In Search of the Subject of Change

Abstract

Great books enable us to reflect on the subject matter under study and lead to the reading of others that expand our understanding and deepen our knowledge. They also make us think about the state of our profession and the way it has been shaped by open debates. More important, great works make us revisit issues and theories studied in the recent past and take a fresh look at topics we thought we understood. This is what the Dominican-born sociologist Carlos Julio Báez Evertsz delivers in his monumental Desigualdad y clases sociales, an interesting, timely, and comprehensive critique of theories of social classes. The central argument of this book is that class remains pertinent to the analysis of contemporary societies. Báez reviews the debates in the social sciences on class to demonstrate that bourgeois social scientists have sought to either deny or obscure the centrality of the concept of class to prevent it from shedding light on the process of social change. While he assesses the works of classic Marxists such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci, the central part of his work focuses on Marx’s ideas on social class and the more recent theories of neo-Marxism, cultural studies, and postmodernism. Drawing on Marx, the classic Marxists, and the neo-Marxists, he proposes the concept of the collective worker, “the social majority that constitutes an important component of the economically active and inactive population, the intellectual and manual workers, industry, services, professional, communicators, teachers at all levels, health and public services, women, precarious workers, unemployed, retired, self-employed, underclass, etc.” (673). In contrast to the neo-Marxists, he excludes from the concept of the collective worker members of the petty bourgeoisie or middle class who have managerial or supervisory roles in the global functions of capital and therefore are in a “contradictory class location” in relation to ownership of the means of production. The book opens (Chapters 1 and 2) with an investigation of social inequality, reviewing the most important works on the subject (Pareto, Piketty, Atkinson, Milanovic, and others) and warning (72–73) that