Urs Lindner presents a working paper on 'Class and Caste: What is the Scope of Ascriptive Inequality?'

The paper is a side product of my research project on affirmative action. It is written for a German volume (Marxismus und Soziologie, edited by Tine Haubner and Tilman Reitz). Motivated by the fact that class inequalities are commonly not targeted by affirmative action programs, my paper deals with the question of to what extent class relations can themselves acquire an ascriptive form. In a first step, the distinctiveness between modern class relations and ascriptive inequalities is established with respect to the work of Marx and Weber. Secondly, I discuss how three Marxo-Weberian approaches elaborate on this problem: Charles Tilly’s theory of ‚categorical inequalities’, Nancy Frasers recognition-redistribution approach and Veit Bader’s and Albert Benschop’s ‚protheory of social inequality’. I argue that Bader/Benschop’s approach is the most promising one as it complicates the distinction between class and ascriptive inequalities with that of positional and allocative inequalities. In a third step, I shortly exemplify my considerations by taking into account transformations of the Indian caste system.