Preface

Summary

In 1996, a monograph written by two Australian sociologists, Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, was published. The message conveyed by title – The Death of Class – could not have been clearer. In the book, Pakulski and Waters suggest that the concept of class has lost any usefulness for understanding contemporary societies: ‘[C] lasses are dissolving and … the most advanced societies are no longer class societies. … [C]lass societies are specific historical entities. They were born with industrial capitalism, changed their form under the impact of organised or corporatized capitalism, and are disappearing in the face of post- industrialization and postmodernization’ (Pakulski and Waters, 1996: 4).

I reference Pakulski and Waters not because their claim was unique or innovative, but because it is a very forceful expression of the widespread scepticism towards class among social scientists. Throughout my intellectual biography – as a student, a young scholar with a recently awarded PhD and a middle- aged lecturer – I have been encountering claims that the concept of ‘class’ is not or no longer relevant. These claims can be grouped into three categories, which are not mutually exclusive. The sceptics question the possibility of conceptualizing class at the level of social theory; of encountering, at the level of empirical social analysis, the existence of entities that can meaningfully be described as classes; and of advancing, in the present day and age, a politics of, by and for the working class. To my frustration, these claims are not exclusively made by people from the right and centre, but also from the left, among them scholars who profess to work in the Marxian tradition. Accordingly, one of my main motivations for writing this book is to demonstrate the enduring theoretical, analytical and political relevance of the concept of ‘class’.

In what follows, I will argue that class is of crucial importance for understanding contemporary (and any other) capitalist societies. I follow the lead of Richard Hoggart (1989: vii), one of the founding fathers of British cultural studies, who remarked in a preface to The Road to Wigan Peer, George Orwell's classical study of the everyday lives of Lancashire and Yorkshire workers: ‘Class distinctions do not die, they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves. … Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty.’