On the theory of social classes

Abstract

The class theory is a framework of strategical research on the social reality without a specific field concerning its origin and without an exclusive practical ground. It may wholly contribute to the analysis of the social structure processi, to the explanation of socially relevant practices and to the identification of the respective bearers of the essential protagonists of those practices. In this article it is not our purpose to lay out the impossible inventory of the multiple variables produced within the scope of the class theory, often incoherent or contradictory among themselves and referred to several epistemological and theoretical frameworks. Our purpose is rather trying to raise some of the problems on which the adequate operativeness of the theory depends, its efficient use as a
research instrument. Thus the analytic distinction between class structural positions and agents that occupy such positions seems to be an indispensable condition to understand the limits historically imposed to the advent of each new conjuncture, as well as the pfocessi of practical production of the social. The study of the social trajectory and its effects of disposition inculcation in the agents (the complex processi of «socialization») is also an essential moment to the explanation of the practices, since they can never be deduced from a certain condition of the structure. At last the definition of the domestic group, instead of the isolated individual, not only contributes to a better grasping of the class profile but it is also more relevant in seizing the respective strategies.