Sociology and Marxism

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

My sociology lessons have informed me that Marxist Sociologists believe the workforce is docile, unlikely to complain and is easy to manipulate. My teacher said that the working class is "brainwashed" and it has never occurred to them that the world could be different.

My teacher went to on to criticise Marxism in Sociology to maintain a balanced view (to be fair, she did this to deliver an "impartial" education).

1) Marxism ignores the rise of the middle class.

2) It assumes that the individuals are simply passive and shaped by Capitalist society.

3) Marx predicted a working class revolution but it did not occur.

4) It ignores other conflicts in society based on gender and ethnicity.

Yes I have my own criticisms on all of the above, but I would like to know what you all think so I can compare.

[Jimmie Higgins]

1) Marxism ignores the rise of the middle class.Well this is a sort of confused statement from your instructor. There are a couple variations on this argument and I will try and take them from crude to more sophisticated:

A) One meaning of this argument is the American myth of the US being "a middle class country". In reality, what happened was in the US there were reforms and the establishment of a trade union system which caused WORKERS to see a rise in the standard of living. So it was not a "rise of a middle class" but the rise of worker's share of profits and social reforms and the ability for working people to afford their own homes and a pretty stable life in the post WWII era. So in this sense of the argument, it can be turned around and pointed out that it was class struggle which produced a more stable working class in the US - which, of course, is very much in keeping with Marxist arguments. Conversely, the so-called "great convergence" (the post-war period where increased wages and reforms created the so-called US middle class) has long ended and sociologists and historians point out we are now in a period of "divergence" which makes the whole "we have a stable middle class so marxism and class struggle are irrelevant"-argument, irrelevant itself.

B) The more sophisticated and connected argument is just that it is workers who enjoyed an increased living standard in the US, but the whole post-war boom contradicts what many Marxists at the time thought would happen (many thought it would be a revolutionary time like after WWI, or those aligned with the USSR believed that Socialism would just be unstoppable because the USSR won and expanded and communist parties became more mainstream in many western countries.). At any rate, few thought after the barbarism of WWII and fascism that class struggle in the West would stabilize. The answer to this is, again, when Marx talks about falling profits or the need of capital to increasingly push down the working class, he wasn't speaking in absolute rules or predictions, just tendencies. And, again since the post-war boom we have seen that profitability has fallen in two important crisis (1970s and now) and that working class living standards have declined over the last generation. So the tendencies described by Marx, still hold true today while generation after generation of sociologists and economists who have said that crisis or class struggle are in the past, have been shown to be wrong.



2) It assumes that the individuals are simply passive and shaped by Capitalist society.No at all. In Marxism, the working class is the potential protagonist of history and liberator of all of humanity from minority class rule. It's true that this "passive worker" view is how Academic Marxist-Studies Marxists see the working class; some really top-down reformists and revolutionaries have also seen the role of the Parliament or revolutionary to "deliver" socialism, but I think any real look at Marx's arguments and the real practice of many many revolutionaries (Marxist or Anarchist) is the exact opposite of this "passive" idea. In fact Marx thought that only workers had the material (not necessarily conscious) interest and ability to replace this system with a fundamentally more democratic one.

Where this idea comes from is a mechanical reading of Marx's materialism which is common in the post-war boom era and still in academia today. I think a famous Marx quote refutes this mechanical reading while also affirming his materialism: men make history, but not in conditions of their choosing. So there's a dynamic where there is still a great deal of subjective agency but this is shaped and formed by the conditions of the material world. It's like saying if you wanted to get across the country you could walk, build a bike or a boat, get a car or a plane ticket, but even if you wanted to you couldn't sprout wings and fly there or jump on a cloud and float there.



3) Marx predicted a working class revolution but it did not occur.Actually there have been several revolutions and uprisings where the working class actually began to run society: the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution with the formation of (Soviets) worker councils, and then even as recently as the 1970s there have been revolutions where workers begin to form popular bodies in communities and workplaces which could be the basis for a whole new order in society, a working class democratic order organized from the bottom up. Even in 2000 in Argentina when the government wasn't able to act, people set up neighborhood councils and began to make decisions - in this case it was "popular" rather than specifically working class, so there are some differences, but in general it shows the potential for people to run things themselves.

What there hasn't been is the full establishment of socialism - and in my view, the so-called socialist countries of the cold war were something else, qualitatively different than a society organized and run by the working class.


4) It ignores other conflicts in society based on gender and ethnicity. Not at all. Again, this may be rooted in the academic version of Marxism which is essentially just using Marx's criticism of the system while ignoring how he says we can be liberated from it. Anyway, in the early US socialist movement there were racist and sexist Marxists, but they made up the right-wing of that early party and pretty quickly abandoned any pretense at revolutionary ideas let alone organizing or action. But even the left-wing who did support an end to jim-crow, were against immigrant bashing, and sexism often argued that these problems would only be solved by revolution. But since the IWW and then the CP this has changed and I think many trends of US revolutionary thought are now pretty clear about how these issues are related. Even if some adopt the old left view of "wait till the revolution" (which I think is mistaken) in practice they will still often fight against racism or sexism or homophobia (unless they just don't engage in any struggle anyway).

So I'd say that modern Marxist Revolutionary trends are actually the most consistent and principled political fighters against oppression in society. The CP did a lot of organizing in Harlem and specifically wanted to organize black resistance in the US; the IWW brought native and immigrant workers as well as skilled and unskilled workers together and cultivated female strike leaders and revolutionaries; the first know gay rights circles were formed with socialist homosexuals; after the Stonewall uprising, Huey Newton issued statements of revolutionary black solidarity with gays and requested that party members refrain from calling cops and capitalists "faggots" and other anti-gay slurs.

There are problems in history and groups or individuals did not always have the best politics either from political error or just being influenced by the racism or chauvinism of the society around them. But I think Marxism largely is much better than any other method or guide for fighting oppression and through the vision of uniting the class to fight for its own interests, I think liberation from specific oppression is inherent in this call: we have to take on the figurative shackles around the ankles of some in the class if we want to have a class that is stronger and more united and more able to fight for itself.

[Os Cangaceiros]

1) Marxism ignores the rise of the middle class.


The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

:sleep:

[Hit The North]

Jimmie's provided some good material to enable a rebuttal of your teacher's description of Marxism. However, I think it is also worth considering that the teacher's views can only be the result of two sources: either she is ignorant or she is malevolent and hostile to Marxism. So she is either mistaken or lying. It is probably not a good idea to accuse her of lying but you should bear in mind that she may be opposed to Marxism and it will be up to you to make sure your class mates get a more accurate view.

Many entry level sociology text books give a false and oversimplified version of Marxism. What level are you learning at?

In terms of this:


2) It assumes that the individuals are simply passive and shaped by Capitalist society.
in terms of sociology, this is more true of positivist forms of sociology like Structural Functionalism, which used to be the mainstream sociology of the USA. It proposes a cause and effect model, whereby individuals become the bearers of social norms and values which derive at the level of an objective social structure. Marxism, on the contrary, argues that there is a dialectical relationship between active human agents and the limitations placed on action by objective social relations. Here are some choice quotes by Karl Marx:


The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
[...]
The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2


The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.



The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm


Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm



In the social production (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#production) of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/e.htm#relations-production) which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#productive-forces). The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.



The mode of production (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/o.htm#mode-production) of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#consciousness) of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#property) relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.



Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.


No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm

So these few quotes demonstrate that Marx is concerned with showing the relationship between active humanity and the way in which this activity produces social relations that come to simultaneously dominate over individuals but also provide the potential for social change and individual transformation.

It's always worth quoting Marx himself in order to dispel the myths and falsehoods about his ideas.

[ckaihatsu]

[S]tructural Functionalism [...] used to be the mainstream sociology of the USA. It proposes a cause and effect model, whereby individuals become the bearers of social norms and values which derive at the level of an objective social structure. Marxism, on the contrary, argues that there is a dialectical relationship between active human agents and the limitations placed on action by objective social relations.


If people can 'dance to architecture' then I can 'design to sociology'....

= )


Worldview Diagram

http://postimage.org/image/axvyymiy5/

[Mr. Natural]

Grey Scholar, Your "teacher" is full of shit, to put my opinion of him/her in terms that reflect the "scholarship" involved. Your teacher is typical, though, and I always have trouble determining whether such nonsense comes from ignorance or malice.

Several comrades have already offered valuable posts. Fuck The Clock even referenced the quotation with which you might be able to confront the the "teacher" and educate the class. It's from the third of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. I'm hoping you find some way to present "Teach" with: "It is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself."

I doubt that your "teacher" is interested in education, though, unlike yourself. My red-green best.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In the US at least, the points raised by the teacher are pretty much the standard version of the way Marxism is presented to undergrads. Some of it is true for academic Marxists in the humanities - many in the new left were sucked into academia in the US and as the movements declined they dropped the Revolutionary part of Marx but kept some of the rhetoric and criticisms of capitalism as they became PoMo and Post-Marxist and Identity Politics etc. The undergrad criticism of Marx goes something like this: Marx is a powerful critic of the system but is too deterministic (he thought socialism was inevitable), too antiquated (capitalism has changed soooo much since those days, we're post-industrial now), not as sophisticated as modern explanations for some of the social phenomena he talked about (Marx didn't care about oppression).

If you challenge this standard reading, most likely they will appeal to authority and cite a bunch of post-structuralist and post-modernist writers. Or just simply shrug it off and say, well yes there have been various opinions of Marxism.