Social class
The social class is a form of social stratification in which a group of individuals share a common characteristic that links them socially or economically, either by their productive or "social" function.;, purchasing power or "economic" or by the position within the bureaucracy in an organization dedicated to such purposes. These links can generate or be generated by interests or objectives that are considered common and that reinforce interpersonal solidarity. Class society constitutes a hierarchical division based mainly on differences in income, wealth and access to material resources. Although classes are not closed groups and an individual can move from one class to another. This system is closely related to the productive system and is the typical stratification system of European societies in the 17th and 19th centuries, today extended to almost the entire world, as well as to a large extent of the mercantile societies of Antiquity.
General characteristics
The assignment to a certain class of an individual is basically determined by economic criteria, unlike what happens in other types of social stratification, based on castes and estates, where the basic criteria for affiliation in principle is not economic (although affiliation to a certain group may secondarily entail economic conditions).
- Generally, for the set of individuals who configure a class there are some common interestsor a maximizing social strategy of its political power and social welfare. In certain cases, a certain number of individuals dissent the interests of their social class.
- The economic conditions that entail adscription to one class or another are generally determined by the birth and family heritage. Thus in most societies the children of the disadvantaged classes throughout their lives will continue to be part of the disadvantaged classes, and the children of the most accommodated classes are more likely to be part of the rest of their accommodating class life.
The set of social classes and their relationships form a class system that is typical of modern industrial societies.
In this type of market-based society, greater social mobility is recognized than in other systems of social stratification. That is, all individuals have the possibility of climbing or ascending in their social position due to their merit or another valued factor in the market. The consequence is a break with class organizations where each person is located, according to tradition, in a specific stratum, usually for life. However, despite these possibilities for promotion, the class system does not question inequality in itself and even tends to erode the bonds of responsibility (which were legal in class societies) between different social positions that are reduced to being trades. and professions and therefore to the search of the economic benefit for the subsistence.
In developing countries, many patrician agrarian classes incorporate class residues or emulate them, revealing a hierarchical ethos past, whether it be the result of a traditional absolutist colonialism that regimented and made it possible, as in Latin America, or, on the contrary, a remnant of social traditions not eliminated by a modernizing capitalist colonization, as in the case of India, in which a caste society is preserved with certain limitations, coexisting with a capitalist economy.
The social class to which an individual belongs determines their opportunities, and is defined by aspects that are not limited to the economic situation. They also provide the same with certain common behavior patterns: tastes, language and opinions. Even ethical and religious beliefs usually correspond to those of a social status that comes from a socio-economic position shared by similar consumption habits and a certain life in common.
A class system is therefore a collective hierarchy, where the criterion of belonging is determined by the individual's relationship with economic activity, and mainly, his place with respect to the means of production and said condition can be closely correlated with the family inheritance.
Social class according to Karl Marx
For Karl Marx, social classes can be understood in two ways, either as: 1) groups of individuals that are defined by the same categorization of their ways of relating to the material means of production (particularly the way they obtain their income), or 2) a class consciousness understood as the belief in a community of interests between a specific type of socioeconomic relations. This is clear from the often-quoted brief description of Louis Bonaparte's 18th Brumaire, in the absence of a dedicated exposition of the topic in the rest of his work:
The landlords form an immense mass, whose individuals live in the same situation, but without many relationships between them. Their mode of production isolates them to one another, instead of establishing mutual relations between them. This isolation is fostered by the media in France and by the poverty of the peasants. Its field of production, the plot, does not admit in its cultivation any division of labour, nor any application of science; therefore it does not admit multiplicity of development, neither diversity and talents, nor wealth of social relations. Each peasant family is enough, more or less, to itself, directly produces most of what it consumes and thus obtains its materials of existence rather in exchange with nature than in contact with society. The plot, the peasant and his family; and next, another plot, another peasant and another family. A few units of these form a village, and a few villages, a department. Thus is formed the great mass of the French nation, by the simple sum of units of the same name, as, for example, the potatoes of a sack form a sack of potatoes. To the extent that millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that distinguish them by their way of living, by their interests and by their culture of other classes and oppose them in a hostile way, they form a class. Because there is a purely local articulation among the peasants and the identity of their interests does not breed among them any community, no national union and no political organization, do not form a class. They are therefore unable to assert their class interest in their own name, either through a parliament or through a Convention. They cannot be represented, but they have to be represented. His representative has to appear at the same time as his master, as an authority above them, as an unlimited power of government that protects them from the other classes and sends them from the high rain and the sun. Therefore, the political influence of the peasant landlords finds its last expression in the fact that the executive power submits under its command to society.
Marxist doctrine tries to discover the objectivity of the existence of socially relevant classes (classifications) through the formation of juxtaposed subjective interests and in opposition to other groups of interests understood in a similar way. Social classes then appear as antagonistic dualities in a historical context of conflict whose central axis is historical materialism. From this confrontation mediated by history, the class struggle arises, which is the very manifestation of the conflict of the material interests of individuals in social relations based on exploitation, generating new ruling classes before as long as the development of the productive forces is not sufficient. so that history ends with a subaltern working class capable of replacing the existing ruling classes, and at the same time incapable of becoming the dominant of another due to lacking its own production tools (as would be the case of the modern proletariat), and thus abolishing all form of exploitation. In the Marxian scheme, the estate social classes of pre-capitalist societies could find themselves in mutual conflict but the dominated classes had interests in the same being that these were in turn estates, with which social transformations demanded a further development caused by new classes. dominant:
In the stament (and even more in the tribe) this appears still veiled; and so, for example, a nobleman remains a noble and a plebeyo a plebeyo, regardless of his other relations, because he is an inseparable quality of his personality. The difference of the personal individual with respect to the class individual, the fortuitous character of the living conditions for the individual, are manifested only with the appearance of the class, which is, in turn, a product of the bourgeoisie. The competition and struggle of individuals with others is the one that breeds and develops this fortuitous character as such. That is why in the imagination, individuals, under the power of the bourgeoisie, are more free than before, because their living conditions are, for them, something purely fortuitous; but in reality, they are naturally less free, since they are more subject to material power. The difference with the season is manifested, in particular, in the antithesis of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As the stalling of the neighbors of the cities, the corporations, etc. appeared, in front of the rural nobility, their conditions of existence, the property of furniture and the craftsmanship, which already existed in a latent way before their separation from the feudal association, appeared as a positive thing, which stood in front of the feudal property, and this was the reason for them to re-dress in their form, first, the feudal form. It is true that the servants of the fugitive English considered their former servitude as something fortuitous in their personality. But with this they did not do but the same thing that does every class that is freed from a hindrance, except that they, by doing so, were not liberated as class, but isolated. In addition, they did not leave the framework of the stool regime, but formed a new slope and retained in their new situation their previous way of work, and even developed it, by releasing it from obstacles that no longer corresponded to the development it had achieved.
Marx noted that, unlike all previous societies in Western history with multiple antagonistic class groups, in modern capitalist society the social subject becomes capital as a social process, and conflict is simplified in the internal formation to civil society of two large classes characterized whose "distribution" it depends on their economic role: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The latter, due to its original social function, would physically have the means of production. It would be proper to the bourgeois classes the mode of production called capitalism and its theoretical support, liberalism, understood as its ideological epiphenomenon. The proletariat, as an oppressed class capable of overcoming the bourgeoisie, should unite against it in order to break with its exploitation. Since its negation is dialectical and without having generated within itself new oppressive or oppressed classes, it would become the instrument of the negation of society with classes. The condition of its transformation into a political class would be the overcoming of its geographical and cultural differences ("Workers of all countries, unite!" had sentenced on the last page of the Communist Manifesto) and the discovery of their class consciousness in order to overcome alienation.
Marxism, as a theory and causal explanation of reality, has come to interpret itself as the adequate future ideology of the proletarian class. This approach has been considered a self-reference paradox whereby the same Marxian notion of class and "class ideology" it becomes the reification of this particular class, a notion that is in turn part of the doctrine and whose verification criterion (success in the historical process) is also part of it. Other Marxist currents have understood his sociological thought as a objective and universal criterion of analysis of reality tested for its "progressive" for the proletariat, or in political terms as functional to a program of action of a revolutionary party that is assumed to be beneficial for this class.
Despite the importance of the concept of class for the Marxist political movement, many authors note as surprising that Marx himself never gave a precise definition of class in any of his writings, despite describing many of its characteristics. These, from certain mentions in key paragraphs, believe it is possible to deduce, in an alternative way to classical Marxism, the notion that the author would have had in mind: among others, that the social position of an individual would not be simply determined by the type of source of income and therefore the social classes would rather be entities of a social nature and not merely economic. It also emphasizes the fact that he clearly distinguished, in Hegelian fashion, between objective social class (Klasse an sich 'class in itself') and subjective social class (Klasse für sich 'class for itself'), and that, although his original analysis was dichotomous, his later writings consider the development of inexplicable intermediate layers within a binary oppressor-oppressed relationship. They cite the abrupt interruption of the manuscript of the third volume of Capital , at the moment when he is answering the ontological question «what constitutes a class?»; in it, class does not appear as rigidly linked to the origin of income or position in the division of labor:
The next question to answer is this: what form a class?, and percent that this comes from it from the answer to the other question: what makes wage-earning, capitalist and landlord workers form the three great social classes?At first glance, the identity of the revenues and the sources of revenue. They are three major social groups, whose components, the individuals who form them, live respectively of salary, gain and income of the land, of the valorization of their labor force, their capital and their land ownership. But from this point of view, doctors and officials, for example, would also form two classes, because they belong to two different social groups, in which the revenues of the members of each of them flow from the same source. The same would be for the infinite fragmentation of the interests and positions in which the division of social labour unfolds the workers as the capitalists and landowners; the latter, for example, in viticultors, farmers, forest owners, landowners and fish owners.
[Here the manuscript is interrupted. ]
Karl Marx has used many variable categorizations to classify production relations by source of income, but this presupposes that the conditions that determine them as classes pre-exist their political unity and that they can come together in subjectively considered conflicts of interest. With which it is not the conflict that generates or gives rise to the class distinction on which they base their unity, but rather it is the one that "discovers" those categories of production relations that are significant to delimit the oppositions of interests in solidarity with each other. In this way, the spontaneous conflict does not determine but reveals the minimum extension that subdivides the different social classes in a possible relationship of exploitation:
On the one hand, the different individuals only form one class as soon as they are forced to hold a common struggle against another class, otherwise they themselves face each other, hostilely, at the level of competition. And, on the other hand, the class is substantive, in turn, against the individuals who form it, so that they are already in their predestined living conditions; they find that the class assigns their position in life and, with that, the trajectory of their personal development; they are absorbed by it.
Regarding the class struggle, according to Marx its final development will only be reached when the conflict between the classes requires that they cease to exist and depends on a transition to a mode of production not built on them. This vision of social conflict as generated by social classes, and the understanding of social classes as part of a structure linked by production relations, was for Marx himself his main contribution to the epistemological challenge of the social sciences:
As far as I'm concerned, I cannot afford to have discovered the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, some bourgeois historians had already exposed the historical development of this class struggle and some bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of these. What I have contributed again has been to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of the classes is only linked to certain historical phases of production development; 2) that the class struggle leads, necessarily, to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this same dictatorship is by itself no more than the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society...
The Marxist-Leninist approach to a class definition
For later Marxism, social classes are associated with the existence of contradictions and class struggle: they do not exist first, as such, to later enter into the class struggle, which would lead one to suppose that there are classes without struggle of classes. Social classes cover as permanent class practices also the class struggle, and they only exist in their opposition. Lenin outlined in a more precise and complete way a Marxist definition of social class, trying to explain the original assumption of opposition between classes but without insisting on its number or its dual polarization character:
Classes are called to large groups of men who differ by:The classes are groups of men in which one can attribute the work of others thanks to the difference of the place they occupy in a particular system of the social economy.
- its place in the historically determined system of social production
- for their relationship (in most cases confirmed by law) to the means of production
- for its role in the social organization of work and, therefore,
- by means of obtaining and by the volume of the share of social wealth available to them.
One of the fundamental aspects of the Marxist-Leninist concept of classes would be that they do not exist in isolation, but rather as part of a class system. Social classes only exist in relation to each other. What defines and distinguishes the various classes are the specific relationships established between them. A social class can only exist based on another. The relationships between the different classes can be of a diverse nature, but among them those that we can consider as fundamental or structural relationships stand out. These are determined by the objective interests that the classes have, as a result of the specific positions they occupy in the productive process, as a result of the specific situation that each of them has with respect to the means of production. These differential positions, which according to Lenin allow one social class to appropriate the work of another, determine that the objective interests of the classes are not only different but contrary and opposed.
According to Leninism, the praxis of the proletariat in attempting to overcome its condition as an exploited group would lead to two final stages in the historical evolution of Western forms of production (as opposed to the historically unchanged Asian mode of production). The first and final stages of communism as a mode of production are differentiated by doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism, in a relatively similar way to Durkheim's categorization, as two different social organizations rather than as a permanent transition:
- Socialism: Persistence of social classes not possessing means of production and political representation of their consciousness through a political party. Public ownership of production provisionally in the hands of the State. Distribution by function.
- Communism: Abolition of the social division of labour and money. Civil society collectivization. Dissolution of any form of class and absorption in a "community of producers" of the State's collective economy. Distribution by necessity.
Further developments of the concept
Although the triumph of the Marxist political action did not prove the thesis of historical materialism on the validity of the doctrine itself, and the Leninist strategy materialized without fulfilling the expectations that were held of it, its dialectic caused a total turn in politics and modern history. The specific applicability of Marx's theory to the capitalist order would be explained, according to the Marxist Karl Reitter, in the following terms:
The result of the class relationship is cumulative at will in monetary and susceptible form besides being reused at another time and another place to reproduce again. All other relationships are different: none of them shows that particularity. The fact that this particularity could be developed historically is explained by the deployment of the socio-economic as an intractable area. Again, the decomposition of feudalism, the separation of the sphere of the political state from society allowed the theme of the economy as a social relationship. In a strict sense, it can only be spoken of economy within the capitalist mode of production. As Polanyi has revealed, in pre-capitalist societies, economics are structurally and inextricably linked to political, moral, stately and cultural references. For example, an analysis of economic dynamics in its pure form, such as that which Marx carried out in the case of capitalist mode of production, is not at all possible for an economy of antiquity. Thus, there is reason to think that class concepts and mode of production can only be applied categorically to capitalism.
Social transformations at the beginning of the XX century led to the appearance of new contributions, including those made by Weber and Durkheim.
Social class according to Max Weber
Max Weber contributed to addressing the social complexity of the West in the XX century (appearance of middle classes, bureaucracy, etc.) and understand from a logic of social action and rationality. It is a mistake to see Weber as Marx (as functionalist sociology has led him to believe since Talcott Parsons) even though he is liberal and close to the religious world. The distance set by him was developed as a response to the more reductionist approach of Marx's Hegelian methodological framework (primacy of the economic-technological material factor to explain capitalism and other socioeconomic forms as evolutionary historical necessities) something that Weber tries to refute through his thesis on the Protestant ethic and the question of a cultural framework impossible to explain superstructurally, and mainly through his idea of understanding (verstehen) of social action. His conceptual framework must be traced in the Nietzschean and Freudian worldviews, from where Weber reconciles non-atomistic methodological individualism with the holistic study of social and cultural structures:
Interpretative or understanding sociology considers the individual and his action as his basic unit. As its atom, if I can afford to use this argumentable comparison exceptionally (...) consequently the theory of sociology is to reduce these concepts to “comprehensible actions”, that is, without exception, applicable to the actions of individual men involved.
With his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he would present the pluricausal thesis according to which although there may be an evolution of its own for society (Comte), thought (Hegel) and technology (Marx), none is a determining infrastructure for the other, just as each of these can describe different paths in the path of their development, both by themselves and by influence of the others. Weber discovered how the attitude of austerity and denial of leisure (business) based on the profit of capital systematized by Benjamin Franklin became generalized only as a derivative of the intramundane asceticism typical of the main variants of Calvinist ethics, and how this was a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for the existence of bourgeois modernity in the West:
The fact that it demands historical explanation is this: in the most highly capitalist center of its time, the Florence of the 14th and 15th centuries, the market of money and capital of all the great political powers, this attitude was considered ethically unjustifiable or, the more, tolerable; while in the 18th century, in the distant petty-bourgeois populations of Pennsylvania, where the businesses threatened to be reduced to barter by the mere lack of money, where only a great start To speak here of a reflection of the material conditions in the ideal superstructure would be blatant nonsense. What constellation of ideas would explain the type of activity directed in appearance towards pure profit, as a vocation by which the individual felt ethically bound? This was the idea that gave justification and ethical foundation to the modality of the new entrepreneur.
Regarding the theory of social action, Weberian methodological individualism contrasts with the methodological collectivism of the Marxist vision of society, which starts from the sum dialectic of "relationships" similar socioeconomic dualities that shape opposing class dualities and that then shape individual life where they are truly expressed, as well as opposes Durkheimian methodological and ontological collectivism, in which society as an organization has autonomous existence as a social organic totality -moral in an internal process of transformation, or its parts (classes or others) can know as a block and act consciously according to a collective and/or social interest without the community participation in said interest of its individual members:
Therefore, every class can be the protagonist of any possible "class action" in innumerable forms, but not in a necessary way, nor does it constitute any community, and it leads to serious mistakes when, conceptually, it is equated to the communities. And the fact that men belonging to the same class usually react to situations as evident as economics are by means of mass action according to the interests most appropriate to their average term – a fact as important as elemental to the understanding of historical phenomena – is something that does not justify in any way the pseudo-scientific employment of the concepts of "class" and of "class interest" as usual in our days and that it has found its classic expression to be
Weber distinguishes between social classes, status groups and political parties, different strata that correspond respectively to the economic, social and political orders.
- The social classes are defined by the economically determinable relationship between its members and the market. These are only one of the forms of social stratification, according to the conditions of material life, and they are not a conscious group of their own unity beyond certain conditions without the necessary community of interests.
- Them status groups they are distinguished by their mode of consumption and their differentiated social practices that depend on objective elements (which Pierre Bourdieu would later call social capital) and other purely subjective ones such as reputation (honor, prestige, etc.)
- Them political parties they can access state power and alter with specific mandates the abstract rules of society, using their influence to obtain ideal or material benefits for their members, which unify in institutional form common interests and social status pre-existing or generated from the State.
The historical context presents the arrival of a middle class already strengthened after the experience of Fordism and that would join as a weighty actor between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, although with the exception of being a state of permanent transit. The complexity of this process transferred its theoretical burden to contemporary sociology (since the mid-seventies) which took charge of this problem in a context of crisis of modern-industrial society as it had been known historically.
The Weberian vision of the class struggle
Unlike the approach based on the mere relationship between property and income, Weberian sociological thinking highlights the power of disposition over goods and services, as well as the ways in which this disposition is applied to obtaining income and income, whereby he uses the economic position in exchange combined with the social position in production, thus completing the class demarcation that Marx had not been able to finish appealing alone to the last criterion.
Within the definition of social class in a broad sense, Weber distinguishes between different classification criteria by which there are multiple types of classes that are juxtaposed among themselves in the same individual:
- "ownership" classes (defined by the probability of supplying goods, obtaining an external position to their source of income and a personal destination)
- "lucrative" classes (demarcated by the value they acquire in the market the goods and services they provide)
- "social" classes in a strict sense (read the above traits but because of their typical occurrence throughout the generations it is the most similar to a "state")
As is noted, the classification reserves the qualification of “social” for those groups that occupy a place on the scale that does not vary with time or whose alterations are minimal. This presupposes that the property is in itself mudable because its conservation is not assured forever. In turn, it may be part of the lucrative class, but provided that goods and services maintain their value in the market; otherwise, membership of that collective is suspended. However, the proletariat (especially that of the mechanized industry), the petty bourgeoisie and the unowned intelligentsia, constitute social classes in the specific sense of the term, since their interests tend to homogenize. However, this does not lead to class struggle: in Weber's view, history shows that those who own property can very well ally with the less privileged sectors. The class contradiction tends to become effective when the property faces declassification, when the secretions are opposed to debts, situations that can lead to real revolutionary struggles.
However, these conflicts and struggles, by their very nature, do not reflect a qualitative and intrinsic contradiction between social classes that, as in Marxism, should be defined by "contrasts"; therefore, they do not need to be resolved through the transformation of the economic system or the social order, but through changes in the access to a type of property or a different distribution of it:
The distinction between proprietary and lucrative classes is based on the merger of two criteria: the type of property used as a means of payment, and the kind of services that can be offered on the market. Its joint use outlines a pluralistic conception of the classes in which the property that yields profits in the market is highly variable, in addition to producing and reproducing numerous and diverse interests within the ruling class. Another thing is the lack of ownership, because the negotiable qualifications they possess can very well give rise to contradictory interests.
The emphasis on the categories of classical sociology
Regarding the question of power, Weber largely implies a closer approach to Tocqueville than to Marx (except in his studies on Bonapartism), since he emphasizes that power, no matter if it submits to someone else, always resides ultimately in political groups. The differentiation between types of relevant social groups includes phenomena not necessarily included in political power and refers to Ferdinand Tönnies's later attempt to return to more realistic and classical distinctions between "class& #3. 4; (in which ownership is discovered a posteriori in an economic situation) and "estamento" (in which belonging is an a priori condition, independent of economic role, based on a cultural category of the community that accepts it); for this reason, the former are a societal and commercial phenomenon typical of modernity, and the latter a traditional and religious community phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, the estates had greater relevance than the social classes in the communal medieval West, largely thanks to their hybrid criteria of family belonging: feudal hereditary and clerical self-election. The estates are in turn distinguished from the "castes", a phenomenon typical of certain Eastern countries, such as the Hindu case, whose endogamous ethnic groups become superimposed social formations but, nevertheless, have almost no open neither with each other nor with the rest of society, whose unity is preserved by Asian, pseudo-feudal, and centralized economic systems, a phenomenon that Marx had objectified as the "Asian mode of production". The distinction between class, caste and estate is therefore key in Weber:
Even though in certain situations Weber uses the dichotomous model, his analysis proceeds through the differentiation between classes, stalls and parties, a resource that he uses to highlight the process of division of power in the community. The distribution to which it refers considers not only economic power but also the one that ambitiones prestige and social honor and the one that strives for political power. By virtue of market interests, the class exists objectively even if individuals are not aware of it: it is a “class in itself” that does not immediately base ties or consciousness. The elements, on the other hand, group people in terms of possession – or of the claim to possess them – of positive or negative privileges in social consideration. The possession of money or the status of a businessman does not constitute stallary qualifications, although they may cause them. Conversely, its lack is not a stallial disqualification, even though it can produce it. In short, state society is governed by conventions related to lifestyle and consumption, while class society flourishes on the market economy. As the seasons create subjective communities in which individuals are recognized because they form circles that tend to insulation, so classes institute societies whose objectivity transcends individual people and are organized according to production and acquisition relations. Classes are not “for itself” communities or classes, but they constitute possible and frequent basis for community action.
Social class in contemporary sociology
The new complexity of society from the end of the XX century to the XXI was causing encounters between the updated positions of Weber and Marx (neo-Weberians and neo-Marxists) although, on the other hand, the more orthodox theoretical production of Marxism continued.
Talcott Parsons, the greatest exponent of structural-functionalism, considers the concept of social class developed by Karl Marx to be highly relevant, although he criticizes the immanent conflict present in it. For the American sociologist, social classes are primarily family structures and kinship strongly related to the economy in a hierarchical social context. Contrary to Marx and Weber, Parsons affirms that social class is a transitory stage towards stratification. He understands the latter as an evolutionary universal, these being complex structures that allow a substantial increase in the adaptive capacities of a system. Thus, for early Parsons, stratification is associated at the individual level with kinship, personal qualities, achievements, possessions, authority and power, while for the second, focused on the AGIL model, it can be observed in institutional terms in the economy, politics, law and culture.
Niklas Luhmann, as in other cases, will move away from Parsonian ideas as far as the concept of social class is concerned. The German sociologist, by situating functional differentiation as a form of differentiation in modern society, considers stratification -and its associated forms of inequality- as previous evolutionary stages together with segmentation and the difference between center/periphery. Still, he identifies a "functionally differentiated society with class structure" in the transition towards functional differentiation. In this transit, inequality is not thematized under the upper stratum in interactional terms, but through systemic mechanisms, be they money, career, and prominence. Using these means, the economic class, the organizational class, and the prominent class would be articulated. Luhmann also maintains that the reproduction of these classes is carried out based on payment (economic class), decisions (organizational class) and mentions in the mass media (prominent class). Among some systemists who have worked on the problem of social inequality, problematizing the use of the concept of social class, we can name Hugo Cadenas, Fernando Robles and Rudolf Stichweh.
Neo-Marxists and Neo-Weberians converge in the contemporary complexity of social classes, and in the verification of facts such as growing social inequality and the theoretical chaos produced in the transformation of work. Leading theorists of contemporary class analysis include Goldthorpe, Erik Olin Wright, Erikson, and Ralf Dahrendorf.