ABSTRACT
An edited volume by McNall et al., published in 1991, two years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, bears a provocative title, Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Two observations by its editors are pertinent to our discussion of globalization and transnational class relations. First, class is one of the most widely used and thoroughly contested concepts in the social sciences, with little agreement among scholars on its exact meaning or its explanatory power; and second, the study of class has been conspicuously absent in recent post-structuralist, post-Marxist and state-centred approaches emerging in historical and sociological scholarship (McNall et al. 1991). However, does this mean that class analysis has lost its analytical and heuristic power and usefulness? Or is it only going out of fashion, as something not currently intellectually trendy in the postCold-War era?
