Citizenship Broadened

Serious consideration of the role played by undocumented labor in agriculture and other sectors of the economy necessarily leads to questions about how citizenship is to be understood both as an analytic category and as a feature of social organization in capitalist society. In this study, the abridgment or denial of citizenship has served as a central feature conditioning the use and the compensation of labor. But, as I pointed out in chapter 4, noncitizenship has nothing to do with the quality of indocumentado laborers or their capacity to work. Rather, it applies to their position in the national polity, to the kinds of claims they can make on the state and/or the economic organizations in which they are employed. If undocumented workers are active economically (indeed, they have to be in order to remain in the country) but can make no political claims on the basis of that activity, how then are we to characterize the political and economic claims of citizens? Are they homogeneous or are there different claims or levels of qualification for citizenship among those acknowledged to be members of the national polity?

What makes citizenship something of a peculiar concept is that it is often viewed as nonproblematic. For some sociologists (especially those concerned with the formation of nation-states, Weber, 1954; Bendix, 1969; Skocpol, 1979; Tilly, 1975; Moore, 1966) citizenship has been used as an important indicator of social development—particularly as regards the creation and generalization of certain kinds of reciprocal rights and obligations that tie individuals to a national community. However, in the study of social inequality and social organization, citizenship is not often considered a crucial defining characteristic distinguishing one set of actors from another. This is particularly true when individual nations are taken as

the unit of analysis. In that sense, national boundaries are taken for granted and are only considered of central importance when exchanges or relations between states affect the object of study. In much political economy, the focus is on the movement of capital, commodities, or organizations (e.g., transnational corporations) across national boundaries, even in the case of migrant flows of highly skilled technical and managerial labor. Most demographers who study population flows do pay more attention to issues of national origin and destination but fail to develop a rigorous conceptualization of citizenship and, thus, often underemphasize the political and economic consequences of differences in citizenship status among those migrants. In some cases, the issue of workers or immigrants with different citizenship statuses is taken into account; however, those studies have more often focused on the isolated or regional significance of those differences, for example, the general argument that undocumented workers or noncitizens show up in southwestern agriculture because agriculture needs certain kinds of labor and Mexicans happen to be nearby in search of jobs.

With the discovery of large numbers of undocumented immigrants working in the United States, however, the meaning of citizenship both as a symbol and as a concrete practice has become much more a problem for sociological analysis. At the most general level, I would argue, citizenship refers to a relationship between the individual and the collectivity. National citizenship, by extension, refers to membership in a national collectivity. Though individuals may claim or be granted a number of citizenships—municipal, regional, and state—I am most concerned with national citizenship. National citizenship represents a form of membership unmediated by intervening levels of organization or allegiance in its most extreme form: a higher order of responsibility or obligation between the individual and the state. While an individual may claim a variety of citizenships, the defining characteristic of national citizenship is its use as a status that transcends all other, intervening memberships in particular areas. Thus, to be a citizen of the United States entails a more general set of rights or obligations than, for example, to be a

citizen of Michigan, Detroit, or the Poletown neighborhood.

Beyond the ascriptive sense, citizenship also represents a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the collectivity—in this case, the nation-state. To be a citizen is to (consciously or unconsciously) undertake certain responsibilities or obligations to the collective. The nature of these obligations may vary; from the payment of taxes as a rent on membership to some further and more directly continuous participation in state-directed activities, such as military service. At the same time, citizenship entails certain rights or entitlements that individuals may claim against the collectivity and collective resources; again, these may vary, but usually include some claims against state activity such as military protection and state services (e.g., education, welfare, etc.). Most often, the nature of these resources or services will be described as social goods—goods that represent the benefits of participation in the national collectivity. They may also be represented as symbols of participation: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to cite one common reference.

Citizenship, in its most universal form, represents a symbol of equality among members of a given collectivity, a symbol that represents equality of obligation and equality of entitlement. In the United States and other Western democracies, citizenship represents a category of claims for formal equality in the political life of the community. This goes beyond the more popular notion of citizenship—or, perhaps more correctly, generalizes that notion—in that it includes more than what are conceived to be the "obligations" of citizens to be politically active—to vote, to take an interest in national affairs, to write to Congressional representatives—or the "rights" of citizens to run for public office, to publicly address or seek redress of grievances, and so on. Citizenship in the United States stands opposed to a system in which status or class differences are associated with unequal claims on the polity. In particular, I refer to differential access to political power based on criteria such as land ownership, sex, race, or occupation. In the formal sense at least, citizenship is available to all who meet certain criteria. In the United States the major criteria for acquisition and exercise of citizenship are age,

mental competence, residence and, for immigrants, some visible means of support. Though these criteria can be manipulated to serve certain purposes for certain groups, at the most general level citizenship is at least identified with political equality.

Citizenship is also an important status with respect to economic activity, though it is generally not associated with the operations of a market economy. In the United States, citizenship represents a guarantee of formal market freedom, that is, the freedom to enter into the economic arena (market) and economic relations (economic exchange) and to do so on an equal footing with fellow participants. The polity acts to guarantee that formal equality through legal enforcement of contracts and regulation of market exchanges such that contract partners are held accountable for performance of their respective obligations. But, in contrast to the political dimension of citizenship, where equality of claims and outcomes are supposed to be guaranteed, freedom to enter into the market does not bring with it an assurance or guarantee of equality of outcome in market transactions or economic activity. In other words, the political features of membership in the collectivity (citizenship) are detached from, or only effective within limits on economic activity and economic outcome.

These two aspects or dimensions of membership in the collectivity come to confront one another as opposing principles in capitalist society: political and economic citizenship clash as competing symbols of participation in the collectivity. Political citizenship represents political equality and equality of access to the marketplace while economic citizenship represents formal market freedom and inequality of outcome. In other words, political equality is confronted by a division of labor between social groups (workers and capitalists) and between economic organizations that are built around unequal access to the means of production.

This conflict has been dealt with by T. H. Marshall in his essays on social class and citizenship. Marshall (1977) argues that the conflict between these two principles of social organization—of political equality and economic inequality—gives rise to citizenship as an important social category and to the

welfare state as an effort to overcome the contradictory features of citizenship and class. The welfare state operates, according to Marshall, in two ways: first, it operates to facilitate the "fair fight," that is, to ensure that contestants in the marketplace (the fighters in this analogy) are properly prepared to contest. Such action is carried out through educational activities and through regulation and enforcement of contracts. However, the welfare-state acts ameliorate the negative outcomes of the "fair fight." It offers ice packs in the form of state-mediated support and transfer payments to those who lose in the market. The welfare state may be either reactive—reacting to the conditions of the economy—or it may be proactive—responding to the demands made upon political citizenship in the area of equality of access (responding to historical inequalities in access by such measures as Affirmative Action or the Equal Rights Amendment).

But because the welfare state notion (as espoused by Marshall, in particular) does not coincide with total state intervention in the economy, it does not pose a direct challenge to the principles of private property or economic (class) inequality. Thus the exercise of citizenship is conditioned by individual and group position in the economy and economic organizations. That is to suggest that citizenship ought to be conceived of as something of a continuum: a variable instead of an invariant characteristic . Political citizenship constitutes rights and entitlements associated with the welfare functions of the state and the criteria for exercise of that status is intermittent, unstable participation or nonparticipation in economic organizations or value-producing labor processes. In particular, the exercise of political citizenship is conceived of as the making of claims on state-mediated transfers and services such as welfare aid, aid to dependent children, disability payments, old age aid, and state-supported food allocation programs. These claims are based on membership in the collectivity and are claims against collective resources.

Economic citizenship, by contrast, constitutes rights and entitlements associated with economic activity and rewards for participation in the economy and economic organizations. The exercise of economic citizenship is conceived of as the

making of claims on transfers mediated by economic organizations (health and medical benefits, pensions, and low-interest loans) and state-mediated transfers based on past participation in the economy (Social Security, federally guaranteed loans, tax benefits, and incentives). These kinds of transfer payments are sometimes referred to as welfare to the middle and upper classes, though broadly conceived they are also to be found in the wage and benefit packages that form the core of many union contracts.

To summarize to this point, the exercise of political citizenship is the exercise of rights associated with membership and participation in the community. It is associated with claims that form a "floor" level of existence in the society. In Marxian terms, this can be roughly equated to the social determination of the floor cost for reproducing labor at the lowest level of skill. The exercise of economic citizenship is the exercise of rights associated with both membership in the community and participation in the economy: where membership in the community facilitates a set of rights and entitlements in economic organizations and where participation in economic organizations facilitates a distinctive set of claims on the state. Most important, within a class analysis of economic organizations, citizenship for those who are economically active provides the potential for negotiation over the price of their labor, the ability to push the price of labor above the cost necessary to reproduce it at a given level of skill by means of enforcement of market position.

The thrust of this theoretical discussion can now be stated in much simpler terms. The rise of citizenship and the welfare state are related directly to conflict between the nation-state as a collection of politically equal individuals and the capitalist organization of the economy as the locus of inequality. The extension of the political rights of citizenship (especially into the area of welfare aid to those who are not economically active) has simultaneously created a floor level of existence (a guarantee against starvation) and has bolstered the market position of those who are economically active.

This conceptualization of citizenship in capitalist society incorporates the basic assumption of Marxian theory of the

formal market freedom of labor but questions its applicability to all members of society. By drawing attention to the distinctions between participation in economic organizations and participation in political organizations (in a broad sense, the welfare state), I seek to highlight the material base and the ideological consequences of differences in citizenship status. Marxian theory focuses our attention on the ways in which the capitalist labor process and the drive to accumulate capital construct a social structure appropriate to the reproduction of surplus value (what Gordon et al. refer to as a "social structure of accumulation," 1982:22–25). Yet, as I have attempted to illustrate here, political citizenship is rooted in a labor process in which no new value is produced; it is transferred . Thus, the welfare recipient makes nothing; but, through the exercise on claims associated with political citizenship, he or she participates in a labor process in which the physical activity of living in a tenement "unlocks" values stored in that building, values that, logically, would not be realized if the exchange were market-mediated, and transfers them to its owner—in the form of rent paid by the state. Similarly, a visit to the hospital by the same welfare recipient produces nothing; but the fact that he/she is acted upon by a doctor or technician results in a transfer of value to the medical care industry. Equally important, participation in this peculiar labor process confers a specific status on those who exercise political citizenship: that of "deadbeat" or parasite (for a similar argument, see Piven and Cloward, 1971). And, to the extent that an identifiable category of citizens (disproportionately black, minority, and female) participate in that labor process, the status is generalized to all members of that category.

The point here is not to suggest that the assumption of formal market freedom of labor is entirely inapplicable; it is instead to argue that the assumption does not apply to all members of society. This does not constitute a reversion to the Marxian concept of an industrial reserve army of labor because at least some portion of that army of labor will remain outside participation in economic organizations. They remain

outside participation in economic organizations for two reasons: first, because a growing segment of the economy—most notably medical care and urban real estate—has developed on the basis of transfers of resources through the welfare system; and, second, because the advantages accruing to economic citizens—particularly unionized labor in core industries—have been built on the bedrock of a welfare system that serves as their lever for claims for a larger portion of the surplus they produce.

Thus citizenship in capitalist society stands apart from but necessarily interacts with economic class inequality. It is offered here as part of a theory of political inequality which seeks to account for the three phenomena surfaced in this study: (1) the integrative functions of membership in a national polity, that is, the ideology of a community of equals which acts to obscure differential access to wealth and property; (2) the manner in which political rights and entitlements associated with membership are themselves products of efforts by different class fractions to create relatively privileged positions in the polity and the economy, that is, different citizenships; and (3) how these different citizenships have altered the operations of the capitalist economy, that is, between those engaged in value-producing and value-transferring labor processes.