Class as a Normative Category: Egalitarian Reasons to Take It Seriously (With a South African Case Study)

Race and sex/gender are commonly argued to deserve equal priority with class oppression in egalitarian politics. However, placing race and sex in the same list as what is here termed “standard-of-living class†constitutes a category error. Standard of living, alongside power and status, belongs to a distinctive list of “metrics of hierarchy†that should be accorded priority in an important respect: in the specification of the hierarchies (or “distribution strata†) that egalitarians seek ultimately to eliminate or reduce. Race and sex, along with other “differentiators,†matter primarily for the way they are “used†by social arrangements (e.g., apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism) to assign persons to places in hierarchies of living standard, power, and status. Examining policies to promote black capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa, the author shows how the conflation of differentiators (race, in this case) and distribution strata (like standard-of-living class) is complicit in justifying multiracialized inequality.