Social class and value in contemporary social theory

Abstract

Over the past 40 years the concepts of social class and value were discussed by several currents of social theory. From the years 1970, the theses on the constitution of a post-industrial society or pos-materialist or even on a services society were elaborated as opposed to the theses that justified the manifestation of industrial societies, guided mainly by designing industrial and working class, i.e. in the so-called productive paradigm. If, on the one hand, the criticism of the productive paradigm were useful in the sense of pointing a reduced conception of labor, social class and value, and therefore the need to overcome it, on the other hand, his theoretical contribution made by critical object the determinist Marxist conceptions that used to characterize the industrial production as the only foundation social processes (be they political, cultural, ethnic, economic or symbolic).This equation stated that, until the years 1970, capitalist societies would be determined predominantly by manufacturing. However, after the historic events that took place in that decade, such a determination would have been overcome and with it the entire Marxist analytic tradition. The Brazilian sociology, as much as the contemporary international sociology, have developed in these four decades a significant bibliographic material in relation to the issue of social divisions, capital valorization process and the meaning of labor in contemporary capitalist societies. In this sense, making the substantive analysis and systematization of the theories that have or have not served itself of the validity of the thesis of the "end of social classes" and the thesis of "end of the value", based mainly on a survey and a critical bibliographic mapping, seems a central aim to us. (AU)