Activity

In a ‘bureaucratic socialist regime’ like the USSR, it is the intelligentsia that is liable to occupy this position. It shares certain advantages with members of the nomenklatura (the bureaucracy of the single party), but it is a class distinct from the latter.

Communities are not formed haphazardly, and if the development of a class culture or identity includes a degree of contingency, it is supplied with ballast by ‘objective’ socio-economic factors.

No doubt the most widespread theory of social classes at present is the constructivist one. Constructivism is a trend in contemporary social science according to which reality – social and/or material – is ‘constructed’ or ‘socially constructed’.

An imbrication of the natural and the artificial is now the rule, and their separation is an increasingly rare exception with the passage of time.

Žižek adopts the Marxist argument of ‘reification’ developed, in particular, by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923).