Classes, Capitalism and the State

Abstract

Ten years is a long time in sociology. Less than a decade ago, Frank Parkin published Class Inequality and Political Order, a work which deservedly became well known.² The book made some important contributions to the then existing literature on class analysis. At that time, the sociological literature was dominated by a particular viewpoint about the nature of classes and class conflict. The entrenched liberal establishment of orthodox sociology in the USA and Europe had elaborated a version of class theory associated with the then dominant notion of ‘industrial society’. ‘Class’ for these writers had become either replaced by ‘stratification’, or regarded as one aspect of stratification among others, and not necessarily the most important. Class conflict, for the various proponents of the theory of industrial society,³ had been drained of any threatening qualities by the progressive incorporation of the working class within the social and political order. The future appeared to be set by the progressive expansion of liberal freedoms within a rapidly maturing industrial system. Many of those who took such a view were influenced by the ideas of Max Weber, understood in an appropriately bowdlerised form. The elements of Weber appearing in their works were not those of the sombre prophet of a numbing all-encompassing world of bureaucratic domination.

A discussion of Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock, 1979).