Class Struggle: A New Lecture on Industrial Society

Author: Aaron
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-06-01
Features: In 1962, when I published "Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society," I wrote the following passage: "These lectures were actually given at the University of Paris between 1955 and 1956, and the teaching materials were mimeographed by the university's documentation center. To this day, I still refuse to present the manuscripts in their original form to a broader audience. I immediately explain the reasons for my hesitation to the readers. These lectures offer a research opportunity and a learning tool for university students, inspiring a research methodology, outlining some concepts, and providing phenomena and insights. The lecture notes retain, and could not but retain, the traces of lectures and extemporaneous remarks. The courses were not written in advance, hence they are in oral form and inevitably imperfect. Although modifications were made afterward to reduce their shortcomings, it is impossible to eliminate them entirely."
"Eighteen Lectures" was well-received by readers, and several publishers abroad expressed interest in translating and publishing it, which prompted me to decide to publish this second volume. However, I still want to reiterate the reminder I made about the previous book. The nineteen lectures in this book were given at the University of Paris between 1956 and 1957. This is an important work by Raymond Aron. Based on the current state of industrial society, the author analyzes and studies the status of class and class struggle in industrial societies, including Western capitalist societies and Soviet-style societies. He points out that due to the process of industrialization, the development of productivity, the overall improvement of people's living standards, the reduction of inequality, inter-class mobility, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between social groups, there is difficulty in defining classes in industrial societies, as well as the growing ambiguity of the class attributes of modern states' regimes. The struggles in industrial societies are primarily conflicts and contradictions between groups, rather than the life-or-death "class struggle."