Defining the middle strata in one of the most unequal countries in the world is a tricky but unavoidable challenge that Businessmap Foundation researchers Khehla Shubane and Colin Reddy tackle in their report on black economic empowerment and the black middle class. The authors ultimately understand that the middle class includes people who live a lifestyle that is socially defined as “middle class” and have the economic resources to do so.
The post-apartheid society therefore stands in contrast with the apartheid era, during which blacks “were bunched around working- class categories”, but are now rising into the middle class and able to finance higher standards of living.
“The patterns of expenditure and consumption which have been apparent in the last few years point to a distinct emergence of a middle class,” they write.
But while the authors’ definition of the middle classes draws a line of distinction between the middle and lower classes, the dividing characteristics of the middle and upper classes are less clear.
A Marxist definition of class is chucked out early on in the paper. Shubane and Reddy depict the Marxist explanation of class as a function of the relationship between an individual and the means of production. Workers, for example, do not own the means of production but rely on wages in return for the sale of their labour.
The authors argue that societies have evolved since Marx put pen to paper and the working class is no longer condemned to their lot, but can move into the middle class using instruments such as investment vehicles while still not owning the means of production.
The authors turn to other approaches that define the middle class with reference to occupations that are “generally associated with the middle classes”. These definitions of the middle class build on the income levels associated with these jobs and the lifestyles that are financially available to the people who do them.
People’s ability to leverage assets also ties into their class position. Shubane and Reddy say that people with more assets are less concerned with leveraging them. They add that the economic environment permits greater numbers of South Africans to access loans and attain middle class lifestyles on modest incomes.
But there is no attempt to delineate the middle class from the rich. Senior management in the public service — described as earning anywhere from at least R1-million to R12-million in state-owned entities — are discussed as a possible path to middle class.
Although Shubane and Reddy acknowledge that “very few blacks who have risen to positions of authority in management have been around long enough to avail themselves of comfortable state pensions,” they add that, “While they are paid less than their counterparts in the private sector, public sector senior top managers can catapult themselves into long-term middle-class comforts.”
Employment equity has also opened the doors for more blacks to enter management, who make up the emerging middle classes. But Shubane and Reddy note that whites still “dominate management echelons in the private sector”.