As we write this introduction, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has spread over the world in the first half of 2020, are the focus of ample conversations and debates. Questions about the appropriateness of government responses to the pandemic, concerns over an economic crisis, people’s mental health, and the importance of public sector services such as healthcare are at the forefront of public discussions. Adding urgency to evaluations of the consequences of COVID-19 is the recognition that such extreme circumstances can, and have, sharpened inequalities. For example, media reportage has commented on economic distinctions when it comes to housing and lockdown. One recent New York Times article reflects on the high number of New York City residents from the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods who relocated to expensive second homes during lockdown (Quealy, 2020). A similar observation informs a Guardian article titled “Super-Rich Buying Up ‘Downton Abbey Estates’ to Escape Pandemic” (Neate, 2020). According to this article, “Estate agents are reporting a surge in sales of vast country estates and former castle properties, which until COVID-19 struck had become increasingly hard to shift as the richest of the rich instead opted to live in luxurious skyscraper penthouses, on tropical islands or superyachts.” The elephant in the room is class and how it affects one’s ability to seek shelter from the virus—or not.Although social class analysis is still holding strong, it has been a fraught field of study during the past several decades. Indeed, the recent history of the concept can be described as a struggle for survival and meaning. In order to set the stage for our special issue on social class in post-socialist contexts, we want to highlight three aspects of the struggle orbiting around social class analysis: its ideological baggage; the persistence of anti-class rhetoric in certain strains of academic inquiry; and the ambiguity that continues to surround the concept of class.Since the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, if not before, the concept of class has had a Janus face as both a description of socioeconomic reality and a prescription for political-economic action. Unsurprisingly, then, class lugs a substantial amount of ideological baggage. This is particularly true in post-socialist contexts in which the use of class was associated with the normative agenda of the previous regime (Ost, 2015), and for many years shied away from by both political commentators and social scientists. Before the 1990s, analysts in socialist countries struggled over how to conceptualize inequality within a political-economic system ideologically committed to classlessness. Different theoretical framings of class, including stratification analysis and critical Marxist approaches, marked the inequalities debate. The 1990s, by contrast, witnessed the departure of the concept of class from academic and public discourse. As Ost (2015) has observed, “class was the key concept of the toppled nemesis” (p. 546) and, therefore, was rejected decisively in post-socialist contexts. However, following this hiatus, the early 2000s witnessed the tentative reemergence of “class talk” in many post-socialist settings. Even then, however, when class was shyly invoked, it was more frequently understood as a gradational concept focused on differences in individual attributes rather than as a relational concept underpinned by relations of power (Ost, 2015). The salience of class has persevered ever since, even as ambiguity over the concept and its entailments persists, as we discuss below.Second, while social class remained, and remains, a freighted term in post-socialist contexts, certain scholars working in long-standing capitalist societies in the 1990s and beyond rejected the concept entirely. Social class deniers such as Pakulski and Waters (1996) dramatically proclaimed the “death of class.” Although according to Wright (2015), “the death of class” debate was “a short but lively discussion” that lasted from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, three articles by Atkinson (2007a, 2007b) and Beck (2013) illustrate that anti-class rhetoric has been more stubborn than Wright predicted. Atkinson (2007a) has critically reflected on two authors whom he accuses of “celebrating reflexivity” at the expense of class: Giddens and Beck. He characterizes Giddens’s notion of the “reflexive project of the self” as leaving “little room for class as a source of identity, action or politics” (Atkinson, 2007a, p. 534), and criticizes Giddens’s overall theoretical project for problematically replacing class constraints with lifestyle choices in explaining action in late modernity. Atkinson (2007b) also interrogates Beck’s assessment that class is a “zombie” concept and that “individualization,” understood as a process through which people construct their biographies reflexively, better captures today’s differentiated societies. For Atkinson (2007b), Beck’s individualization thesis is flawed in terms of “its damaging ambivalence and contradiction as regards what individualization is and how far it has superseded class, its inconsistent and unsatisfactory depiction of what class was before its membership of the living dead, its misguided portrayal of class analysis, and, last, its self-defeating logic on the causes of individualization” (p. 362).Beck (2013), in turn, has accused authors such as Atkinson for being too focused on the reproduction of the social order and the continuity of class in national societies, which “blinds them to the explosive dynamics that are currently transforming the world” (p. 64). The title of Beck’s (2013) article summarizes his general position on social class: “Why ‘Class’ Is Too Soft a Category to Capture the Explosiveness of Social Inequality at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” For Beck (2013), exploration of the connection between, for example, occupation and income, misses the “radicalization of social inequality” (p. 66) in the face of global challenges such as the global financial crisis and climate change. Consequently, he calls for a break with “the nation-state orthodoxy of class analysis” (Beck, p. 67). It seems that for Beck social class is not dead, in the sense that class analysts do empirically illustrate the workings of what they understand to be class, but rather that it should be killed because its focus is misplaced. Even though both outright deniers of class such as Pakulski and Waters and Leftist revisionists such as Beck focus their attention primarily on established capitalist societies, the death-of-class debate also gets addressed in class analysis in post-socialism (see, for example, Domański, 2008).Third, writings on class frequently highlight the ambiguities and multiple entailments of the concept of class itself. Such tensions are internal to the field of class analysis. For example, Wright (2005), in the introduction to his book on theoretical approaches to class analysis, mentions “the general ambiguity of the term ‘class’ ” (p. 1). Such a statement reflects lively debates over what social class is. In the bulk of contemporary sociological literature that engages with theoretical rather than more pragmatist approaches to class, the answer to this question is most often addressed from either a Goldthorpean/neo-Weberian or a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective for which “class matters”; that is, class has “systematic and significant consequences both for the lives of individuals and for the dynamics of institutions” (Wright, 2005, p. 21). Indeed, defending one of these two theoretical approaches to class analysis against the other underpins much class analysis writing drawn to theory. Le Roux et al. (2008) and Savage et al. (2013), for example, have argued for a Bourdieusian approach to class. They contrast such a Bourdieusian perspective to Goldthorpe’s class schema, which they characterize as the “gold standard” in the measurement of class, especially as it decisively prevailed over “the rival Marxist framework of Erik Olin Wright” (Savage et al., 2013, p. 221). In an article on the post-communist class structure of Hungary, Albert et al. (2018) also call for a Bourdieusian framing of social class inequalities and draw on Savage et al.’s (2013) work to critique Goldthorpe’s class schema. Revivals of class analysis through a Bourdieusian lens have emerged in other post-socialist countries, including Serbia (e.g., Cvetičanin & Popescu, 2011; Cvetičanin et al., 2021) and Croatia (Tomić-Koludrović & Petrić, 2014; Doolan & Tonković, 2021). Importantly, the unresolved question of which tradition of class analysis is more viable has, throughout the years, yielded both complex theoretical argumentation and rich empirical research.The notion of intersectionality has further complicated the use of class as an analytical tool. According to authors such as Atkinson (2015), whichever theoretical approach to class one takes, there is always the “tricky issue of how it relates to other forms of inequality and difference” (p. 81). First put forward by feminists of color, intersectionality encompasses “the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (Collins, 2015, p. 2). As a point of interest for our special issue, Walby, Armstrong, and Strid (2012), in their review of the concept of intersectionality, note that the intersection of gender and class has been relatively neglected compared to the intersection of gender and ethnicity. According to the authors, a possible explanation for this is that, unlike gender, ethnicity, disability, age, religion/belief, and sexual orientation, social class is not “a justiciable inequality” (p. 232). By this, they point to the challenge of reconciling social class with a logic of justice based on the recognition of identity claims, rather than claims of socioeconomic redistribution (Fraser, 1996).To what extent is contemporary class analysis from post-socialist European countries visible in mainstream sociology journals and what debates does it engage with? In 2019, we co-authored an article reviewing contemporary social class research published between 2006 and 2016 in leading sociology journals (Cepić & Doolan, 2018). We selected these journals as indicative of “state-of-the-art” contemporary social class research. Among the 326 articles we identified that, during the observed period, included the term “class” in their title, abstract, or keywords, we found that the bulk of class research comes from either North America or Western Europe, whereas only 5 articles were based on data from European post-socialist contexts (Cepić & Doolan, 2018). Certainly our choice of journals—all of which are published in North America or Western Europe—is connected to the finding that so few articles address class in other parts of the globe, including post-socialist Eastern Europe. However, it does point to the poor visibility that class analysis from post-socialist settings has in influential sociology journals.The five articles that we identified are by no means representative of the whole field of class analysis in post-socialist contexts, but they do exemplify some of the issues class analysts engage with in post-socialist settings and beyond. For example, Domański’s (2008) article engages with the importance of class differentials when it comes to voting preferences against what he describes as “the long-lasting debate on so-called ‘death of classes’ ” (p. 179). Lazić and Cvejić (2011), who focus on the value orientations of the Serbian middle class during socialism and post-socialism, underscore the different definitions of the middle class that contribute to the concept’s ambiguity. Like the other articles we reviewed, these two articles comment on both the continuities and discontinuities between socialism and post-socialism. Lux, Sunega, and Katrňák (2013) address this as well through their discussion of the impact of social stratification on housing inequality in the Czech Republic, while Lippényi, Maas, and Van Leeuwen (2015) do so through an exploration of social mobility in Hungary. Finally, Pellandini-Simányi (2017) examines how Hungarians cope with income inequalities among friends. She notes that status-bridging friendships have always been scarce irrespective of the dominant political and economic order.The theoretical traditions and concepts that these articles draw on are quite general. Apart from Domański (2008), who employs the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero class schema (often referred to as neo-Weberian), they each lean on more general occupation-based approaches. This corresponds with the broader trend identified by Cepić and Doolan (2018): in contrast to Goldthorpe’s (2008) plea for a narrow definition of class, our review indicated that there is a strong trend toward a “kitchen-sink approach,” whereby the articles are not embedded in traditional theoretical paradigms of class research. Other than Lazić and Cvejić (2011), who examine the contextual meanings of middle classness, the other reviewed papers use class as a tool for interpreting various dimensions of social and political life (identity, work, voting, housing, mobility, friendship) rather than examining class from a meta-theoretical angle. Interestingly and importantly, none of the authors write about the “baggage” of class analysis inherited from socialism, which illustrates perhaps that enough time has passed for the concept to be productively reclaimed.A sense of injustice that defies simple evaluations and solutions permeates the articles in this special issue. In Fraser’s (1996) terms, these injustices are socioeconomic, rooted in the economic structure of society; they are cultural, encapsulating classed disrespect and disparagement; and they involve injustices related to political representation. As our contributors show, these injustices of class are not limited to a single time or political system. They include injustices experienced by workers in socialism who, though nominally granted political power, were often removed from decision-making processes in practice. They also include structural injustices related to class-based struggles in education, and cultural injustices in the form of the disparagement of working-class taste in music. Finally, and most capaciously, the injustices of class include the injustice of taking capitalism as an incontestable given when the system works for the few rather than for the many.Our contributors’ research contexts and disciplinary perspectives are multiple, as befits our interdisciplinary aspirations. They bring together insights from history, sociology and anthropology, with a geographic scope that includes countries from Central and Southeast Europe. The special issue opens with Ana Dević’s (2022) contribution, a rich historical analysis of scholarly and activist efforts in Yugoslavia that drew attention to the gap between proclaimed socialist ideals and experienced social class inequalities. She focuses in particular on workers’ rights. On the basis of her detailed analysis of many different relevant texts, from legal documents to research articles, Dević lays out the growing sense of powerlessness among the working class in Yugoslavia. Her timely genealogy of working-class inequalities in an ostensibly “classless” context is a salutary reminder that the sociology of class cannot be reduced to a sociology of ideological discourse about class. Dević ends by connecting working-class disempowerment to the rise of ethnic nationalism, which propelled the dissolution of Yugoslavia.Our next authors, Tamara Trošt and Denis Marinšek (2022), begin from where Dević leaves off in order to provide a comparative, quantitative examination of the classed nature of a series of worldviews, including attitudes toward immigrants, LGBT persons, political orientation, support for the EU, and emotional attachment to country, in two post-socialist settings: Serbia and Croatia. Their contribution provides a comprehensive review of literature on the relationship between class and worldviews and calls for a nuanced understanding of interfaces in worldviews. Taking education and income as indicative of socioeconomic status, the authors show that education is the most robust predictor: higher education is associated with more-tolerant scores in attitudes. The authors discuss a series of explanations for this relationship in post-socialist settings while acknowledging it is by no means uniform.Whereas Trošt and Marinšek’s contribution discusses the intriguing relationship between education and worldviews, Tanja Vučković Juroš (2022) directs her attention to a key focus of social class analysis in education itself: the reproduction of class inequalities. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capitals, Vučković Juroš analyzes rich material from biographical narrative interviews with three young individuals from lower-class backgrounds in Croatia. She sensitively relates the difficulties these young people faced as they navigated the Croatian educational system, while also noting the complexity of class belonging as it translated into educational horizons of what is probable, possible, and unimaginable. Crucially, for Vučković Juroš, social class is both an “objective” structural factor in determining educational outcomes and a “subjective” facet of individual biographies.Moving on with Ondřej Daniel (2022) as our guide, and continuing in a Bourdieusian vein, we tour the landscape of class and musical taste in post-socialist Czechia in order to gain insight into processes of “Othering” and in particular the disparagement of working-class musical tastes by cultural elites. Apart from drawing attention to the cultural dimensions of class and in particular class-based snobbery expressed in a sense of superiority cultural elites have when it comes to their tastes in music, Daniel productively sketches intra-class differences shaped by gender and political orientation, thereby adding to the intersectional flavor of our collection. His contribution also establishes a clear link to one of the inspirational monuments of the sociology of social class, Bourdieu’s Distinction. Like Bourdieu, Daniel insists that aesthetic evaluations and social class are part and parcel of each other.As a bookend to Dević’s opening discussion, our special issue closes with another historical analysis. Our final contribution is Dražen Cepić, Karin Doolan, and Danijela Dolenec’s (2022) reflection on the role of social class analysis in envisioning a better world. Their historical case study of Yugoslav scholarship on class during state socialism, combined with a discussion of post-Yugoslav social class research, argues that in socialism, class analysis drew on both Marxism and liberal thought as tools for systemic critique to envision a future that might succeed in resolving the class contradictions of the present. By contrast, we find that in post-Yugoslav sociological class research, explicit systemic critique of capitalism through a social class lens has been marginalized, and the present order is often taken for granted.Coursing through the special issue are several themes relevant for social class analysis in post-socialist contexts that also reflect broader concerns in class analysis. First, class relations of domination and subordination are not new to post-socialist settings. As Dević, Vučković Juroš, and Cepić, Doolan, and Dolenec note in their contributions, class inequalities have persisted from socialism to capitalism, even as they have also undergone transformation. Importantly, the working and lower classes have ultimately been failed by both systems. The implication of this persistence is not to relativize the role that the broader political-economic context can have in addressing class inequalities nor problematically equate class inequalities in socialism and capitalism, but rather highlight the value of historically situating class differences in the present. The social world is accumulated history, as Bourdieu (1986) put it, yet too often this history is overlooked. The special issue insists on combining a genealogical perspective on how class was conceived and practiced during socialism and a comprehensive perspective on both the subjective experiences and objective determinations of class today.Second, and as particularly highlighted in Daniel’s contribution, class distinctions are cultural as much as they are economic. Indeed, whereas it is often the case that the main class boundaries are drawn between the rich and the poor, managers and workers, or the economic elite and the working class, an exploration of cultural taste shows the role of cultural elites in shaping class distance and reinforcing inequalities. As Bourdieu (1984) emphasized long ago, sociologists separate aesthetic, social, and economic concerns at their peril.Third, our issue forwards a notion of class as “process,” produced through interactions and experiences, rather than as a fixed, categorical concept (Archer, 2003). Such a direction is inspired by authors such as Kuhn (1995), who describes class as “something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your reflexes, in your psyche, in the very core of your being” (p. 633). Connected to this, and also in line with Reay’s (2005) work, Daniel and Vučković Juroš illustrate how social class is not only a matter of objective life circumstances and chances, but, rather, is also deeply etched into people’s psyches through different emotions that together form an “affective lexicon of class” (Reay, 2005, p. 913). In this sense, Daniel writes about the disgust expressed by cultural critics toward the music tastes of the working classes, whereas Vučković Juroš notes how one of her interlocutors felt ashamed for being poor. Both point to class differences as encapsulating feelings of respect and disrespect.Fourth, as Dević and Trošt and Marinšek remind us, class inequalities have political consequences. These two contributions stress that unaddressed class inequalities are conducive to the rise of right-wing populism. Indeed, both authors quote a well-known story that workers who came to demonstrate for their worker rights in front of the Yugoslav federal parliament in Belgrade in the late 1980s, following a nationalist speech given by Slobodan Milošević, went home as “Serbs” who espoused an ethno-nationalist agenda. Eribon (2013) has made a similar point about the working class in France turning to the right as a result of disempowerment and the Left’s preoccupation with neoliberalism.Finally, our articles draw attention to the role of academics in engaging social class analysis against the normalization of inequalities. According to Cepić, Doolan, and Dolenec, the fervor and zeal with which class inequalities and working-class disempowerment were criticized by activist scholars in socialist Yugoslavia, and which are also illustrated in Dević’s contribution, have dimmed in capitalist post-Yugoslavia.Notwithstanding the challenges orbiting social class analysis today, including its ideological baggage, anti-class rhetoric, and accusations of conceptual ambiguity, the five contributions to this special issue defend class analysis as a legitimate and valuable theoretical perspective and empirical endeavor within post-socialist countries. This should not come as a surprise, yet, in light of broader trends in the sociology of post-socialist contexts, it is. In the wake of socialism, sociologists’ attention focused elsewhere. Questions of identity—especially nationalism—and culture surged to the fore. Even those sociologists concerned with political-economic questions in post-socialist contexts were more likely to emphasize the role of new economic elites—to the detriment of those who remained excluded from the new privileges of capitalism, not to mention the new pariahs created by “transition.” Nonetheless, as our contributors variously show, class as both a set of practices and a motivating political concept did not simply evaporate in the heady atmosphere of capitalism. Based on the array of contexts and arguments that our special issue provides, there is no better time than now for sociologists to reconsider social class, both in post-socialist contexts and beyond. This is an endeavor that is particularly important for those at the bottom of the social class hierarchy who, as the articles in this issue illustrate, continue to suffer multiple injustices.The authors would like to thank Jeremy F. Walton for his useful comments on an earlier version of this article.This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project number 3134.