With respect to the overall diagnosis of patterns of inequality in the contemporary West, we find three general points of view.
1. One group of authors, most of them Marxist-oriented, sees increasing inequality, although they are not in agreement about its structural bases. Braverman (1974), focusing on the labor process in monopoly industry, argues that in the wake of Taylorization labor power (even white-collar labor) is increasingly deskilled and that this process has produced greater proletarianization. Gorz (1982) takes a different line, stressing that the working class is divided between a well-organized core in primary labor markets (characterized by high wages, employment security, and moderate unionism) and a fragmented, nonorganized lumpenproletariat at the periphery of the laboring society which, in the form of "new" social movements, attacks the growth- and security-oriented alliance between labor and capital. It should be noted that the authors in this group look almost exclusively at the labor process.