Class analysis, culture and inequality in the information society

Abstract

This paper argues that class analysis contains important tools for understanding contemporary socio-economic inequality in the new media environment. For research seeking to promote the reduction of inequality, the Marxian class analytical tradition has two important features: (1) it identifies collectively-held interests in contrast to the methodological individualism of neo-classical economics, thus providing a basis for political action; and (2) it understands those interests as relational and socially constituted, and therefore processual and able to be changed. Class analysis has declined in effectiveness due to its failure to respond to critiques emanating from identity-based new soc..