Kritik der Klassenbildung

Abstract

Abstract Critique of Class Formation. On Division, Inequality, and Class Theories We live in an age of multiple crises: Financial crisis, climate crisis, corona crisis, oil and gas price crisis, supply chain crisis, logistics crisis or inflation crisis. As heterogeneous and multifactorial as the causes of these forms of crisis may be, they all have at least one common effect: they reinforce social inequalities, since they never hit and affect everyone in the same way. Using the Covid 19 pandemic as an example, it became obvious that the inequalities begin with the possibilities of isolation, continue globally via vaccine distribution and finally result in significantly higher death rates, which are distributed along the gap between rich and poor. Against this background, the lecture takes the popular talk of a ›division of society‹ as an opportunity to redefine the concept of class. To this end, various developments and tendencies in inequality research will be discussed and finally theses on political class formation will be presented.