Search

The 'new Marxism of collective action' is a term Lash and Urry have recently used to describe a new intellectual current in Marxism which seeks to apply rational choice theory, and particularly game theory, to key Marxian concepts like collective action, class, revolution and exploitation. This current is seen as part of a general shift within social science away from structure towards agency. This paper focuses on a concept which Lash and Urry's outline ignored: namely, exploitation. Granting the concept this attention is useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, by summarizing the general debate on the concept, both within the new Marxism of collective action and outside, the paper allows the discussion of exploitation to be placed in the context of the more general debate between structuralist and humanistic versions of Marxism; especially in the context of the debate about whether there can be a Marxist theory of ethics and injustice. Secondly, by outlining how the concept is understood by advocates of the new Marxism of collective action, the paper accords the concept the central status which advocates reserve for it. In consequence, the paper identifies differences between advocates of the new Marxism of collective action with respect to how exploitation is to be understood, which suggest that the intellectual current is not as homogeneous as Lash and Urry imply. Moreover, the paper stresses that the differences between them with regard to exploitation are more than just unhelpful disagreements over matters of definition, but represent fundamental disagreements about the validity of Marx's original formulations in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intellectual reasons for the failure of sociology to give sufficient attention to warfare and military organisation as central problems in social theory. These reasons are to be found in the dominance of liberal functionalism and Marxism as paradigms in the development of sociology. A reorientation of social theory is called for and it is suggested that writers in the neo-Machiavellian tradition provide an important corrective to sociological orthodoxy in respect of the role of war and military organisation in social life. The paper goes on to show that these factors are crucial components in an adequate account of one of the most important problems raised by sociology: why did hegemonic capitalism develop originally in the West and not elsewhere. Thus, ironically, those factors which sociology has tended to ignore are actually the key to solving one of its central problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews Chinoy's Automobile Workers and the American Dream as an example of a lot of work which revolves around themes of alienation, worker degradation and quiescence. Two aspects of the automobile as an item in the sphere of consumption in post-war America are then detailed to try to point to the theoretical assumptions and empirical absences which characterize the dominant tradition exemplified by Chinoy's classic text. The paper ends by making some criticisms of the way production activity is privileged in social analysis and calls for the creation of a sociology of consumption to combat the emphasis on production as the source of social meaning and worth which is institutionalized in much sociology and most Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'Eurocommunism' is an ideological construct. Our object in this paper is to chart its origins, development and elaborations in current ideological struggles. Of particular interest is the way in which the term 'Eurocommunism' has been incorporated into communist discourse. In this paper, for the sake of clarity, we have decided not to explore the theoretical developments within the communist parties but to concentrate on how they have handled a term which originally came from bourgeois discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates marxist attempts to identify a 'class of possessors' under capitalism. It suggests that such attempts are unsuccessful for three reasons. Firstly, marxism wrongly equates the agent of possession with the human individual Secondly, its conception of the capitalist economy rests upon teleological assumptions. Thirdly, it wrongly asserts the priority of capitalist relations of production over and above their legal conditions of existence, causing it to misrecognise corporate forms of possession. After considering marxist attempts to theorise possession through the analysis of management and monopoly we consider a more fundamental question: whether it is possible to analyse possession/separation in conventional marxist class terms at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, Harald Wydra argues that the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe has been a long-term social process interwoven with the collapse of communism whose origins are long before 1989. He challenges the vision of East and West as two isolated blocs that prevailed in the 1950s and the assumption of gradual convergence that became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. His main focus is upon the East where, he believes, dissident movements created a 'second reality', undermining the myths propounded by the official communist establishment. He argues that there was an increase in self-restraint on the part of the communist state accompanied by the growth of civil society and non-violent political opposition. The East experienced a feeling of 'unrequited love' in its relationship to the West. Dissidents took their standards and aspirations from Western experience but found themselves largely ignored by the West. Since 1989, democratisation has increased the influence of western models and standards but it has also led to a breakdown of self-restraint and an upsurge of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review provides a critical commentary on the sociology of consumption recently developed by Peter Saunders in the new edition of his Social Theory and the Urban Question and elsewhere. Comment is made on the politics of socialized consumption, the sociology of consumption sector cleavages and the concept of a privatized mode of consumption. Note is also made of the methodological critique of realism and the assertion of a Weberian alternative which underpins the contribution. It is argued that although the approach provides some insights it tends to get locked into a series of unproducive conceptual and methodological polarities in its attempt to undermine the supposed hegemonic position of Marxism within contemporary urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Poverty of Theory E.P. Thompson makes the heretical claim that Marx's 'mature' writings, for all their grandeur, in some ways mark a retreat from his pathbreaking works of the 1840s. The Grundrisse in particular, and to a lesser but still significant extent Capital, are trapped within the analytic and conceptual framework of the very political economy Marx was criticising. Two features of this framework particularly concern Thompson. First, the notion that it is possible to isolate 'the economic' from political, religious, legal, moral or cultural activities as an independent or first order object of study; second, the static and a historical character of political economy's propositions and methodology. These, he charges, are substantially reproduced in Grundrisse and only partially overcome in Capital.[1] I do not wholly endorse Thompson's view. But I do think his argument important, if at times overstated. Marx did, in the 1840s -- and not just in overtly 'philosophical' works like the 1844 Manuscripts, but above all in The German Ideology - initiate an extremely wide-ranging critique of bourgeois civilisation as a whole, which went far beyond the obvious concerns of Grundrisse and Capital. He did not return to these themes again in anything like the same detail. And part of what Marx showed in these works was precisely the impossibility of abstracting 'the economic' in the way Thompson objects to -- in Marx's writings of the 1840s, the development of capitalism is apprehended as intimately bound up with wider social changes, in politics, law, culture, morality. Moreover, Marx exhibited an eminently historical grasp of these interlinked changes. In sum, his writings of this period provide the basis of a panoramic historical sociology. Commentary has tended to neglect this: the 1840s writings have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The macro-micro problem has been a prominent feature of British sociology of education since the early 1970s. In this discipline macro and micro have each come to be associated with particular theoretical perspectives, notably Marxism and interactionism respectively. This has had several unfortunate consequences. First, arguments about the value of macro and micro work have often been little more than dismissals of one perspective by proponents of another. Second, the macro-micro debate has conflated several quite distinct methodological issues. This article focuses on one of these issues: the question of whether social events can best be explained as the product of large or small scale structures. It is claimed that this issue cannot be resolved by philosophical analysis alone, the answer is a matter for empirical discovery. Moreover, the problem cannot be settled at the moment because we have insufficient well-established theories. Only when more such theories are available will we be able to resolve the question of whether valid macro and micro theories are possible. What stands in the way of achieving this, however, is precisely what led to the fruitless character of the macro-micro dispute in the first place: the organization of the sociology of education around theoretical perspectives rather than around substantive research problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about peasants. Peasants are a mystification. To begin with, "a peasant" does not exist in any immediate and strictly specific sense. Over no end of continents, states and regions those so designated differ in ways as rich in content as the world itself. Within the same village the rich and the poor, a landowner and a tenant, a householder and a hired hand will usually break any continuity of smooth gradations. History adds its dimension of diversity, for even the same would not be the same in different years, decades and centuries. The fundamental patterns and causes of structural change have been seen as both generic and specific to the peasants. Theories of structural transformation have been rightly expressed in a broader than peasantry framework of the national societies or of international systems. At the same time peasant specificity has been claimed in the ways those general processes reflected within, and are reacted to by, the peasant communities. For example, commercialization has usually resulted at first in a stage of agriculturalization of the peasant, their earlier non-agricultural tasks taken over by industrial mass production.