ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how social inequality tends to be accounted for within much social science scholarship at present. It focuses on a leading interpretation of social stratification, namely the intersectionality theory inaugurated by feminism in the West. That critical appraisal initially traces two routes: reconsidering the cycles of coercive social regulation in the capitalist world-system vis-à-vis the concrete aspects of labor; and distinguishing between the abstract and concrete aspects of labor. The chapter analyses how certain human particularities (fertility, physical appearance, bodily size and strength) are compulsorily aggregated and substantially rearranged in varied, distinct, and challenged ways throughout the historical long term. Within capitalism as a historical system, labor here is understood as an inherently contested social relation, linked to—yet necessarily entailing—its opposite (i.e., capital), thereby involving and exceeding the wage-based work process and the economic sphere, narrowly defined.
