The conception of social class according to Nicos Poulantzas

the “new little bourgeoisie”

Abstract

This article aims to: 1)  present and analyze the theoretical explantions elaborated by Poulantzas – one of the most renowned representatives of structural marxismo – about the social classes and which led him to call “new small bourgeoisie” salarieda workers who are not workers and also do not own the means of production, but whose political and ideological practices tend to be equal or similar to those of the traditional bourgeoisie  due to their special  positions in the economic structure. But, according to Marx, in capitalist societies the determining structure of social classes is , because, fornot the economic structure?; 2) to demonstrate that the theoretical and methodological postures of structural Marxism, especially those of Poulantzas, suppress the subject of history, because, for its authors, history has ceased to be a human process in realiazation to become a realization of structures. And yet this is na inescapable fact: individuals, human beings, people, with their motivations, interests, preferences, beliefs, atitudes and behaviors are the producers of history. They produce it, it is true, under given conditions: in the conditions produced and bequeathed by other individuals, from which they deliberate about their own lives, creating new conditions according to the choices of alternatives that could take effect; 3)  and to reaffirm that, by distorting Marx’s genuine explanations, structural Marxism does not offer any congtribution to the investigation, analysis and explanation of the social reality that, emptied of  historical contente, tried to portray with the formalism of a world of definitions and subdefinitions.