Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to indicate what kind of approach is being used to analyse the Soviet Union in this book. This is necessary because of the continuing prevalence in sociology of analyses of class structures which fail to define sufficiently clearly the basis of the categorisation of classes. In other words, it will be argued that the prevailing modes of analysis of what is often called ‘social inequality’ or ‘social stratification’ fail to provide sufficiently clear theoretical grounds for distinguishing different classes, or for analysing class relations.
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Notes
J. H. Goldthorpe, ‘Social Stratification in Industrial Society’, in R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset (eds), Class, Status and Power, 2nd edn, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967.
The dissertation argued that Goldthorpe’s reliance on S. M. Miller’s article ‘Comparative Social Mobility’, Current Sociology, 1960, was somewhat misplaced
since Miller had inaccurately computed the rates of social mobility in the USSR on the basis of data provided by A. Inkeles and R. A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen, Oxford University Press, 1959.
This position is based on that of B. Hindess, The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology, Macmillan, London, 1973.
K. Marx, Capital, volume 3, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1972.
M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, The Free Press, New York, 1964, p. 424. I have used the term ‘class position’ instead of the translation ‘class status’ because the latter may be confused with Weber’s concept of ‘status’.
K. Marx, Capital, volume 2, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1967.
K. Marx, Capital, volume 1, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1970.
See G. Littlejohn, ‘State, Plan and Market in the Transition to Socialism: The Legacy of Bukharin’, Economy and Society, vol. 8, no. 2, May 1979, pp. 212–15, for a brief discussion of the views of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky on this issue.
V. I. Lenin, ‘A Great Beginning’, in Collected Works, vol. 29, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1965, pp. 409–34.
See I. Steedman, Marx after Sraffa, New Left Books, London, 1977; and
A. Cutler, B. Hindess, P. Q. Hirst and A. Hussain, Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Capitalism Today, vols 1 and 2, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977, 1978.
For example, L. Harris, ‘The Science of the Economy’, Economy and Society, vol. 7, no. 3, August 1978.
Various somewhat different comments on the difficulties of using the concepts of the labour theory of value for analysing the division of labour have already been made in G. Littlejohn, ‘Economic Calculation in the Soviet Union’, Economy and Society, vol. 9, no. 4, November 1980.
See, for example, P. Hirst, ‘Economic Classes and Polities’, in A. Hunt (ed.), Class and Class Structure, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1978, pp. 125–54;
or B. Hindess, ‘Classes and Politics in Marxist Theory’, in G. Littlejohn, B. Smart, J. Wakeford and N. Yuval-Davies (eds), Powerand the State, Croom Helm, London, 1978.
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© 1984 Gary Littlejohn
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Littlejohn, G. (1984). The Class Structure: Stratification or Relations of Production?. In: A Sociology of the Soviet Union. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17358-7_2
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