Date: Mon, 8 Jan 96 19:36:15 CST
From: <mkarim@moses.culver.edu>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: class analysis, again
Bill Bogard wrote
but "primacy" in terms of what? causality? surely not this, since this would be a form of reductionism (--once again, "determination in the last instance"). in the order of necessity? but are persons any more "free agents" in the spheres of culture or politics (or gender, race, age)? what about in order of significance? but how does class have any more "meaning" in a person's life than gender, age, race, etc.? and doesn't emphasizing the "meaning" of class (as you say, how it "defines" one's experience) privilege culture and language over economics? although it serves a political interest, the idea of class primacy, it seems to me, is theoretically "unrescuable." it's better to begin, i think, from the assumption of the real material complexity of the determinations of social experience. bill bogard
Bill:
First of all, I am not willing to give up the concept of causality. Causality does not necessitate the attribution of any meta-methdological status to science. This is a concept of causality within the boundary of a pragmatically accepted scientific paradigm that captures the intersubjectively accesible, replicable, and predicatable reality for us. In that sense, I defend science and defend the usefulness of propositions, hypotheses, and theories based on cause and effect relations. Causality does not necessarily imply determinism. There is nothing new about making cause-effect statements within probabilistic frameworks. And causality definitely does not mean reductionism. I don't see why cann't we attribute a privileged status to one variable within the context of multicausality. In this regard, I agree with Shawgi Tell's understanding of causal hierarchy.
It is against this backdrop that we need to understand and defend the centrality of class analysis. I think it is a plausible hypothesis that in majority (not all) of the social instances (economic inequality, political power, cultural stratification, health care, education, social construction of crime and deviance etc.), the experience of class is more decisive than ethnicity, gender, and other social experiences. More importantly, I don't see how can we grasp the constitution of global modernity (world capitalist economy, geoplotical dominance, bureaucratic structures, bourgeois democracy, hegemony of instrumental rationality, etc. ) without attributing a privileged status to class analysis. Again, it does not imply class reductionism. To answer the question of a collegue on this list (I apologize for erasing his name and address by mistake), in this particular case, by reductionism I mean the misleading idea that class, and only class can explain all these phenomena, class is the magic key that can unlock the mystery of history, or a literal understanding of "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Our ambition is more modest. To quote aging Engels (not implying that I am a fan of Engels; I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew Austin's criticism of Engels; the only thing that I would like to add is that not all the problems of marxist epistemology can be resolved by putting the blame on Engels; but that's a different story which we can argue on a different occassion), class is just more important among a list of causal variables.
I am not trying to a push a dogma here. The centrality of class is a testable hypothesis, which needs to survive the measures of acceptable social scientific testing. I am willing to abandon the centrality of class analysis only in the face of scientific counterevidence, not as a result of callous speculative rejections. (If I sound naively mechanical here, it is because of the sketchiness demanded by e-mail postings. Let me assure you that I am very much of a post-positivist, and I recognize that scientific facts are not out there for unmediated testing; to borrow Poppers's phrase, facts are "theoretically impregnated").
To response to your other point- no, I don't think class is necessarily any more structured than ethnicity or gender. Different social experiences in different social situations contain different dynamics of structure-agency relations. I am not willing to propose any meta-theory to attribute more necessity to class.
However, there are a few more points I need to make to clarify my position. I really think that the classical Marxist understanding of class needs to be reworked in some major areas. I agree with the common criticism that in classical Marxism, power and culture appear as mere epiphenomena of economy. While the immediate location of class is still in economy, we need to be significantly more attentive to the politicalcultural /ideological/linguistic processes and forces that shape class experiences. We also have to do some serious rethinking of the way exchange and consumption appeared as subordinate to production in Marx's texts. Production, exchange, and consumption are interpenetrating components of a dialectic whole that constitute the totality of capitalist economy. Although I have my own share of criticisms of Andre Gunder Frank, I think the way he was attacked by Marxists for defining capitalism in terms of mode of exchange was unfortunate. The issue of consumption, inadequetely emphasized in Marx's own class analysis, has attained a whole meaning now because of the post-materialistic ecological awareness, something that was not possible for Marx to grasp.
I also refuse to attribute any special revolutionary agency to the proletariat as a class. The issue was elequently discussed by German critical theorists. From postcolonial perspectives, Fanon's faith on the peasantry and lumpenproletariat is worth noting, even after so many years. Leopold Senghor's astute observation that the first world proletariat actually gains from colonialism and neo-colonialism is as true as ever. The xenophobia of the U.S. working class is a case in point. Maoism, in spite of its failure to make a conceptual break with the Leninist rhetoric of the "working class vanguard party", also added a whole new dimension to our understanding of the revolutionary agency of the peasanrty. A number of empirical sociological/ anthropological works can also be mentioned, but let's wait for another time.
Many of us will agree that "extraction of surplus value" is not a sufficient ground for attibuting any special privilege to the proletariat. I am not abandoning the concept of "surplus value." But we already know that "surplus value" is not a testable "thing." Its more significant value, or probably the only value, is the ethical vision that it contains for the dream of a future unalienated society. "Surpus value", understood as a discursive choice, is phenomenally more powerful and irresistable than a scientifically testable proposition.
Many of us also don't think that the elimination of class inequality automatically guarantees the elimination of inequality on the basis of ethnicity, gender, power, sexual orientation, age, religion, species, and others. Marx was wrong to argue (for example, "In the Critique of the Gotha Program", in his criticism of Lassalle and his followers) that elimination of economic inequality will automatically put an end to political and social inequality. On the contrary, many of us would argue that a multiplicity of inequalities need to be addressed in their own rights. Hence the need for continual dialougues among marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, non-anthropocentric theories, and other emancipatory perspectives.
Class analysis also needs to be separated from an evolutionaryteleological understanding of PROGRESS. "Progress" needs to be understood as an ethical vision, not as a historical necessity. And probaby more blasphemously, class analysis needs to be rescued from the dualism between materialism and idealism. Although it was Engels, not Marx, who was responsible for constructing an absurd metatheory of dialectic (Engels was the first Stalinist, as they say), and the phrase "dialectical materialsim" was first used neither by Marx, nor by Engels, but by Plekhanov (who is also responsible for the suffocatingly crude monistic view of history), critical theory in our time has to direct epistemological critics right at the heart of historical materialism elaborated by Marx himself. Hence my postcolonial bias and my willingness to take liberation theology seriously. By the way, does chaos theory has a conceptual common ground with the desire to transcend the false dichotomy between materialism and idealism? I am sorry, I am terribly uninformed about chaos theory. I will appreciate assistance from T.R. Young and others.
Let me also respectfully disagree with Shawgi Tell on one issue. I don't think "exploitation" is any more objective than "oppression." While the capital-labor conflict still needs to inform our understanding of exploitation, the concept also needs to be expanded to include other realms of exploitation, such as, sexual exploitation. A multiplicity of oppressions, e.g., political, racial, cultural, trans-species, are compatible with a restructured class analysis.
Now, one can raise a legitimate issue. After the class analysis is so radically divorced from classical Marxism, can it still be recognized as a marxist class analysis? At what point one ceases to be a marxist and becomes something else? (At what point Marx ceased to be a left Hegelian and became a Marxist, inspite of his oft-qouted statement that he was not a Marxist)? Is what we are talking about really neo-marxism, post-marxism, plain marxism (to borrow C. Wright Mills' self-description), or just eclectic left-wing sociology? As far as I am concerned, in the final analysis, it is not the labeling that is important, but the concrete processes of theorizing and praxis that we need to carry on. Let the others worry about what they want to call us.
It is also important to note that the recognition of the significance of class is not a monopoly of marxist sociology. In contemporary sociology, Bourdieu reminds us of the significance of class analysis, especially its cultural dimensions. Giddens, in spite of bracketing of class experience in his more recent works (and the overall conceptual sloppiness of his structuration theory), advocated the centrality of class analysis.
In nutshell, I think a histrically reconstructed class analysis is as important as ever. By the way, you said, "although it serves a political interst, the idea of class primacy, it seems to me, is theoretically unrescuble." So, there are theories independent of political interests? Hmmm... how come I haven't encountered any of them yet?
Manjur Karim | Culver-Stockton College Associate Professor of Sociology | 1 College Hill mkarim@culver.edu | Canton, MO 63435
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 1996 13:18:21 -0800
From: William Bogard <BOGARD@WPOFFICE.WHITMAN.EDU>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: class analysis, again -Reply
Manjur Karim writes (1/9):
I am not willing to give up the concept of causality. Causality
does not necessitate the attribution of any meta-methdological
status to science. This is a concept of causality within the boundary
of a pragmatically accepted scientific paradigm that captures the
intersubjectively accesible, replicable, and predicatable reality for
us. In that sense, I defend science and defend the usefulness of
propositions, hypotheses, and theories based on cause and effect
relations. Causality does not necessarily imply determinism. There
is nothing new about making cause-effect statements within
probabilistic frameworks. And causality definitely does not mean
reductionism. I don't see why cann't we attribute a privileged
status to one variable [class] within the context of multicausality.
In this regard, I agree with Shawgi Tell's understanding of causal
hierarchy.
>>i suppose we are at an impasse. to me, "primacy" in terms of causality can't be divorced from determination in the last instance (even if only probabilistic determination). i don't deny the operation of causality (or the ability to make causal hypotheses, etc.), or that class can be a causal factor of social experience, only the primacy of class in terms of what we generally mean by "primacy" (viz., first or highest). bill bogard
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 00:00:24 -0500
From: Valerie Scatamburlo <valeries@YorkU.CA>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: class analysis, again
On Jan 9, 1:50pm, SHAWGI TELL wrote:
> Subject: Re: class analysis, again
> While I disagree with Manjur's point about the working class > not being the revolutionary agency of social change and/or that the > "New Social Movements" may represent adequate revolutionary surrogates,
The viewpoint evident in the above statement - that is; one which suggests that the current situation entails a simple choice between class politics v.s. identity/new social movement politics seems to me to be very problematic. There has been an attitude of reluctance on the part of many Marxists to seriously engage issues of identity and we have done this at our own expense - leaving the questions of identity, subjectivity and representation largely in the hands of "posties" to make of them what they will. It appears as though many Marxist thinkers have arrived at the point where the current slogan is identity v.s. class - where the two are treated as mutually exclusive categories. Such an impasse necessitates in my mind a serious rethinking of both "categories"- as such I will offer some preliminary comments on this matter for this is something which I have been attempting to grapple with. Let me add that much of what follows is informed by what I consider a brilliant analysis of the problematic outlined by Himani Bannerji in her book "Thinking Through" (1995)
The identity v.s. class formulation as two mutually exclusive forms
of politics is reminiscent of the problematic discussed by Marx in the "first
Thesis" on Feuerbach in the German Ideology on the false separation between a
sense of self or being and the world that being inhabits. "To paraphrase
Marx, the idealists have captured the theorization of consciousness, of
the sense of self and imaginative cultural being, while the materialists have
mastered an understanding of organization or structure of the world. Both
insist on their unconnected and autonomous natures and for Marx, both were
WRONG. For him the project consists of an introjective and constitutiv
theorizing of the two moments - of the self or consiousness as being in and
of the world and of the world as history and structures made by the self with
forms of consciousness. This approach he felt would develop a knowledge
adequate for changing the world, with a centrally situated agent or subject
without who m no transformative
politics would be possible. If we as Marxists take this to be our stance as
well thenour ta sk consists of providing a reflexive dialectical
understanding of "identity" and its associated concepts of "difference"
."subjecti v ity" and "agency". This can only be done in relation to our
world
and the history and social oraganization of capital and class - inclusive of
colonialism, imperialism and slavery. In so doing we unite the Gramscian use
of hegemony - which speaks to everyday life with the Marxist concepts of
class and ideology and Marx' s historical and organizational underrstanding
of capital. Only then can we get out of the narrow and limiting
formulations of "culture or class", "identity politics/new social movements
or class struggle" . If we were not to understand identity produced of
difference as antithetical to class we would begin by unsettling our
categorical approach to both these concepts - after all we don't always know
what identity and differenc e mean in their configurations with history,
capital and class - i.e. in the hands of diverse historical agents who are
located in specific historical moments and social relations of power.
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 96 18:06:26 CST
From: <mkarim@moses.culver.edu>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: class and identity
I agree with Valerie Scatamburlo's comments about the false dichotomy between class and identity. In a few earlier posts, I was trying to make a point for the centrality of class analysis. I hope I was able to make it clear that I was taking about a historically open-ended, contingent, and indeterminate class analysis, which is very different from the "Marxism-Leninism" that Shawgi Tell advocates.
I definitely agree with Valerie that the dualism between socialist movement and new social movements takes place at our expense. Like Valerie, I also turn to Gramsci for a historically relevant frame of reference in this confusing time of ours. The obsolete rhetoric of Leninist politics does not capture the diffused multiplicity of late capitalism. Even the third world society that I am from is not nearly as simple as many of our western comrades may think. The tripartite alliance of the state, class structure, and metropolitan capiatlism, the explosion of the continuum of social life under the impact of larger structural forces, the everyday subaltern resistance, the diasporic motion of populations across national and regional boundaries; all these experiences have caused a multifaceted generation and realignment of identities that we marxists cann't grasp without major rethinking of our analytical categrories. Unreconstructed Stalinism is so painfully inadequate to grasp this complexity that it is almost pathetic. On the other hand, we should not give up the concepts of "structure" and "totality" that that the faddish postmodernist/poststructuralist/ postcolonialist discourses ask us to. It is impotant to read and re-read Gramsci as a choice between the oppressive crudeness of the orthodoxy and and the astructural fragmentizing agenda of the "posties". However, I find some selctive use of postcolonialism. it provides me with a framewok to understand the epistemic hegemony and the construction of instrumental rationalistic categroies in the third world that took place as a consequence of the expansion of the world capitalist system. Even Gramsci, with all his brilliance, could not grasp that process, primarily because of his grounding in eurocentric marxism. But at the same time I reject the postmodernist underpinning of most of the postcolonial discourses. My sympathey with part of the postcolonial agenda has a practical/theoretical purpose- bringing a postcolonial sensibility to a marxist frame of analysis. The point is NOT to celebrate fragmentation as opposed to totality, event as opposed to structure, or local as opposed to global, but to take a radical look at the suppressed knowledge in the formerly colonial societies to open space for their participation in a reconstructed globally-democratic modernity. The point is not only to deconstruct instrumental rationality, but to rebuild a new universal framework of critical rationality. This is the dream of a reconstructed enligtenment that brings us back to Marx over and over as the most important point of departure for oppositional consciousness in our time.
Coming back to the earlier point, failing to see the dynamic interpenetrations of class and and other locales of identities is self-defeating. Moreover, class itself is an identity, situated both in being and perception, in the dialectical juncture of objectivity and subjectivity. Some of us are still trying to defend the centrality of class analyis, not as an "either-or" proposition, not as an incorrigible dogma, but as a central, yet fluid component of a multifaceted hisorical totality.
Manjur Karim | Culver-Stockton College Associate Professor of Sociology | 1 College Hill mkarim@culver.edu | Canton, MO 63435