It’s Not What You Have, It’s What You Do: The Return of the Division-of-Labour View of Class

The challenge to the simple two-class, polarised picture of the capitalist society arises because historically additional actors apart from the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem to have arrived on the scene. This chapter will focus on the alternative solutions to this problem of non-capitalist and at the same time non-proletarian class-like actors. First of all, however, let me pose a question: why is this such a problem for the Marxian worldview? After all, an alternative, stratification theory would not have nearly such a difficult time with adding more social actors as conditions required. What is it about the Marxist picture that caused it such trouble? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.