Much of my thinking/reading/writing since retirement has been focused on two longstanding areas of interest: health inequalities and the sociology of stigma. This has culminated in two single-authored volumes, Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account (Routledge, 2018) and A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders (Palgrave, 2020). To a degree I’m still in pursuit of satisfactory narratives in both areas, though I remain wary of simply repeating myself or edging forward too slowly, in either process challenging any would-readers to remain interested and engaged.
In this blog I cut a few corners and to the quick. I first offer a brief characterisation of what I have come to call the ‘fractured society’, and second, outline four pairs of causal or generative mechanisms that are in my view pivotal in delivering the fractured society. One of these pairs addresses shame and shaming and blame and blaming. It is a blog – in my defence – that takes the argument and narrative beyond anything in the two books mentioned.
First up are eight key characteristics of the fractured society. These are:
Environmental threat: humans have penetrated, and now reflexively shape, two historic ‘givens’: (i) the external or natural world, and (ii) human nature. This penetration is now established as hazardous, with predictions about global warming in particular occasioning widespread scientific concern. We are all of us now inhabitants of Beck’s ‘risk society’.
The nomadic proletariat: environmental threat is one motive for the upsurge in global migration, others being political or military conflict, absolute and relative poverty, and a desire to join family and kin. One in 110 people worldwide are currently ‘displaced’. For all Beck’s writing of the ‘boomerang effect’ of contemporary mega-risks, it is typically the global poor who remain on the front line.
The new inequality: escalated and escalating levels of material inequality are another fracturing property of financial capitalism. According to the latest Oxfam assessment, in 2020, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people comprising 60% of the global population. A tiny fraction of the super-rich in Britain, well under 1%, have seen their capital grow while the middle classes have been squeezed and stretched and the working classes have often experienced a – sometimes precipitous – decline. As for income, the top CEOs in the FTSE 100 earned the average annual salary in the first 33 hours of 2020.
Class and precarity: as the emergence of an exclusive band of super-rich alongside growing poverty testifies, class relations are biting deeper into people’s lives even as the prospects of growing class consciousness seem to be diminishing. Standing is right also to note a widespread ‘precarity’, which captures a new cross-class insecurity around jobs, wages and prospects.
Post-national ‘othering’: nation states remain critical global actors, but post-national ‘imaginary communities’ have assumed an increasing salience, perhaps most dangerously in the wake of new patterns of migration an asylum-seeking, but extending also to the long-term sick, disabled and under- and unemployed, against whom stigma has been ‘weaponised’ (ie blame appended to shame).
Gender dissolution: capitalism has always been gendered and racialised and relations of class have utilised and exploited this. Obstinate patriarchal relations have retained their vibrancy in financialised capitalism, a global ‘feminisation of poverty’ has been documented, and in Britain a cultural and rights-based challenge to cis-defined binaries has been mounted under the rubric of a putative fourth wave of feminism. The women’s has as a result become fragmented.
Cultural disorientation: there has emerged a relativisation or ‘postmodernisation’ of culture during financial capitalism that is functional for – though not determined by – it. As Lyotard claimed in the 1980s, universal ‘grand’ narratives have been displaced by relativised ‘petit’ narratives, yielding a ‘confused’, pick-and-mix recipe for identity-formation as propitious for absolutes and fundamentalisms as it is antipathetic to rational positioning.
Disconnected fatalism: a step beyond disorientation is what I term ‘disconnected fatalism’, which denotes feelings of abandonment, bitterness, hopelessness and kindred aspects of vulnerability. It clusters amongst the working-class, and most conspicuously among the un- and under-employed in the former mining and manufacturing communities of the Midlands and the North.
Now for the quartet of causal/generative mechanisms:
Class/Command Dynamic: a reinvigorated dynamic of class and command (or statist) relations has been decisive for the emergence of financialised capitalism and the fracturing of society. With regard to class, it is that fraction of the Occupy Movement’s 1% – in fact, less than 0.1% of the UK population – that is pivotal. It comprises rentiers, financiers, major stakeholders and CEOs of transnational corporations whose ever more concentrated ownership of capital in financial capitalism enables them to buy ever more influence from the power elite to shift policy in their favour. The pertinent formula is: capital buys power to make policy in its interests.
Stigma/Deviance Dynamic: relations of stigma have to do with ‘shame’, those of deviance with ‘blame’. Financial capitalism testifies to what I have called a ‘weaponising of stigma’, or ‘a heaping of blame on shame’. People who have conventionally been shamed increasingly now face the further calumny of being blamed for their shame. Moreover, this is the unequivocal product of a calculated political strategy (which is in turn a product of the class/command dynamic). If people can be blamed for their shameful difference, then they can more readily be abandoned by the state – rendered ‘abject’ – in the process opening the door wide for cutting tax-funded welfare expenditure.
Insider/Outsider Dynamic: the insider-outsider binary has been omnipresent in sociology (there can be no insiders without outsiders). In financialised capitalism a racialised coalescing of this binary/dynamic has fuelled support for a reactionary, alt-right and proto-fascist populist politics. This recasting of the dynamic has further skewed the already skewed command relations of the state (ie May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy and the ‘Windrush scandal’). This process of crude, racialised othering is most conspicuous in the state’s current treatment of migrants/refugees.
Party/Populist Dynamic: formerly stable party political alignments are being undermined both by the intrusion or ‘overlay’ of cultural issues and by populist politics. At the time of writing the evidence would seem to be that the ‘hegemonic bloc’ of progressive individualism is withering away and that we presently inhabit an interregnam, with a contest now raging between what Fraser terms ‘reactionary’ versus ‘progressive populism’ (Corbyn’s defeat in 2019 occurred before my previous publications, but the argument holds).
I will not tax the patience of anyone inclined to read this short piece. Of course the thesis summarised here is incomplete, necessarily so given what Bhaskar calls the ‘open’ nature of (the fractured) society. But it is, I believe, an important and salient contribution. I still – at the beginning of 2010 – hope to deepen and extend it (as well as to find new areas to delve into).
More detail is accessible in:
Scambler,G (2020) The fractured society: structures, mechanisms, tendencies. Journal of Critical Realism Vol 19 No 1 pp. 1-13.