Marxism and Sociology Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Marxists argue that capitalist societies are organized around social classes defined in terms of their unequal rights and powers over the means of production and over the products of economic production. Class relations are understood as relations of exploitation, meaning that the surplus created by the producing classes is appropriated by the owning classes.

Capitalism is understood as an intrinsically volatile and unstable system. Investment decisions are oriented toward maximizing profits rather than human needs and established ways of life. Aggregate profit rates periodically plummet, leading to massive disinvestment, unemployment, the creative destruction” of old infrastructure and productive spaces, and new forms of socioeconomic regulation that promise to undergird a new cycle of capital accumulation. Capitalism is restlessly expansionist, constantly seeking to incorporate and encompass new land and property and to shape practices that previously lay outside of it. At the same time capitalist history is characterized by repeated moments of decommodification, wherein entire practices, populations, or geographic regions are released into a non-capitalist state of being. Some argue that European colonial rulers sought to enhance political control and depress the cost of labor power by combining non-capitalist zones of indirect rule” with directly ruled areas that were fully integrated into markets. Urban populations that were central to mid-twentieth-century Fordist production have become ever more distant from the central zones of capitalist vitality in many parts of the USA and Europe, frequently shunted off into a huge prison-industrial complex (Wacquant 2009).

Marxist theory has been challenged in various ways. Gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality have been shown to be as important as social class in accounting for people’s self-understanding and social practices. Proletarian workers, seen by Marx as the bearers of progressive change, have often supported far-right parties and movements. The first anti-capitalist revolutions occurred not in the most developed parts of the capitalist world, as expected by Marx, but in semi-feudal Russia. The USSR and other socialist countries became politically repressive and economically stagnant.

Marxists have proposed various neo-Marxist alternatives in response to these problems. Some of them retain Marxism’s insistence on the causal primacy of social class or the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and the value form. Others reframe the Marxist theory of capitalism at the global scale.

Theorists of dual systems” and intersectionality” give equal weight to gender and/or race and ethnicity alongside class as axes of domination and exploitation. Adorno’s (1990 [1966]: 10) ”negative dialectics” moved beyond traditional Marxist assumptions of teleological progress. Althusser (1990 [1965]) acknowledged a plurality of semi-autonomous forms of practice and argued that significant social events resulted from contingent, unpredictable conjunctures rather than the regular unfolding of a single process. Critical realist philosophers urged Marxists and positivists to accept the existence of a “rainforest-like profusion” (Collier 2005) of social structures and practices that interact in unexpected ways to produce the flow of social events. Neo-Marxists acknowledged that the state and culture were semi-autonomous forces in their own right rather than simple epiphenomena of more fundamental capitalist structures. Bourdieu (1993), who sometimes described his sociology as a generalized Marxism,” argued that cultural practices could invert” the economic world. Neo-Marxist theorists of imperialism describe international politics as driven also by irreducibly political geostrategic dynamics alongside capitalist profit seeking. The policies of modern states sometimes run directly against capitalist interests. In other cases state policies correspond to the needs of capitalist accumulation for reasons other than those described by Marxist theory. Neo-Marxist regulation theory (Boyer 1990) explores the stabilizing frameworks such as “Fordism” that are sometimes elaborated in response to capitalist crisis, but insists that longer-term crises of profitability and persistent muddling through” are also possible since there is no omniscient agent or structural mechanism guaranteeing a solution. Capitalism is still seen as having powerful effects on the rest of society but Marxism is now construed as a regional theory of capitalism that no longer claims to explain the entirety of social life.

Bibliography:

Adorno, W. (1990) [1966] Negative Dialectics. Continuum, New York.
Althusser, (1990) [1965] Contradiction and overdetermination. In: For Marx. Allen Lane, London, pp. 87-128.
Bourdieu, P. (1993) The field of cultural production, or: the economic world reversed. In: Johnson, R. (ed.), The Field of Cultural Production. Polity Press, London, pp. 29-73.
Boyer, R. (1990) The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press, New York.
Collier, A. (2005) Critical realism. In: Steinmetz, G. (ed.), The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 327-45.
Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.