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Research Methods for the Analysis of the Internal Structure of Dominant Classes: The Case of Landlords and Capitalists in Chile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
Extract
Capitalism is profoundly conditioned by the types of landed property and agrarian classes it confronts in its development, thereby determining fundamental features of the historically specific “social formation” that emerges in a given capitalist country. Such a social formation is not merely split into the constituent classes unique to the capitalist mode of production, but also incorporates, as Marx wrote of Western European capitalism, “strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay” (1967, vol. 1, p. 765). Or, as Joseph Schumpeter—certainly no Marxist—put it: “Any theory of class structure, in dealing with a given historical period, must include prior class structures among its data; … any theory of classes and class formation must explain the fact that classes coexisting at any given time bear the marks of different centuries on their brow” (1955, p. 111). Every concrete social class, therefore, is also an historical class, not a mere social category or analytic abstraction, and its existence depends on the particular history of the society of which it is a decisive constituent; and in that history, the protracted presence of agrarian elements has often been critical.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1975 by Latin American Research Review
Footnotes
This is part of a larger project, with Lynda Ann Ewen, funded by the Ford Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, University of Wisconsin Ibero-American Studies Program, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, none of which is responsible in any way for the content.
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