To say that productivity increases only by dint of constant socio-technical development amounts to claiming that a growing expenditure of energy is the sine qua non of profit creation.

The industrial working class was fragmented, while formerly auxiliary subaltern sectors made their voice heard independently. The outcome was the situation of indeterminacy we are still in today, which is prompting more sophisticated theoretical accounts.

Rancière proposes an aetiology of the degeneration to which politics is liable. It is sometimes transformed into ‘archi-politics’.

According to Žižek, the subject is a ‘vanishing mediator’.39 This concept is adopted from Jameson. In the latter it refers to any phenomenon that allows another phenomenon to emerge and disappears once it has performed that task.

he argues that the form of domination which obtains in the economic sphere – exploitation – possesses primacy over other forms of oppression. Together with his desire to rehabilitate the Cartesian subject, this is a second thesis which sees the philosopher oppose the reigning doxa in ‘western academia’.

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

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.

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’.

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.

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.