Neoliberal Changes: Charting the Evolution of the American Class Structure, 1970 to Present

• In Event: 508 - Section on Marxist Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Social Movements

Abstract

How has the class structure of the United States changed since the mid-1970s? Which groups have benefitted and which have lost from these transformations? This paper empirically interrogates claims about class and neoliberalism that have often been asserted and impressionistically supported but rarely systematically studied. Adding greater analytic depth to the sometimes generic investigations of ‘inequality’, we apply occupational class criteria to IPUMS Census data from 1970 to 2010 to observe changes in the relative sizes and internal composition of the working class, professional middle class, petit bourgeoisie and capitalist class. We find a working class that has relatively declined due to growth in the professional middle class but which still constitutes a large majority of U.S. society, alongside relatively stable—but internally recomposed—petit bourgeois and capitalist classes. Women, whites and Asians appear to have benefitted more from these changes than men and people of color, but expectations of a polarized geography of class are surprisingly unsupported. We conclude that neoliberal changes in the U.S. class structure, while generally in the direction of ‘post-industrial,’ ‘post-modern’ or ‘rentier-state’ models, have by no means brought these into being. Further research into the declining fortunes of the professional middle class and their potential alliance in social movements with large swaths of the working class are called for.

Authors

• Peter R. Ikeler, State University of New York-Old Westbury

• Laura Limonic, State University of New York-Old Westbury