The Relevance of Class Analysis in Contemporary Societies: a Critique of postindustrial society theories and of the static conceptions of social classes
The work of Daniel Bell on the post-industrial society describe the dilution of the working class and the rise of a new form of social stratification articulated to the control of information. From the 1980s, and still today, many authors in the anglophone world have been inspired by his work in their attempts to theorize the death of class. These authors tend to relate the evolution of the working class to the rise and fall of the specifically industrial phase of capitalism. Over the last thirty years, Erik Olin Wright has attempted to face the challenge brought forward by post-industrial society theories by renewing the class analysis of advanced capitalist societies through the production of very elaborated class maps. Such a synchronic analysis, however, implies important lacuna and is exposed to critics that describe it as an abstract model arbitrarily applied upon social reality. If it is important to insist on the fact that class divisions entailed by capitalism are more important than ever before in contemporary societies, the renewing of their analysis is also asking for a conception of class as a process and a relation stemming from a historically specific form of exploitation, as suggested by Edward Palmer Thompson.