Status Attainment and the Commodity Form: Stratification in Historical Perspective

Abstract

ions. Refined status attainment models of today describe precisely this-the external, impersonal relations between individuals as the summation of their values as commodities. Status attainment models measure the universalism, atomism, and impersonality generated by commodity relations (and intensified by bureaucratic relations) in advanced capitalist society because there exists a homology between the structuring principles that comprise the commodity form and the operating procedures that guide application of status attainment models. As a framework within which social practices are enacted and experienced, the commodity form can be analytically decomposed into three structuring relations. These relations are (1) abstraction, (2) equivalency, and (3) reification (Goldman and Wilson, 1983). As capitalist relations expand, more and more characteristics of people and their products become detached and treated as exchangeable things. Abstraction means use value and exchange value are separated so different objects become what they are not: equal (Balbus, 1977:573). Likewise, concrete labor is masked so that qualitatively different kinds of labor are treated as if they are identical. Labor is abstracted from the specific organic context and social relations within which it must necessarily take place. To accomplish the exchange of objects and labor as commodities, the fiction must be established that all objects and labor have an axis of commensurability. Marx employs the term abstraction to refer to objects that appear independent of any subjectivity purpose or to refer to a subject purpose that appears independent of any objective conditions of existence (Bologh, 1979:21). In the status attainment model this can be seen in the use of individuals as the unit of analysis, variables that measure individual attributes, and measurement scales that provide all occupations with a common metric axis. The status attainment model dissolves the unique and particular characteristics of people and communities when it separates them from the actual relational context in which those characteristics necessarily emerge. The second element of the commodity form is equivalency. Commodities are valued because they can be exchanged for another commodity. Commodified objects must, therefore, enter into formal relations of equivalence with one another. This principle of equivalence necessitates construction of standardized units to facilitate comparison of otherwise incommensurate items. As the commodity form spreads, the dissimilar is made comparable by reducing it to its comparable characteristics. In the process, individuals and their relations must be removed from their specific context and placed within a framework of universalized, standardized relations. In status attainment models socioeconomic status units are made functionally equivalent to each other through the use of quantified scales and mathematical models. The third element of the commodity form is reification: relations between people appear as relations between things. The products of people appear, not as the outcome of social activity, but as alien and impersonal forces. The skills and aptitudes of laborers are treated as separable from them, and the traits of consumers appear to reside in the objects of consumption. In status attainment models the social relations of occupational status are transformed into relations between apparently independent and autonomous categories. We have shown that in the concrete world of workers, relations of production were reified in This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 05:48:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms STATUS ATTAINMENT AND THE COMMODITY FORM 207 practice into minute gradients in an abstracted hierarchy of position. Status attainment models provide a measure of those reified categories, but carry the reification process a step further by abstracting those reified categories from the context of work relations and class struggle, thus disguising the real production of the social world.