ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to distinguish between mere statistical categories and social categories, and between objective differences and subjective awareness of them. It discusses the thesis concerning the replacement of the distinction between manual and non-manual workers by that between skilled and unskilled. The chapter considers the set of objections by examining the system of stratification in terms of status, educational opportunity and social mobility. State-socialist societies aspire to communism and therefore to an equalitarian form of society. The educational system has been singled out as a dominant institution by writers as diverse politically as Daniel Bell and Louis Althusser. Soviet sociologists deny the relevance to state-socialist society of the concept of vertical mobility in the sense of upward and downward mobility between social statuses in a hierarchy. One of the most traditional forms of social stratification is that between man and woman.
