Volume 1 / Athens 1999 by Yannis Yannitsiotis Review of Jan Pakulski & Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class, London, SAGE, 1996 The Death of Class by Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters announces the end of social classes in today's post-modern societies in a somewhat triumphant manner. The authors' certainty, accompanied by a provocative language, as for example the preface's first paragraph - "this book is an admission of hypocrisy. We have written a book about class while being committed to the view that books about class should no longer be written" - comes from the changes that have occurred in the last decade in Europe: the withdrawal of Marxism, the dissolution of communist regimes, the fact that class ideology no longer affects Western Europe. The more developed countries have ceased to be class societies, particularly after the second half of the century, while class maintains its strength in the less developed countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In particular, the authors indicate that modern Western societies are characterised by "a wide redistribution of property; the proliferation of indirect and small ownership; the credentialisation of skills and the professionalisation of occupations; the multiple segmentation and globalisation of markets; and an increasing role for consumption as a status and lifestyle generator" (p.4). In order to give a meaning to the concept of "class", the authors choose a particular view based on a combination of Marxian and Weberian views. Class is thus linked to property and market relations. This reductionist approach characterises the overall study here attempted. The authors mention that social class is a historical phenomenon that appears in the 19th century. In the beginning of the 20th century, factors such as the state and political parties changed the nature of class relations, resulting in class losing its validity. The birth and death of class is historically determined, as suggested by the authors, in the following way, dividing history into three periods. The first period refers to the "economic-class society" characterised by relationships of power and conflict amongst groups of interest, which appear in the economic domain. The dominant class holds the control of the state, whereas the laboring classes develop a revolutionary identity. The second period refers to the "organised-class society", which is dominated by politics and the state. The state is guided by a political-bureaucratic elite that includes party leaders and organised interests. The masses are equally organised, in national-political groups. The third period is characterised by the "status-conventional society" in which social framing is determined by culture. The welfare state has weakened to such a degree that it is unable to support collective benefits, while the economic dimension of class gives way to mobile, biographically self-composing individuals. In the first chapter, the authors give a description of class theory as established by Marx, and of class analysis as described in some empirical studies of Goldthorpe, Marshall and Wright. The following two chapters analyse the basic works of sociology. On the one hand they center their attention on distinguishing categories other than class such as ethnicity, gender, race, power, culture, professional authority and others, which have played a catalytic role in contemporary societies as points of social differentiation. On the other hand, they redetermine social class in today's societies, so as to prove that class theory cannot constitute an epistemological subject, simultaneously showing the essential importance of status as a notion in the forming of social scales. The fourth and fifth chapters allow a more systematic approach to the three historical levels of class. The fifth chapter is particularly revealing in the authors' notion that individuals are freer in making their choices and establishing their positions than they were in the past. The sixth chapter concentrates on the issues of culture and identity, as well as their manifestations, such as knowledge, customs, and aesthetics, and suggests that the theory (true to the first historical period) holding culture as the reflection of class is problematic. The seventh chapter emphasises the existing disjunction between contemporary politics and class. The authors borrow the expression "imagined communities" from Benedict Anderson, and speak of classes that are being created, like nations, as imagined communities, i.e. abstract totalities which exist on a symbolic level rather than a realistic one, as in the first period mentioned above. They thus ascertain that political practices, wider political groups and political expression reveal a huge differentiation that doesn't correspond to specific political classes as in the second period. This particular book could represent a useful contribution to the field of sociology regarding the issue of social class. It includes enough information on empirical studies of class analysis, and distinguishes many social class manifestations. The discussion that is here attempted with an angle on theoretical problems closes quickly because the authors are tied to empirical studies, and give particular weight to an image of modern society which they construe as the end of an era. It is not, however, evident how much they believe in the end of the great narratives (Socialism, civil democracy) or in "the end of the history", as F. Fukuyama put it. There is indeed an exaggerated certainty, constant throughout the book, about the death, as they say, of class. I believe there are two unfortunate choices that give this book its stigma: the schematic and even simplistic use of history, and the confined perception of social class that leads to reductionism, something the authors themselves denounce. The authors choose as a point of reference E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Class (see pp. 9-10), which is analysed in such a way as to disorient the reader, since they don't refer at all to Thompson's belief that class is, first and foremost, a matter of relation. Most important is that the choice of Thompson is made so that members of sociological communities who undertake to "subject their theories of class to intersubjective argument and their empirical descriptions to validation" can be differentiated from those who hold to "historical and philosophical interpretations" in which class "exists almost by virtue of the observation that it exists, made by the ideological experts who are committed to its existence". Here, Thompson seems to be categorised for the fact that he puts too much emphasis on the cultural character of class and its complexity. This observation is surprising to the reader. for his work is loaded with examples and "pragmatic" events, as the authors claim. It is maybe superfluous to mention that in the field of history, thirty years after its first publication, this classical book has been revised many times by later historians. In the 1980s it was perceived as socially reductionist, for Thompson's analysis of the relationship between experiences and class consciousness was problematic. Furthermore, the authors should make reference to the very rich historiographical production on social class in the last two decades, which includes revisions of economical and social redefinitions of class, as well as opens major areas of discussion of the relationship between "reality" and discursive practices, and the importance of representation and symbolism, elements that played a fundamental role in the making of social class both in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors' choice of Thompson to prove their critique is unsuccessful, because the epistemological paradigm within the field of historiography has changed, and surely, the particular sociological perception doesn't allow the slightest interdisciplinary communication with history, anthropology or literary criticism. This book is particularly relevant in its own account of social classes as they are historically rendered, and of the manner in which it conceives the historical character of a phenomenon such as class. History, for the authors, is identified with the past, and characteristics of oblivion are attributed to it with unfortunate metaphors such as "... dispatch patriarchy to follow class in the trash can of history where they both belong" (p.112), or expressions like "History has proved unkind to this expectation" (p.61) (in relation to the belief that classes achieve the highest point of their articulation under conditions of conflict and struggle). At this stage, the past and the discourse on it, as determined by the discipline of history, is not a fixed point nor the objective judge of human actions. Therefore, the historian, or anyone else speaking of the past, doesn't deal with an immobilised time maintaining the safe distances established by objectivity. S/he is interested in and speaks of historical time and its various important moments as they are formulated in relation to social and cultural occurrences. S/he attempts to understand linguistic and intellectual engagements of social reality that transform historical time into conventional time, i.e. into past, present and future. The authors' belief that "class is a historical phenomenon" is positive in that it doesn't give class an ontological aspect. At the same time, however, it doesn't bring to light class's cultural character, its historicity. As far as I understand, the question posed is not whether the existence of social class can be proved, but in what ways it is redefined by individuals themselves, bearers of social action and theoreticians, so that social inequality may be interpreted. Class is therefore determined by empirical terms, and in fact through economic reductionism. Historical studies that question socio-economical grounds as explanatory methods of understanding social class have proved the importance of language in class formation and the role of symbolic meaningfulness, together with which individuals research and assume their identities. The Death of Class doesn't take into consideration this long tradition. It holds a marginal position in the construction of identity, the role of power and its relation to knowledge. Foucault's now classical advice is thus missing. Believing in this from beginning to end, the authors recognise the past through the trilateral format of functionalism. The absence of crisis on all levels of the evolutive social structure is obvious. They propose a status-conventional theory primarily based on culturalism (symbolic dimension of individual and collective life), fragmentation (infinite overlapping of associations and identifications that are shifting and unstable), autonomisation (self-referential individual rather than externally constrained) and finally on resignification (continuous regeneration of individual preferences) (pp. 152-8). This book is disappointing not so much because it is centered on the empirical studies of sociology and on the significant absence of a theoretical treatment of social class - this in fact could be one of the many ways of narration - but because it isn't convincing that class, in our era, has died. The authors do recognise today's social inequalities, -although they don't define them and make no reference to the reasons that instigate, sustain and reproduce them. The choices around which the authors articulate their thought are obvious: they idealise the post-fordist-taylorist model, recognise the supremacy of liberalism, confine the classist character of social structure to developing countries and not to the capitalist West, etc. Therefore, neither the destruction of communist regimes and character of social structures developing in Eastern Europe, nor today's reality of twenty million and even more unemployed in the European Union allow us to distance ourselves from the concept of class. But in the event we agree that the collective notion of "class" as a pragmatic and cultural category is no use in understanding social problems and social change, then the fields of communication, labor, social protests, and individual rights form links between class and other categories of individual and collective identity in which we can also detect the ways power and social inequality are structured. Here, the scope of research has not been exhausted yet; on the contrary, it is only beginning ... The death of terms and concepts such as class is, after all, an issue of communication among people, of self-determination as members of groups or wider collectives, of discussing and deciding upon their actions. The Internet, the communication means of post-modernity par excellence, constitutes the renegotiation, and not the rejection, of notions of reality such as class, by now defined with the structure rather than the production of information. If, thus, the importance of human relations, of which class is part and parcel, acquires meaning and interpretation in a particular time and context, then it seems useless to persist with formats that comply with modes and thoughts of modernity on the issues of birth, evolution and death. Classes don't "die" in the streets of the city. They first "die" in the thought and language of people. Paraphrasing Norbert Elias, I would say that "the loneliness of dying classes" intensifies rather than relieves the agony of the death of class. Social classes, apart from being tools for analysing and theorising, were glorified as individual and collective identities, while they also expressed social inequality and power structures. Power relations and inequality themselves don't die in the contemporary megalopolis of neo-liberalism and of the "Asian Tigers", nor have they disappeared from people's daily experiences, sense and language. Return to Top