So the distances and differences of social space and symbolic space continue  to frame perception of practices and people and, therefore, shape  tastes and pervade relations with others. Evidently class is still experienced  and, accordingly, we can safely say that the reflexivity thesis has  been refuted on that score. But some precision is necessary here: theoretical  classes or classes on paper, the objective clusters in social space  that map into symbolic space and shape perception, have been shown  to mediate subjectivity, but the salience of constructed classes – the  explicit discourse of "class' as a means of grasping and articulating the  differences of the spaces and fabricating social and political collectives  that Beck and the others often have in mind when announcing the  decline of class – has not been properly demonstrated hitherto. This is,  in a sense, not strictly necessary: the core facets of class according to  the Bourdieusian scheme have all been confirmed, and the fate of class  discourse is essentially tangential. Yet if Beck and the others are to be  assessed fairly – the absence of constructed classes might lend at least  some credibility to their claims – and if we are to attain a grip on any  contemporary trans-lifeworld doxa sustaining social division, this must  be assessed. In this final empirical chapter, therefore, the task will be to  examine the use of class labels as descriptors and typification bundles  and – sure gauges of "class consciousness' in the Marxist tradition, but  here an indication of the importance of an established principle of  perception – their linkage with political proclivities. Given the significant  political shifts described in the opening chapter, namely the weakening  of trade unions and the move to the right and jettisoning of class  discourse, where it was present in the first place, among political parties  of the left in most Western nations, the argument might at first appear  more favourable to the reflexivity theorists than has been the case so far. It will soon become clear, however, that the processes unmasked,  though liable to being misread by naïve sociological theory as testament  to the absence of class, are in fact rooted in the differences, strategies  and struggles generated by the structures of social space.