Bullshit Sociological Paper Concludes "Poverty is Necessary"

[The Vegan Marxist]

Read this load of bullshit!

http://www.sociology.org.uk/as4p3.pdf

[ContrarianLemming]

I don't even need to, considering we have, for almost all of human history, lived without poverty.

[JazzRemington]

They're functionalists. What do you expect? They DO write toward the end that even though poverty has these functions that it hypothetically shouldn't exist. But, it's still a ruling class ideology.

[Invincible Summer]

As soon as I saw the name Robert Merton i stopped reading.


I don't know about other universities or the global sociological field in general, but at least in my uni structural-functionalism is seen as pretty outdated and reactionary.

[Steve_j]

Did you read the paper? Sorry i just skimmed through it and i could only see statments along those lines that indicated that it is only "necessary" to support the middle and upper classes.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Did you read the paper? Sorry i just skimmed through it and i could only see statments along those lines that indicated that it is only "necessary" to support the middle and upper classes.

That's one of the main outlines it tries proposing. That poverty is a necessary element in society to help support the upper class.

[Steve_j]

That's one of the main outlines it tries proposing. That poverty is a necessary element in society to help support the upper class.


This analysis is not intended to suggest that because it is often functional, poverty should exist, or that it must exist.


?

[¿Que?]

I don't know about other universities or the global sociological field in general, but at least in my uni structural-functionalism is seen as pretty outdated and reactionary.
There was an attempt to revive it under the name of neofuntionalism. I believe it was a moderate leftist version of it.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Are any of us surprised that capitalism requires poverty to function? Really?

If anything, this paper is yet more evidence that capitalism needs replacing with something better.

[IndependentCitizen]

Functionalists are dumbasses who refuse to recognise people's struggles. Ignore them, they're all cosying up to the bourgeosie anyway.

[M-26-7]

Here's the very end of the paper:


In sum, then, many of the functions served by the poor could be replaced if poverty were eliminated, but almost always at higher costs to others, particularly more affluent others. Consequently, a functional analysis must conclude that poverty persists not only because it fulfills a number of positive functions but also because many of the functional alternatives to poverty would be quite dysfunctional for the affluent members of society. A functional analysis thus ultimately arrives at much the same conclusion as radical sociology, except that radical thinkers treat as manifest what I describe as latent: that social phenomena that are functional for affluent or powerful groups and dysfunctional for poor or powerless ones persist; that when the elimination of such phenomena through functional alternatives would generate dysfunctions for the affluent or powerful, they will continue to persist; and that phenomena like poverty can be eliminated only when they become dysfunctional for the affluent or powerful, or when the powerless can obtain enough power to change society.

I'm not too sure what you find wrong with it. The author points out thirteen ways that poverty serves certain social functions under capitalism (without ever explicitly saying "under capitalism"), and then concludes that "poverty can be eliminated only when...the powerless can obtain enough power to change society."

Full disclosure: I only skimmed the paper, so feel free to point out to me something that I may have missed. For instance, where is says that poverty is "necessary", because I sure didn't get that out of it. I kind of got the opposite (the paper ends with a section titled "The Alternatives" and concludes that most of the social functions the author has listed up until now aren't necessary).

[AnthArmo]

I read through the whole paper. Seems to take a very "Objective" viewpoint. It doesn't make any moral prescriptions, merely states fact.

It states that the poor help sustain Capitalism, albeit without specifically mentioning Capitalism. They serve as an ideological scapegoat, were the poor are seen as immoral, lazy and un-ambitious. And that economically, they do all the "dirty work", and financially make the economy work better for the upper-classes.

Then it goes onto "Alternatives", stating that they could be given higher-paid jobs, but that would seriously undermine the affulence of the upper-classes. It's pretty neutral, I get the impression towards the end that whoever wrote this has a latent bias TOWARDS the poor, but the neutral nature of this paper forces him to suppress it.

[Hit The North]

As soon as I saw the name Robert Merton i stopped reading.


Then you have a poor or mistaken idea about Merton's work. As well as being a great innovator in sociological research methods, most often Merton's work sabotages the conspiracy of silence in structural-functionalism over issues of conflict and inequality. His strain theory of deviance explicitly blames American capitalism for American crime and, as we can see from Gans' treatment in the linked-to paper, locates the structural perpetuation of poverty and inequality within the self-interest of the wealthy elite. This is pretty bold stuff in the context of the red-panic forties and fifties US of A where McCarthyism stalked the corridors of the academe.

[GPDP]

Yeah, for a paper written within the framework of structural functionalism (which is indeed the sociological ideology of the bourgeois, much like liberalism in political science and neo-classical economics in, well, economics), it's actually fairly progressive. It's akin to using the then-reigning mainstream conservative methods, and turning them on their heads to arrive to progressive, if not radical conclusions.