Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

Abstract

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.” 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). 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).