History of Sociological Thought: Marx, Durkheim, Weber, DuBois

2014

http://www.akpress.org/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.html

On the occasion of Karl Marx's 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and special issues have celebrated his work by focusing on its main achievements – a radical critique of capitalist society and an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the social, economic and political tendencies and struggles of our age. Albeit often illuminating, this has also produced a certain amount of déjà vu. Providing an occasion to disrupt patterns of repetition and musealization, Krisis (http://krisis.eu/) proposes a different way to pay tribute to Marx's revolutionary theorizing. We have invited authors from around the globe to craft short entries for an alternative ABC under the title " Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z " – taking up, and giving a twist to, Kevin Anderson's influential Marx at the Margins (2010). The chief motivation of this collaborative endeavour is to probe the power – including the generative failures – of Marx's thinking by starting from marginal concepts in his work or from social realities or theoretical challenges often considered to be marginal from a Marxist perspective. Rather than reproduce historically and theoretically inadequate differentiations between an ascribed or prescribed cultural , economic, geographic, intellectual, political, social, or spatial centre and its margins, the margins we have identified and inspected are epistemic vantage points that open up new theoretical and political vistas while keeping Marx's thought from becoming either an all-purpose intellectual token employed with little risk from left or right, or a set of formulaic certitudes that force-feed dead dogma to ever-shrinking political circles. We have welcomed short and succinct contributions that discuss how a wide variety of concepts – from acid communism and big data via extractivism and the Haitian Revolution to whiteness and the Zapatistas – can offer an unexpected key to the significance of Marx's thought today. The resulting ABC, far from a comprehensive compendium, is an open-ended and genuinely collective project that resonates between and amplifies through different voices speaking from different perspectives in different styles; we envisage it as a beginning rather than as an end. In this spirit, we invite readers to submit new entries to Krisis, where they will be subject to our usual editorial review process and added on a regular basis, thus making this issue of Krisis its first truly interactive one. The project is also an attempt to redeem, in part, the task that the name of this journal has set for its multiple generations of editors from the very beginning: a crisis/Krise/Krisis is always a moment in which certainties are suspended, things are at stake, and times are experienced as critical. A crisis, to which critique is internally linked, compels a critique that cannot consist simply of ready-made solutions pulled out of the lectern, but demand, in the words of Marx's " credo of our journal " in his letter to Ruge, " the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age " .

To counteract the colonial division of labour and equalise trade relations across the global North and South, Global Value Chains (GVC) analysts have advocated value chain upgrade. Such upgrade would entail a much-needed financial improvement for Southern producers. Rather than turning to governments and IGOs, GVC analysts have generally addressed their policy suggestions to firms directly. There is an idea that firms can actively disentangle and disrupt prevalent hierarchies in their own activities. This thesis looks closer at prefigurative politics as a political strategy and asks: are prefigurative upgrade projects a successful tool for equalising trade relations across colonial divides? Can individual firms disentangle colonial inequalities in trade? As marxists and decolonial theorists have argued, global trade inequalities are about more than money: economic relations are inherently political. The 'value' in Global Value Chains should be understood not only as return on investment or profit, but also as something broader, a question of what makes a good life and a balanced division of work in society. GVC analysis has hitherto paid insufficient attention to these insights. As a remedy this thesis proposes the addition of a new concept to the GVC toolbox, 'voice upgrade', i.e. an improvement of the ability of all actors in the chain to speak and listen about the political questions of value. Two case studies are used to ground the discussion: firstly, the trading of coffee from the Zapatistas in Mexico to Café Libertad in Germany. Secondly, the export of spice blends and sauces from the Western Cape of South Africa via the firm Turqle. These prefigurative projects both subvert and reproduce prevailing hierarchies. Importantly, while the former is possible, it requires deliberate facilitation.

2001

This thesis examines the idea of freedom in the thought of Karl Marx in relation to a philosophical tradition concerning the appropriate regimen for creative human self-realisation dating from Plato and Aristotle. The thesis consists of nine parts. Part One examines the work of a number of postmarxist democratic theorists in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Marx’s conception of democratisation as a singular process that overcomes the dualism of the state and civil society. The overemphasis upon institutional separation as a condition of democracy is shown to be mistaken. Instead, democracy is shown to be capable of being achieved only as the result of a singular process in which the power of control alienated to the state and capital is practically reappropriated and reorganised by society as a social power subject to conscious democratic control within everyday life. Part Two challenges the limited, ‘protective’ character of freedom and democracy in liberal political theory by developing the philosophical conception of ‘rational freedom’. This part examines the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel and Kant in order to emphasise the social and communal character of freedom, locating the individual in a rich social-institutional fabric. Part Three examines Marx’s critical relation to Hegel. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political philosophy is shown to reveal the state to be an alienated social power arising from the contradictions of civil society. In condemning Hegel for his idea of the state as an hypostatized abstraction, Marx is shown to turn the critical focus upon the abstracting tendencies of modern society. This part therefore establishes the basis for transcoding the process of abstraction into a fetishism of politics and production which runs through the whole capitalist social metabolic order. Marx's materialist problematic of reification is thus opposed to an idealist discourse on 'rationalisation' and the 'realisation of reason in history', given that the contradictions are located not in reason but in an alienated system of production. Part Four focuses upon the subversion of the universal and communal character of the principle of ‘rational freedom’ by a capitalistically structured civil society. Having dealt with the political implications of reason taking repressive form, suggesting how the future social order is to be organised, this part examines the moral questions raised by the 'bourgeois' character of capitalist modernity. The critical focus will, therefore, fall on Marx's critique of rights-based liberalism. Human emancipation as the practical reappropriation of social power is considered as asserting the priority of the good over the right, thus inverting contemporary Rawlsian liberalism. Part Five provides the ontological and socio-structural framework sustaining the conception of communism as the good society. Marx's praxis is defined as an affirmative materialism which forms the basis for asserting a democratic social control dissolving the institutional-systemic apparatus raised over the life world. Praxis as the core of Marx's ontology provides the basis for an analysis which comprehends a dynamic, multifaceted reality. The argument underlines the centrality of the notion of conscious, practical, creative and sensuous activity in Marx's affirmative and active materialism. Part Six addresses the question of mediation, arguing for a conception of social control as a form of self-determination and social self-mediation. In formulating the question in terms of the alienation of control within what Marx, calls a 'system of general social metabolism' (Grundrisse 1973:158/9), this part apprehends capital as a mode of alien control which is fundamentally uncontrollable. The commitment to abolish reified social relations directs Marx's project back to its premise of rooting society and social powers in the interaction of real individuals, establishing a new framework for free individuality and for addressing the problems of organisation and administration of post-capitalist society. Part Seven develops a conception of communist individuality. Whilst individualist liberals have accused Marx of attempting to foist an 'artificial unity' upon humanity, this part demonstrates that this is precisely what Marx considered the ‘objective dependency’ of the capital system to do. Marx argued against liberal notions of individual freedom precisely because he appreciated the extent to which individuals have come to be enslaved to their own powers under the capital system. This part shows that Marx's demand for communal control was designed to achieve individual freedom in a supra-individual world. The social control of individuals is opposed to the objective control of 'things'. The final two parts (Eight and Nine) seek to tie together the themes of true democracy, social control and self-mediation, affirmative materialism, community and communist individuality within a conception of commune democracy. Part Eight defends Marx’s early definition of ‘true democracy’ as entailing the dissolution of the state and of (capitalistically organised, inegalitarian, unpluralist) civil society as a single process. The argument delineates Marx's definition of democratisation, seeking its realisation outside of and against the abstract form of the state. Making a distinction between state and government, it is possible to develop the anti-statist character of democracy without thereby being committed to an antipolitical stance. By recognising plural identities and enabling participation, the notion of the communist public sphere comes into its own as a political society. Part Nine recognises that the need for constructive models of the socialist society has tended to be overlooked in marxist analyses in favour of the critique of the capitalist mode of production. This part shows that whilst Marx may be weak with respect to the institutional means of the socialist economy, he is strong at the level of principle. Taking an Aristotelian view that first principles are a strong foundation for any architecture, this part sets about filling in the details of a viable socialist economic order.

This book examines the world’s dominant ideology, industrial capitalism, through a selection of lenses. The most important of these lenses is an historical one, for industrial capitalism was born out of misery during the industrial and agricultural revolutions of circa 1750+CE. Historically, indeed, questions have been asked of industrial capitalism’s morality since its inception. Other lenses, those of popular culture, of literature, of sociology and anthropology are also used in this book. As a 21st century society we seem to have forgotten the Industrial Revolution’s miseries. We have been convinced that we have moved on. This text will argue we haven’t. History indeed has much to teach us and this book asks questions that have been asked before. However, it would seem that the great majority of us also appear to have forgotten that these fundamental questions have already been asked… This explains why the text’s historical lens is paramount. But it is not the only lens we need to use to examine industrial capitalism. If we are to question industrial capitalism’s moral rightness, its fitness to be the dominant ideology of the modern world, as this book does, we must also ask questions via its popular critics, and through literary, social and anthropological commentary over time. The book is written for the layman and the student; its target audience is not the expert, so it may tell you things you already know. It focuses on industrial capitalism, a form specific to the modern Industrial Revolution society and crafted by that revolution. Though industrial capitalism has mutated since that earliest industrial revolution, its essential form and tenets remain unchanged. Industrial capitalism is — to borrow from religion’s lexicon — an inveterate sinner. Industrial capitalism’s sins, this text will argue, relate to its excesses of exploitation, resource depletion and environmental degradation; these have threatened and still threaten the world’s security, peace, and long term habitability. The fact that to some, perhaps to many, they are not sins, not indeed failings but strengths, is why industrial capitalism’s sins are so beautifully beguiling.

Theories and forecasts about the future of capitalism have proved among the most important and most contentious topics in the history of sociology. Disputes over this question can be regarded as 'classic' in three different ways. Firstly, the future of capitalism provided a topic which was discussed directly or indirectly by many of the founding fathers of sociology. The genesis of sociology itself is closely connected with the rise of industrial capitalism and reflections on its origins, nature, dynamic, effects, and future were central issues for most sociologists. Secondly, the future of capitalism has been continually re-appraised during the development of sociology. For capitalism has survived and expanded, changed in some respects and remained the same in others, experienced both boom and slump, been overturned in some parts of the globe and prospered elsewhere. Thus earlier theories have been tested as the future became the present and new ideas and forecasts have continually been proposed to reaffirm or correct past arguments. In this sense the future of capitalism has provoked disputes both in the classics and about their continued relevance. [...]

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century it is curious to look back on the previous century as in some ways a better time, when things were simpler, less threatening and the ever onward march of the industrial revolution was taken for granted, Indeed the Marxist critique was essentially that capitalism was a fetter holding back the inevitable tide of progress, denying its fruits to be enjoyed equally by all. How different things seem now, after almost two centuries of industrialisation. Western societies are characterised as 'risk societies' (Beck. 1992), increasingly sensitive to a widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of forces outside their controL A large part of this has to do with the growing sense that nature is taking its revenge, as the ecological life-support systems of the planet are degraded and destroyed, Globally, after four decades of 'development', the vast majority of the world's human population go with basic needs unfulfilled and, perhaps for the first time in human history, there is a widespread feeling that things will not be better in the future. As the new millennium approaches, for a growing number, progress simply ain't what it used to be. The organisation of this chapter is as follows, The historical relationship between Marxism and ecology is discussed in the first section. together with a brief overview of recent engagements between Marxism and ecologist. In the second section, a recent Marxist understanding of the ecological crisis as the 'second contradiction of capitalism' is elaborated, In the third section this thesis is used as the starting point for an ecological reconstruction of Marxism. The conclusion argues that the ecological critique does require a reassessment of Marxism and that for Marxism to be relevant in the next century it must (and can) evolve as an ecosocialist and ecofeminist political project.