SOCIAL CLASSES AND STRATA IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM

This is an unpublished essay written in 1981, in the same year that A Sociedade Estatal e a Tecnoburocracia (Editora Brasiliense) – a collection of the previous essays on the theory of the new professional class – was published. My other two central papers on the subject, The Emergence of Technobureaucracy (1972) and Introductory Notes to the Statist or Technobureaucratic Mode of Production (1977) are in this book. I intended to include this third essay in a book to be published in English – a project that eventually did not materialize. In 2001 I read the paper, and decided to make it available in my web page, www.bresserpereira.org.br. It is a dated essay, particularly because Soviet Union does not exist anymore, but I believe that it remains relevant for understanding the social structure of the world we live, and why class analysis lost part of its heuristic power. Although complemented by the other essays, it can be read independently. Technobureaucracy constitutes a social class to the extent to which it takes on all this social category’s specific characteristics. It is no longer a status group, as the bureaucracy was under feudalism and in the competitive phase of capitalism. Technobureaucracy is the dominant class in statism, and the rising class in technobureaucratic capitalism. In a socia