for the emergence of a unified class consciousness. In fact, in Melber’s view, the actual site from which to gain insight on the possible African economic futures is not the ‘middle of the pyramid’ but the top tiers of the income strata, as it is ‘their forms of appropriation and enrichment’ which ‘are the ultimate determinants of the scope and limit of poverty reduction by means of redistributive measures’ (Melber 2017, 150). The academic gaze on the middle classes actually diverts ‘from the real challenges in a world of growing inequalities’ (150), since ‘what is not in the middle class debate’ – inequality on the rise – is precisely what is key to account for the dynamics of ‘class and power’ in Africa as in the rest of today’s world. His text, in fact, combines a discussion of a changing social structure with an argument on economic inequality echoing ‘the 1% vs the 99%’ issue. Nevertheless, Melber suggests, the middle classes remain an important social category to analyse as they ‘signify modified social relations in African societies’ (151–152). The middle classes therefore might deserve to be more in the middle of a debate on class analysis in Africa.
Melber’s argument about the ambiguous contours and the political misuses of the ‘middle class(es)’ is entirely convincing. In what follows, I would like to complement his points by suggesting a possible route for class analysis in Africa, as his own text perhaps offers less systematic, and less clear, developments in that direction. In particular I will show how two propositions derived from a Bourdieu-inspired class analysis can contribute to an understanding of class dynamics in Africa.1
The first point resides in the articulation of an objectivist and a subjectivist moment in social analysis – an attention to both the objective and the subjective structures of the social world. Class analysis can of course take several forms, which are regularly portrayed as originating in, and distributed between, a Marxian and a Weberian pole. The key issue in the Marxian perspective is of course the extraction of surplus labour and the process of exploitation – although not exclusively, as testified by the focus on political dynamics of class relations in The 18th Brumaire. Weber is rather credited with an interest in the intersection of status and economic positions in the production of unequal life chances, pioneering in some respects a multidimensional class analysis. Although organised around different issues, these varieties of class analysis share an interest in the ways in which the access to, and the possession of, economic powers shape the contours of class relations (Wright 2005, 25–27). In other words, they refuse the reduction of class analysis to an exploration of class identities and cultural practices. Rather, they consider it essential to scrutinise the making of objective economic positions – with which the symbolic work of production of meaningful social divisions is entwined. In this regard, if Bourdieu’s theory of the social space is regularly portrayed as a cultural turn in class analysis, he also assigns a major role to economic capital in the distribution of social positions and in the making of (objective) conditions of existence, economic capital being essential in drawing the contours of ‘classes on paper’ (Bourdieu 1984).
In fact, Bourdieu’s theory of practice is well known for its suggestion that an interest in the practices and representations social actors deploy in and about the social world is incomplete without a reconstruction of the objective structures in which these practices are grounded. As he says, ‘the prerequisite for a science of commonsense representations which seeks to be more than a complicit description is a science of the structures which govern both practices and the concomitant representations’ (Bourdieu 1977, 21). And the whole theory of practice is indeed concerned with bridging objectivist and subjectivist approaches to the social world. My point here should therefore not be understood as a plea for a turning away from the cultural dimension of class, and the multiple ways in which symbolic boundaries are produced in Africa today, ‘translating symbolic distinction into closure’ (Lamont and Molnar 2002, 172). But a revival of class analysis, as called upon by Melber, cannot do either without a sustained interest for the dynamics of the political economy and the analysis of economic positions – beyond the mere distinction of income strata.
On this front, talking about class, one can only urge for more research to pay close attention to economic capital and assets – and not only to daily per capita expense or income – at a moment when both the sociology and the economics of inequality have shown without ambiguity that the understanding of economic inequalities benefits immensely from an approach from inequalities of capital and assets, beyond income disparities (for instance Chauvel 2001; Piketty 2013). As Claire Mercer notes for instance about the house-building middle class in Tanzania, ‘a nation under construction’, ‘what unites all these house-builders is that they own land in a context of land scarcity’ and price increases, leading to ‘greater differentiation between those who own land and those who do not’ (Mercer 2014, 234). Yet, the issue of the structure of economic capital remains all too often overlooked in the literature on the middle class, being somewhat obliterated by approaches to the economic dimension of inequalities from per capita expenses only.2 One could add that this limitation is especially regrettable on the African terrain, where the possession of visible wealth is well known to have multifarious social implications, from expectations of patronage and euergetism to the possible emergence of interpretations of the process of accumulation in terms of ‘occult economies’.
At this point, it is probably worth noting the absence or the weakness of the relevant economic data sets, eloquently analysed by Jerven (2015), as a significant obstacle in the study of wealth inequality in Africa. This is of course a real problem, which poses clear limits to our methodological arsenal. Diverse Marxist-inspired traditions, however, provide another established research current which has, for a long time, explored issues of social inequality without relying necessarily on complex data sets. After all, when Marx analysed the working day, the creation of the industrial reserve army or the primitive accumulation (Marx 1906/1867), this was done without massive data sets. In Africa, one can think of the French tradition of Marxist anthropology and, to take just one example, of Meillassoux’s analysis of the interlacing of kinship structures with relations of production and capital accumulation in West Africa (Meillassoux 1975). Much closer to us, and in a different vein, the recent book by Matteo Rizzo on the evolution of public transport provision in Dar es Salaam provides another telling example of how it is possible to explore inequalities of capital and labour, and class dynamics, through the close analysis of labour relations – here between bus owners and workers in the ‘informal’ economy – and, once again, in the absence of massive data sets (Rizzo 2017).
In fact, because Bourdieu treats economic capital much as Piketty does, that is, essentially as retained wealth and assets, and not in a Marxist perspective as wealth in motion (hence Harvey’s critique of Piketty – Harvey 2015), he might not be the best ally with whom to unpack the dynamics of capital in a critical political economy perspective (see also Burawoy 2012) – despite his keen interest for the analysis of economic positions.
Building on Bourdieu’s class analysis, however, also requires us to complement the objectivist moment – including the examination of economic positionality – with the exploration of practices and representations. Meaning and discourses cannot be considered as epiphenomena. In that respect, analysis of class through the lens of class identities and cultural practices is certainly also important. Researching young professionals in Nairobi and showing how they cultivate a sense of cultural avant-garde – while facing popular accusations of betrayal of their Africanness – Rachel Spronk identifies a ‘triad of mutually constitutive factors’ on which the production of this social group rests, namely ‘education resulting in salaried occupations, lifestyle choices, and modern self-perceptions’ (Spronk 2014, 111). Clearly, she focuses on the domain of cultural practice to show how these are key to account for the ‘modes of sophistication’ of these professionals, and notably for the ways in which they identify as ‘modern’.
However, this should not necessarily lead to Spronk’s conclusion that a ‘sociocultural’ analysis of class gives ‘a truer measure’ of the phenomenon (Spronk 2014, 110). Rather, the economic position of these professionals also appears determinant in different respects, and Spronk incidentally notes that ‘the parents of the young professionals’ in her study largely recruit among the ‘mission school-educated children’ of the late colonial period which formed the backbone of Kenya’s postcolonial state administration (101). Clearly school (cultural) capital and their families’ relative economic comfort have played a key role in the emergence of the group under study. But further analysis – rather than a fleeting mention – of the interweaving of education (and the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital) with the economic benefits derived from a family background of stable state employment would probably have thrown additional light on the class trajectory of the professionals under scrutiny, and helped us to better appreciate the historical production of social divisions (and inequalities) in the Kenyan social space.
This brings me to my second point. Analysis of the social space à la Bourdieu invites us to consider social positions simultaneously in light of economic capital as well as of the other social powers active in a given social universe. In fact, Bourdieu’s class analysis suggests that we look at the social space – i.e. the space of social positions – as a multidimensional space structured by the unequal distribution of various species of capital and other social properties or attributes.3 These forms of capitals combine to produce social advantages or disadvantages in the social space under consideration. They also produce more or less enduring social divisions and social distances in which multiple factors can intersect. As a correlate, in the structural perspective advocated by Bourdieu, the position of social groups is inevitably relational, and defined as much by the resources they can rely on as by those they lack. Living in shacks is one thing. Living in a shack in which you are looked down on by educated and successful city dwellers yet another, to echo one of the rare mentions Spronk distils about Nairobi’s young professionals’ gaze on other segments of Kenyan society (Spronk 2014, 108).
Bourdieu’s analysis of late twentieth-century French society is famous for its account of the space of social positions mainly grounded in the unequal distributions (and the interplay) of economic and cultural capitals, which he deems to be the most decisive social properties in his case study. It is however possible to build on this perspective by asking what social properties are active in African social spaces today, and how they relate to class. As Melber himself puts it, ‘depending on the circumstances’, ethnicity or race might prove more decisive than any form of ‘class consciousness’ (2017, 147). Few students of Africa would indeed contest that autochthony works ‘as capital’ (Hilgers 2011) in various situations across the continent, where it is regularly intertwined in the distribution of social positions with economic inequalities – not only of income but also of assets – and discrepant levels of education, as well of course as gender and generation. What is key is then to identify the structural effects of the combination of different social properties in the making of social positionality. The perspective advocated here thus proposes that the space of social positions is multidimensional, and this also allows us to avoid what might be considered a pitfall of unidimensional conceptions of the social ladder, along which social actors can only climb or fall.
Contrastingly, a multidimensional analysis of social positions points to the intersection of different social properties in the production of social spaces in which ‘diagonal’ or ‘horizontal’ moves are also possible, characterised by changes in the structure of capitals more than in their global volume. Indeed, it is probably worth recalling here that Bourdieu’s multidimensional class analysis carries an integral concern for the complexity of social change, the dynamics of social inequality4 and ‘reconversion strategies’ through which social subjects and domestic groups strive to maintain their position amidst changing circumstances (Bourdieu 1979, 145–185).
In a nutshell, a multidimensional analysis of social positions focuses on the interweaving of various social properties and forms of capitals in the production of positionality – and in the making of social change. This draws particular attention to the effects of combination or association between these social attributes, to the interplay between these social properties and to potential processes of conversion of value, as well as to changing relations between forms of capital, in the production of social positions. As for the first of these processes – conversion of value – one can think for instance of the conversion of forms of nobility into privileged access to land tenure in situations of emerging market economy, as was for instance the case when commercial agriculture started to develop in the Tswana polities in the late nineteenth century (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 119–165) – and actually in so many other African situations of class formation. Closer to us in history, one can also think of the commodification of culture and ‘ethno-preneurialism’ in an age of ‘globalization of economies of difference and desire’ in which ethnic traditions are turned into the identity economics of ‘Ethnicity Inc.’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 139–150). But the changing relations between types of capital can also take more prosaic forms, as in the current experiences of so many young people across Africa who find that the distinctive power of their school (cultural) capital has partially faded away and been devalued in parallel to the general increase in the level of formal education and the diffusion of school titles (for instance Camfield 2011). Understanding the dynamics of social positionality on the continent today in fact requires us to account for complex regimes of social (im)mobilities in which the forces at play in the making of social positions are changing.
Finally, for the purposes of a discussion of the middle class(es), scrutinising the making of social positions from a point of view attentive to the articulation of various forms of capitals also suggests analytical distinctions in considering the heterogeneity of the African middle classes. One might think for instance of the significant differences in social positions between school teachers with a civil servant status on the one hand, and store owners on the other, who might both qualify as ‘middle class’ according to their respective levels of income, but also present significant differences both in terms of the structure of their economic capital and in terms of cultural capital. Conversely, one can point to the heterogeneity in social positions among secondary school teachers themselves, similar on the one hand regarding cultural capital and possibly typical ‘middle-class’ aspirations, but distinct on the other hand regarding economic capital, with a significant divide between those with a permanent civil servant status and those – younger – heirs of the structural adjustment programmes without much employment security, forming a kind of teaching ‘precariat’, with no certain perspectives of achieving a much better economic status in the future.5
Conclusion
The changing African scene confronts social analysis with multifaceted dynamics of social structure. In the above paragraphs, I have argued that building on a Bourdieu-inspired class analysis could provide valuable insights from at least two different angles. Let me restate them briefly. First, in the perspective advocated here, paying consistent attention to the objective conditions of existence of the social subjects, and notably to the conditions of production of their economic positions, remains a prerequisite for any form of class analysis that has an ambition to go beyond a mere phenomenological account of the experience or cultural practices of social actors, be they middle class or whatever class you have. In that, I can only join Melber in his plea for a sustained attention to the dynamics of the political economy in the middle-class debate – and beyond. Bourdieu is not a political economy analyst. His perspective, however, provides a stimulating invitation to consider together objective conditions of existence – as defined, notably, by the political economy – on the one hand, and subjectivities on the other.
Second, my conviction is that important intellectual profits can be gained from a multidimensional analysis of social positions, attentive to the intersection of different forms of capitals and other social properties or attributes in the production of social positionality – and the correlative making of social divisions or boundaries. This could notably help to further unpack the ‘African middle class(es)’ – beyond their ‘ideological smokescreen’ dimension – in allowing us to consider for instance social mobility beyond unidimensional conceptions of the social ladder, and in helping us to think of the making of social divisions in a multidimensional social space. Moreover, these considerations on the multidimensionality of social positionality offer insights with which to think of social inequality. In an age that is certainly as much one of inequality as it is of the middle class(es), building on the idea of a multidimensional social space might also help us to articulate how inequality is deployed along different, intersecting axes – forging varieties of social conditions of existence marked by structural under-privilege.