Class and contemporary forms of “reality” production, or hidden injuries of class, 2

The opacity of how power operates in society is hardly a new problem. In modern societies, where resources are allocated largely by the “hidden hand” of a market system, this opacity is intensified, making the regular inequalities that result from that allocation difficult to perceive as such. ¹ According to Max Weber, common class interests (based on shared positions in that allocation) are grasped only if there is a “transparency of the connections between the causes and the consequences of the “class situation”. ² The growing scalar complexity of economic and labour relations, combined with the decline of institutions for organising labour (trade unions) and of a whole family of narratives for making sense of social action in terms of class (socialism), has made it still more difficult to produce effective narratives of class in late modernity. ³ This is a general, and not a specifically national, problem; obviously, it is not something for which direct responsibility can be laid at media’s door.