Post-Yugoslav Notes on Marx’s Class Theory and Middle-Class Classism

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the state of the middle class in neoliberal capitalism from the post-Yugoslav perspective. By utilizing a materialist understanding of social class devised from Marx’s late writings, the author shows how the materiality of class in late capitalism is obscured by an ideological misrecognition of class relations as cultural difference, which in turn derives its effectiveness precisely by concealing class relations as such. Classes in Marx’s late theory are not culturally defined social groups, but are (re)produced by socially objective, automatic economic forces. The history of capitalism is therefore also a history of separation of cultural differentiation from class formation. The author argues that today’s middle “class,” in postsocialism and elsewhere, is indeed a culturally aware social group, but not a class in a Marxian sense. Its relation to capitalist class formation is non-direct and mediated, and sometimes takes the form of accentuation of its cultural superiority in distinction to the proletariat or classism.