This session is articulated around the debate on how we think about social class and, more specifically, whether or not class is an identity. One position maintains that, as class has been considered an identity, it has been treated primarily as a merely cultural phenomenon. This has led to a reduced capacity for analysing it as a social phenomenon—a form of social relationship—that accounts for a large part of the formation of the cultural, economic and social phenomena of our contemporary world. Another position is that today the social totality can no longer be understood from the working-class perspective: its operational meaning has disappeared. It is one thing for class to continue to have an explanatory function and another for it to function as an axis of identity, as an anchoring point for political mobilization. Class cannot be a preconceived concept with which to account for all antagonism. 

Xavier Domènech is a historian, professor of History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a member of the UAB’s Centre for Studies on Dictatorships and Democracies. He has worked on social movements and processes of political change during dictatorship and democracy, popular cultures, processes of construction of historical memory and national diversity in Spain. Among his main works are Lucha de clases, franquismo y democracia. Obreros y empresarios (1939–1979) (Akal, 2022), Un haz de naciones. El Estado y la plurinacionalidad en España (1830–2017) (Península, 2020) and Hegemonías. Crisis, movimientos de resistencia y procesos políticos (Akal, 2014).

Antonio Gómez Villar is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB), co-director of the Barcelona Pensa Philosophy Festival and a member of the Institute of Cultural Studies and Social Change (IECCS). His main lines of research are the ways in which the conceptual field of class has been redefined in response to the transformation of subjectivities and new cultural and political relations, and the analysis of collective action repertoires from an antagonistic perspective. He is the author of books such as Los olvidados. Ficción de un proletariado reaccionario (Bellaterra, 2022) and Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe: hegemonía y populismo (Gedisa, 2021), and co-edited the books Maradona, un mito plebeyo (Ned, 2021) and Working Dead. Escenarios del postrabajo (La Virreina, 2019) with María Ruido and Marta Echaves.