Existential equality and class stratification, loose thoughts

Discussing equality and inequaity in the political/economic world is difficult, becase we've inherited very confused sets of ideas about social life that are disconnected from direct, daily experience. The categories of caste, ethnic group, cass, etc., don't necessrily "make sense," it's hard to see how or why they influence the world. We know that they do, however we only really perceive this in moments of injustice. We don't consider so much in terms of general divisions in society, the fairly continuous ways in which social categories actually produce individual subjective life.

Part of the difficulty here lies in getting some idea of what a social category actually "is", how people are actually bound together beyond the immediately obvious individual bodies and desires we experience more clearly.

Spinoza offers the best ways to think through this I believe.

Let's begin with what we regularly perceive- individual bodies, persons. Any social theory cannot deny the reality of individual life, nor its significance. Instead, a social theory must consider the atomic constituents of relationship between bodies. What draws bodies into collective formations of any sort- a workplace, a band of friends, a tribe, a church, a party, a family. What individual force draws together individual bodies?

We generally recognize only one quantum force in mainstream American culture (the culture expressed in and through major institutions like centralized media, professional training and literature, law, commerce/workplaces, education/schools, etc.) That force is some form of self-interest, based in something like instrumental rationality. It is aso tied to a certain idea of what "power" is, because the calculation of self-interest is based on increasing power. Essentially, the idea of power at play is a power of self-determination or a control over the situations in which your life is immersed. This manifests as control of other people, control of the practices you engage in, control over yourself, etc.

In this vein of thinking, we can imagine social groups as rooted in self-interested similarity and collective antagonism over social power.

We can also develop another quantum mechanism, what the early modern philosophers referred to as "sympathies." This hasn't been developed as a philosophical concept and so it hasn't been integrated into political economy.

We can tell caste differentiation when we note existential separations between people occurring in regular patterns based on certain traits. We can see this, we note it all the time, day to day. However, we have to be focused on a certain open understanding if we are to note it accurately.

This sympathy, this open understanding, is the glue that binds together a community (of any scale). It does not depend upon similarity, nor does it necessarily create qualitative unity among a population. In thrives on difference, because it actually depends upon a difference that allows for empathy, for identification with a being or process or experience outside the immediate experience of the identifying being.

[key terms: zone of proximal development, from Vygotsky; biology of empathy, neurology tied to orientation of the self into another perspective]

Now, if we reduce structural boundaries between categories of people, establishing a "rough equality", we increase the full range of possibility for existential empathy a person might experience. We increase the possibilities for becoming-other.

This means that the breadth of understanding of the person potentially increases. There are more and more diverse populations with which they may become-other. The range of individual experiences increases.

This equates to an increase in "power" according to Spinoza's description, i.e. powers of action. For Spinoza one's power is not so much a fuction of control over one's milieu, but of understanding of one's milieu that allows increased combinations with other bodies. This increases powers of action, in terms of qualitatively different powers of action.

So a rough equality in terms of social power equates to a rough communicability of existential experience. This allows for an increase in the powers of action of an individual through increasing the field of content to apply the method of becoming-other.