Emergentist Marxism: Dialectical Philosophy and Social Theory 0415395062, 9780415395069

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Emergentist Marxism

In tackling emergentist Marxism in depth, this well-written volume demonstrates that critical realism and materialist dialectics are indispensable to theorizing the functioning of complex social and physical systems. Author Sean Creaven investigates Marx’s dialectics of being and consciousness, forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict, and demonstrates how they allow the social analyst to conceptualize geohistory as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes. For those interested in social and political theory, Marxism and communism and contemporary social theory, this outstanding volume is an important read and a valuable resource. Sean Creaven is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

Routledge studies in critical realism Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Kathryn Dean, Nick Hostettler, Jonathan Joseph, Tony Lawson, Alan Norrie and Sean Vertigan

Critical realism is one of the most influential new developments in the philosophy of science and in the social sciences, providing a powerful alternative to positivism and postmodernism. This series will explore the critical realist position in philosophy and across the social sciences. 1 Marxism and Realism A materialistic application of realism in the social science Sean Creaven 2 Beyond Relativism Raymond Boudon, cognitive rationality and critical realism Cynthia Lins Hamlin 3 Education Policy and Realist Social Theory Primary teachers, child-centred philosophy and the new managerialism Robert Wilmott 4 Hegemony A realist analysis Jonathan Joseph 5 Realism and Sociology Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research Justin Cruickshank 6 Critical Realism The difference it makes Edited by Justin Cruickshank

7 Critical Realism and Composition Theory Donald Judd 8 On Christian Belief A defence of a cognitive conception of religious belief in a Christian context Andrew Collier 9 In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays Andrew Collier 10 Realism Discourse and Deconstruction Edited by Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts 11 Critical Realism, Post-positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge Ruth Groff 12 Defending Objectivity Essays in honour of Andrew Collier Edited by Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite

13 Ontology of Sex Carrie Hull 14 Explaining Global Poverty A critical realist approach Branwen Gruffydd-Jones

15 Contributions to Social Ontology Edited by Clive Lawson, John Latsis and Nuno Martins 16 Emergentist Marxism Dialectical philosophy and social theory Sean Creaven

Also published by Routledge: Critical Realism: Interventions Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Kathryn Dean, Nick Hostettler, Jonathan Joseph, Tony Lawson, Alan Norrie and Sean Vertigan Critical Realism Essential readings Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie The Possibility of Naturalism (3rd edition) A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences Roy Bhaskar Being and Worth Andrew Collier Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism Philosophical responses to quantum mechanics Christopher Norris From East to West Odyssey of a soul Roy Bhaskar

Realism and Racism Concepts of race in sociological research Bob Carter Rational Choice Theory Resisting colonisation Edited by Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter Explaining Society Critical realism in the social sciences Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Jan Ch. Karlsson and Liselotte Jakobsen Critical Realism and Marxism Edited by Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Michael Roberts Critical Realism in Economics Edited by Steve Fleetwood Realist Perspectives on Management and Organisations Edited by Stephen Ackroyd and Steve Fleetwood After International Relations Critical Realism and the (re)construction of world politics Heikki Patomaki

Capitalism and Citizenship The impossible partnership Kathryn Dean Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism Christopher Norris Transcendence Critical Realism and God Margaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas V. Porpora Critical Realist Applications in Organisation and Management Studies Edited by Steve Fleetwood and Stephen Ackroyd

Making Realism Work Realist social theory and empirical research Edited by Bob Carter and Caroline New Rethinking Marxism From Kant and Hegel to Marx and Engels Jolyon Agar

Emergentist Marxism Dialectical philosophy and social theory

Sean Creaven

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Sean Creaven Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJI Digital, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0-415-39506-2 ISBN13: 978-0-415-39506-9

This is for my parents, Linda and Kevin

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

x xi

Introduction

1

1

Critical realism and dialectic

6

2

Materialist dialectics

3

Socio-historical materialism

142

4

Stratification and power

214

5

Marx versus Weber on the dialectics of history

280

Conclusion

322

Notes Bibliography Index

334 370 388

70

Preface

Emergentist Marxism is intended as a critical exploration of the conceptual and methodological interface between Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist philosophy and Marxian materialist dialectics. Its primary purpose is twofold. First, to articulate and defend a synthesis of the critical realist/dialectical critical realist and Marxist traditions in the philosophy of social science. Second, to apply this theoretical research perspective to the task of analysing the constitution and dynamics of social systems in historical development. The book extends and substantiates the arguments of my Marxism and Realism. This was concerned with demonstrating how Marxism can be legitimately ‘constructed’ as an anti-reductive ontology of society which theorizes the dialectical interface between the key emergent strata of social systems. The task here was to show how emergentism is compatible with Marxian materialism, so that the errors of idealism and pluralism can be avoided in social analysis. However, the earlier work did not engage with Bhaskar’s dialectical reconstruction of critical realism, which he claimed provided indispensable underlabouring for emancipatory philosophy and politics, including Marxism. The main philosophical task of Emergentist Marxism is to overcome this neglect, by clarifying the relationship between Bhaskar’s realist dialectics and the materialist dialectics of the Marxist tradition. My argument is that dialectical critical realism enriches but does not found Marxian dialectics (as Bhaskar would claim); rather, the latter both overreaches and preservatively sublates the key concepts of the former. The key sociological task of Emergentist Marxism is to explore how this theoretical and methodological approach (‘emergentist Marxism’) can be used to make sense of the constitution of modes of stratification and of the key historical dynamics of socio-cultural evolution and structural transformations of social systems. This is accomplished by critically engaging with Marxism’s chief theoretical rival in the social sciences: the Weberianinspired sociology of domination.

Acknowledgements

I owe a big debt of gratitude to several people who have provided me with invaluable assistance with this project, whether directly or indirectly by example or inspiration. Special thanks to Paul Reynolds for his generous offer to help me in editing the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge my enormous intellectual debt to certain leading comrades of the Socialist Workers’ Party – including and especially Alex Callinicos, Chris Harman, Paul McGarr and John Rees – for considerably enriching my understanding of classical Marxism and materialist dialectics. I must also acknowledge the profound influence of the work of two critical realist scholars in particular on the theoretical and analytical substance of this book. Most obviously, Roy Bhaskar himself, whose ‘depth realist’ philosophical ontology and theory of explanatory critiques are both simply indispensable to Marxian social theory. But also Margaret Archer, whose morphogenetic perspective on the interface between structure and agency in social systems has considerably enriched my reconstruction of socio-historical materialism as realist social science. My research has also benefited greatly from the assistance of a number of organizations. Thanks to my employer, the University of the West of England, for granting me the study leave to complete this research (despite my unsuccessful bid for research funding which would have financed teaching cover). Thanks to Brill publishers and the International Association of Critical Realism for granting me permission to reutilize my previous work on Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism published in Historical Materialism (10(2), 2002) and Journal of Critical Realism (2(1), 2003). This material is contained in Chapters 1 and 2 and in the Conclusion. Thanks to Routledge (Taylor & Francis) publishers for allowing me to reproduce some of the key arguments of my book on Marxism and Realism (2000) and my chapter in Brown et al. (eds), Critical Realism and Marxism (2002). This material is contained especially in Chapters 1 and 3.

Introduction

Emergentist Marxism is situated in the debate between critical realists and Marxists on the status of Marxism as realist science, and the extent to which Marxism requires critical realism and dialectical critical realism, and of course vice versa. It is concerned with examining the likely payoff of this engagement. The book has three main functions. First, to explore the conceptual and methodological interface between Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist philosophy and Marxism. Second, to fashion a synthesis of the best elements of critical realism/dialectical critical realism and the materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition. Finally, to apply the results of this synthesis (a theoretical research paradigm I have entitled emergentist Marxism) to the analysis of social systems in development, past and present. This undertaking is necessary because both Marxism and critical realism/dialectical critical realism have a crucial and mutually complementary contribution to make to critical philosophy, the social sciences, to emancipatory politics, and therefore to each other. The positive role of Bhaskarian realism can be briefly summarized as follows. First, critical realism/dialectical critical realism provides a powerful and fully worked-out alternative to the unpalatable alternatives of empiricism and conventionalism in the philosophy of social science. This is by virtue of its distinction between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge, its concepts of stratification and emergence, and its critique of the epistemic fallacy. Second, critical realism/dialectical critical realism furnishes a social ontology (critical naturalism: the transformational model of social action, later radicalized as four-planar-social-being and the ‘social cube’), which is capable of resolving some of the central dilemmas of sociological theory – such as the relations between structure and agency, subject and object, voluntarism and determinism, and individual and society. All of this is of obvious benefit to Marxism, for the simple reason that it is indispensable to the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences more generally. Third, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism system presents a rich array of dialectical concepts and methods which have real practical utility in the analysis of social systems. This is advantageous to Marxism (and to any critical social theory), because the operational parts of Bhaskar’s realist dialectics both add increased analytical power to materialist dialectics, and also help to clarify its

2

Introduction

methods. Finally, critical realism/dialectical critical realism philosophically substantiates an understanding of social science as an inherently prescriptive discipline, such that the facts of the matter (social relations or social institutions or social practices) are logically supportive of ethical and political judgements about what should be done about them. This too is important to Marxism. For this too has always (rightly) taken it as given that value-neutrality in social science is impossible and undesirable, and that the role of social science is not simply explanatory (to determine ‘what is’ and why), but also evaluative (to derive judgements of ‘what ought’ from ‘what is’). Like Bhaskarian moral realism, Marxism sees its role as being to rationally determine whether or not and how the objects of social science are beneficial or detrimental to human interests, and to formulate (on the basis of this evaluative science) the appropriate political methods and strategies to maximize human freedoms. The positive contribution of Marxism to philosophy (including and especially critical realism/dialectical critical realism) and social science is also indispensable. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Marxism, or socio-historical materialism, remains one of the key intellectual perspectives in the social sciences, and one which straddles the bridge between philosophical ontology and practical social theorizing. Marxism provides a methodology which has been productively employed in both sociological and historical researches into modern and pre-modern societal forms. Marxism is important because it claims to successfully theorize human social history as animated by a multiplicity of interrelated dialectical mechanisms. These are primarily: (1) social labour for subsistence (supporting forces of production evolutionism) and structural contradictions of modes of production; and (2) class struggles over control of allocative and authoritative resources in response to the development of material production and the structural contradictions of relations of production this engenders. This is a highly ambitious research programme that, if justifiable, promises the considerable payout of a universally objective social science. Second, Marxism is already, I want to argue, implicitly a critical realist social theory, informed by a broader realist epistemology of science, and anti-reductive materialist philosophy of being. In these respects, Marxism is compatible with Bhaskar’s philosophical ontology. Indeed, a strong case can be made that Engels’ dialectical materialism, which under-labours Marxian social science, should be recognized as being foundational to Bhaskar’s own realist dialectics. The same claim cannot plausibly be made for rival social science ontologies, since these are informed not by emergentism but by dualism or reductionism (whether of the idealist versus materialist, or of the holist versus atomist, varieties). Finally, Marxism claims to offer theoretical guidance to the political and ideological struggles which are required to transcend oppressive and exploitative social systems (i.e. class-divided societies). This establishes a natural affinity between Bhaskarian philosophical realism and Marxian social science, since the former (especially in its dialectical critical realist mode) is also self-consciously intended as affirming the real possibility of human de-alienation in the modern epoch.

Introduction

3

The chief aims and rationale of the present work are not entirely novel to it, but are based on my previous published output. Emergentist Marxism extends and applies, but also philosophically substantiates, the arguments of my earlier Marxism and Realism. Marxism and Realism sought to do two main things. First, it sought to theorize social reality as forged in the dialectical interface of distinct ontological strata – organisms, subjects, actors, agents, practices and structures. This was the realist emergentist component of the analysis, and it allowed a non-reductive understanding of societies as ‘open’ systems, an obvious pay-off for Marxism. Second, it sought to give this critical realism a specific materialistic foundation. This entailed drawing on realist concepts of stratification and emergence to defend the central claim of Marxism, namely that specific forms of human agency (social labour and class struggle) and social structure (modes of production) have explanatory primacy in explaining the structuration and dynamics of social systems. However, a crucial weakness of Marxism and Realism was a failure to engage with Bhaskar’s dialectical reconstruction of critical realism (i.e. dialectical critical realism) in his post-1993 writings. This was an important omission, since this phase of Bhaskar’s work is clearly indebted to Marxism, yet claims to preservatively sublate it, situating the valuable elements of materialist dialectics within a new totalizing philosophical system. Consequently, the current book aims particularly to clarify the relationship between emergentist Marxism and dialectical critical realism. In doing so, it overcomes the earlier neglect of Bhaskarian dialectics, integrating those elements of the dialectical critical realist system into Marxism that further its explanatory reach, both on the natural and social scientific terrains, but rejecting Bhaskar’s grandiose claim for dialectical critical realism that it preservatively transcends the materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition. But here I also reprise the analysis of my previous book, and offer additional arguments in defence of the theoretical perspective first outlined there, but extended and clarified in this book. The analysis is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, I furnish a thoroughgoing review of Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems. I draw out their usable and operational elements, assess their compatibility or otherwise with materialist dialectics, and consider the efficacy of Bhaskar’s critique of Marxism, which partly informs his claim to be providing a new meta-philosophy for the left. My argument here is that, despite its advantages, Bhaskarian dialectic neither outflanks nor transcends Marxian dialectic, but is dependent on it in fundamental ways. Moreover, despite the considerable merits of Bhaskar’s dialectic, its critical edge is blunted by a range of conceptual ambiguities, problems and defects, which are simply not shared by Marxian dialectic. However, I reaffirm that Bhaskar’s core critical realist concepts (especially stratification and emergence) and his evaluative realism (the theory of emancipatory critiques and ethical naturalism) add something substantial to Marxism without taking anything away. In Chapter 2, I examine the materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition, and those researchers who have been influenced by Marxism. Here I start

4

Introduction

by exploring the relationship between Hegelian and Marxian dialectic. I outline the chief methodological principles of materialist dialectics, establish how these are compatible with Hegelian dialectic and the crucial points of departure, and why these are necessary. Here I also establish the basic compatibility of materialist dialectics with critical realism. I go on to explain how materialist dialectics are applied concretely by the classical Marxists in social analysis. I argue that Marxian dialectics derive enormous explanatory power from a relatively simple complex of interrelated concepts, drawing on the examples of Marx’s logic of capital and Lenin’s materialist epistemology to establish the point. I then explain how Marx’s dialectic of history (socio-historical materialism) avoids the key theoretical and methodological errors commonly attributed to it by the critics (including by Bhaskar himself) – including those of reductionism, determinism, conflationism, teleologism and historicism. I finish by substantiating my argument of the previous chapter that the insights of critical realism and dialectical critical realism require preservative sublation within the philosophical ontology of materialist dialectics, rather than vice versa. There are, I suggest, at least two good reasons for this. First, dialectical materialism provides a corpus of concepts which are better suited than those of dialectical critical realism to make sense of the dynamics of natural necessity. This is evidenced by their successful application in a range of natural scientific research domains. Second, dialectical materialism equips the analyst with the philosophical toolkit to avoid idealist slippage (or agnostic compromises with ontological idealism) without collapsing into physicalism. These chapters (1 and 2) establish the ontological and methodological grounds for emergentist Marxism. The following chapters are concerned with applying this emergentist Marxism in the social sciences. This is particularly to make sense of the historical constitution of modes of power and domination and the dialectics of societal evolution and structural transformation in social systems. My fundamental purpose here is to extend the concepts and methods of Marxism and Realism by means of a thoroughgoing analysis of the hierarchical relationships between stratification systems in modern and non-modern societies (class, gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, state power), and by applying the emergentist Marxism research paradigm to the substantive analysis of social systems in historical development. The point of this is to demonstrate the power of emergentist Marxism as socio-historical science and as critical theory of modernity. Whereas the key purpose of Marxism and Realism was to demonstrate how emergentist Marxism functions as a theory of the interface of the key strata which constitute social systems (synchronic analysis), the chief purpose of Emergentist Marxism is to explore how this approach can be used to explain the mechanisms of sociohistorical evolution and transformation of social systems (diachronic analysis). In other words, whereas Marxism and Realism articulates a critical realist Marxist account of social organization, the main purpose of Emergentist Marxism is to provide a critical realist Marxist account of social history. The strategy pursued here is as follows. First, I attempt to substantiate Marxism as a successful critical realist theory of the dialectical interface

Introduction

5

between structure and agency in social systems from the earliest class-divided societies to the present day (Chapter 3). Second, I show how emergentist Marxism offers both a theory of stratification (Chapter 4), and of socio-historical development (Chapter 5), which is conceptually superior to those of its chief theoretical competitors – the Weberian and neo-Weberian sociologists of domination. Finally, I conclude by assessing the respective contributions of Marxian and Bhaskarian dialectics of freedom to the project of human emancipation at the start of the twenty-first century. The major contribution of Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom is to grasp history as animated by an englobing directional logic (concrete singularity to concrete universality), moving from ‘primal scream’ to ‘universal free flourishing’. Here Bhaskar reintroduces to social theory the concept of progressive change in social development, which was also central to Marx’s sociology. Bhaskar’s dialectic of emancipation, I argue, is both theoretically defensible, and of crucial importance at the contemporary global conjuncture, providing as it does ethical or normative under-labouring for emancipatory politics. But, at the same time, I argue, Marx’s socio-historical materialism provides Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom with sociological flesh, in the absence of which it cannot fully substantiate the concept of progressive directionality which lies at its root. In developing these arguments I have found it necessary to draw on my earlier published research. My account of stratification and emergence in critical realism (Chapter 1) redeploys the analysis of my Marxism and Realism (Creaven, 2000, pp. 24–32). My account of dialectical critical realism (also Chapter 1) reproduces but develops the analysis of my ‘The Pulse of Freedom: Bhaskar’s Dialectic and Marxism’ (Creaven, 2002b, pp. 77–141). My account of dialectical materialism, the basic concepts of socio-historical materialism, and the nature of structural conditioning (Chapter 3) reutilizes aspects of my analysis of Marxism and Realism (Creaven, 2000, pp. 58–68, 71–9, 150–2, 202–3, 208–15, 234–5) and of my ‘Materialism, realism and dialectics’ (Creaven, 2002a, pp. 131–54). My account of Bhaskar’s normative dialectic of freedom (Conclusion) reproduces in part my analysis of ‘Marx and Bhaskar on the Dialectics of Freedom’ (Creaven, 2003, pp. 63–94).

1

Critical realism and dialectic

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to offer an appraisal of Bhaskar’s realist philosophy, as this has progressed through its critical realist and dialectical critical realist ‘stages’ of development. This is no mere academic exercise, since it is my contention that prior to Bhaskar’s ‘idealist turn’ of transcendental dialectical critical realism post-2000, his philosophy provides ontological, epistemological and ethical supports for an emancipatory social science and politics, and is, therefore, quite consistent with and complementary to Marxian dialectics. Thus, Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems provide concepts and analytical tools, I contend, that do indeed under-labour for Marx’s materialistic social theory. Bhaskar’s groundbreaking critical realist critique of the ‘epistemic fallacy’ does undermine the philosophical foundations of idealism and empiricism in the philosophy of science. His central critical realist ontological concepts of stratification and emergence, which undergo further development in his dialectical critical realist system, do allow the transcendence of the false dilemmas posed by reductionism (of the micro and macro variants). Moreover, they do allow of a productive solution to some major dilemmas of Marxist thought (such as the relationship between freedom and necessity, voluntarism and determinism, and agency and structure in social analysis). Additionally, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism is a welcome and progressive development of his critical realism, not least because he rehabilitates dialectical analysis in philosophy and social theory, and to an audience often unfamiliar with and sometimes hostile to dialectics, and in a fashion which is broadly consistent with Marxian dialectic. In doing so Bhaskar articulates a corpus of dialectical concepts (especially his ‘absenting absence’ dialectic, his modes of negation and his classes of real contradiction), which are of practical utility in substantive social theorizing, including on the terrain of socio-historical materialism. Crucially as well, Bhaskar’s philosophy, at this stage in its development, provides conceptual tools that allow of a defence of Marx’s own belief (in opposition to positivism) that it is perfectly possible to move from questions of fact to questions of value, or from descriptive statements to evaluative statements

Critical realism and dialectic 7 (i.e. to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’), in social analysis and in politics. This is indispensable to any notion of social science as a critical and emancipatory discipline, which is capable of under-labouring political struggles for a better society. Finally, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy articulates a humanistic moral realism (based on ethical naturalism), which is not only defensible but also provides rational normative grounds for endorsing Marx’s emancipatory political project of abolishing hierarchically organized social relations. My argument is that whereas Marx’s social theory demonstrates how human emancipation is practically possible (given the structural contradictions and dynamics of capitalism), Bhaskar’s humanist dialectic demonstrates why such emancipation is a moral necessity. Nonetheless, I want to argue that it is doubtful whether Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems can be viewed as indispensable to establishing the ontological coherence of Marxian social science, which is certainly the claim that Bhaskar wishes to make for dialectical critical realism. To establish these points I will address a number of issues. First, I will consider the relationship between Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems, exploring how and to what extent the latter overreaches and transcends the former, and the adequacy and utility of Bhaskar’s critical realist dialectical concepts. Second, I will consider the nature of the relationship between Marxism and Bhaskar’s dialectic. Here I will ask: Does Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism amount to a ‘transcendence’ or ‘outflanking’ (albeit sublative) of Marxian dialectic? Is dialectical critical realism indispensable to Marxism for the formal specification of its dialectics? Is dialectical critical realism, in other words, foundational to Marxism? Or is Bhaskar’s dialectic better understood as some kind of intervention on the terrain of Marxian dialectic – either as specification, restatement, refinement, extension, deepening, development or ‘overreach’ of Marxian dialectic, or perhaps as a combination of some or all of these things? Bhaskar wishes to make the former claim for his dialectical critical realist philosophy. My argument (elaborated in this chapter) is that this position is indefensible and that the latter interpretation is appropriate. Therefore, a synthesis of the fundamental ontological concepts of critical realism and dialectical critical realism with Marxian dialectic offers the prospect of a promising way forward for critical emancipatory theory. For, although both ‘overreach’ one another in certain respects, the former does not ‘transcend’ or ‘found’ the latter in any ultimate ontological sense. For some this is what Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism is all about. Yet this is not so, because Bhaskar is concerned not with synthesis but with preservative sublation of Marxian dialectic (along with critical realism and all previous dialectical philosophy) within the conceptual framework of dialectical critical realism. But there are, I believe, stronger grounds for holding that elements of critical realism and dialectical critical realism substantiate and enrich the ontological materialist dialectics of the classical Marxists, rather than the other way round. Preservative sublation, I contend, should be of the operational parts of Bhaskar’s realism within the conceptual framework of Marxian dialectical materialism, not vice

8

Critical realism and dialectic

versa. For unless this is done, crucial errors (of irrealist slippage viz transcendental dialectical critical realism and agnostic compromises with irrealism) cannot be decisively dispelled. The purpose of this chapter is to establish these arguments. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to explore the key tenets of critical realism and dialectical critical realism, indicating their advantages to philosophy and social theory, and obviously to Marxian dialectics.

Bhaskar’s critical realism Bhaskar’s critical realist philosophy was built on ontological and epistemological foundations. Ontologically, Bhaskar argued for a conception of reality as intransitive (independent of human agency), transfactual (in possession of causal powers) and stratified (composed of various levels necessarily related to each other). Bhaskar’s depth realism distinguished between three basic domains of reality – the empirical, the actual and the structural. The empirical is the world that is apprehended by humans as sense-data. The actual is the world of empirical phenomena (whether experienced or unexperienced by human beings). The structural is the world of natural necessity, the essential properties and causal powers of things that give rise to the empirical and actual domains of the experienced and potentially experienceable. This structural domain is not uniform, but is multi-layered, with lower-order structures (such as the brain and central nervous system) giving rise to higher-order structures (such as mind and consciousness). The relations between these strata are based on ontological rootedness (of higher on lower) and emergence (with higher being made possible by the causal interaction of the lower).1 This stratified ontology allowed Bhaskar to formulate a productive alternative to reductionism (the view that the objects of the higher sciences are ultimately decomposable into those of the lower sciences) and dualism (the view that reality is composed of different substances – such as mind and matter – which are autonomous of each other and interact in a quite external and inessential way). On the one hand, reductionism is rejected because the generative mechanisms comprising a particular stratum, though generated by those of its root stratum, are nonetheless sui generis, a new form of complexity, with its own distinct properties and powers (such as the mind’s capacity to think, which is not a property of the individual cells that compose the brain). On the other hand, dualism is rejected because stratification and emergence also means that the relations between the objects of knowledge are not inessential or contingent, but are necessary, with the higher-order strata only relatively autonomous of their root stratum. Epistemologically, Bhaskar argued for an anti-empiricist and anti-positivist naturalism in the philosophy of science, according to which there ‘is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and social sciences’.2 Yet Bhaskar’s naturalism correctly recognized both methodological and structural constraints on this unity. The methodological constraint is the impossibility of

Critical realism and dialectic 9 experimental closure in the social sciences (given that one cannot study social relations in a laboratory). The structural constraint is simply that the social sciences and their objects of knowledge (social relations) are internally rather than externally related, quite unlike the relations between the socially generated natural sciences and their non-social objects of knowledge. Notably, Bhaskar’s naturalism is not the position that the methods of the social and natural sciences are identical, or that the methods of the social sciences should be derived from those of the natural sciences. Rather, it consists of two rather different propositions. First, that the goals of each are the same (causal explanation of phenomena). This is on the grounds that both social and physical reality are composed of unobservable structures, whose generative mechanisms govern the phenomenal forms that may be apprehended through the senses as objects of human experience. Second, that ‘it is the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for us’,3 so that the form of possible science in both the social and natural domains is given by the properties (enablements and liabilities) of their respective objects of inquiry.4 Such an epistemology presupposes Bhaskar’s realist ontology of the world as existing independently of human beings and of their perceptions and conceptions, yet exerting directional guidance on the manner in which human beings can relate to the objects of experience. Such directional guidance is both cognitive (by contradicting or corroborating particular truth-claims) and practical (by allowing or enabling certain causal interventions in the world but ruling out or constraining others), this making it possible for human reason and abstraction to delve beneath the phenomenal forms of reality to its underlying structures. This epistemology also presupposes Bhaskar’s specific theory of the mind–body connection, i.e. his synchronic emergent powers materialism. As Andrew Brown observes, synchronic emergent powers materialism: establishes that the ‘real essence’ generating thought is some (as yet little known) structure emergent from the brain and CNS [central nervous system]. This is an essence very different to that of the objects of thought such as electrons, atoms, molecules, etc. In this almost trivial and yet fundamental way, thought is non-identical with, or ‘non-isomorphic’ to, its object (a ‘reflection’ theory of knowledge is ruled out, in any literal sense). Science and everyday activity reveal that knowledge cannot be gained merely through passive contemplation but must be worked for; reality does not readily uncover its secrets to humanity. Critical realism is thereby led to theorize the process of knowledge acquisition in terms of the causal interaction of thought and object. Thought causes intentional human activity. Such activity impacts upon real objects, which, in turn, causally impact upon thought. On this view, an object may be essentially independent of the process by which thought attempts to grasp it. Hence, statements referring to real objects (ontological statements) are not always reducible to statements referring to the process of knowledge acquisition (epistemological statements).5

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Critical realism and dialectic

Bhaskar’s ontological and epistemological realism thus allows a distinction to be drawn between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality. The transitive is the epistemological dimension: the state of human knowledge of the world. The intransitive is the ontological dimension: the state of the objective world independently of our knowledge of it. Bhaskar refers to the failure to uphold this distinction as the epistemic fallacy. This is an error committed by non-realist philosophy of science, and it results from the failure to recognize that questions of natural necessity shape what kinds of human knowledge are possible, rather than vice versa (i.e. that human cognition or sense-experiences determine our knowledge of the world). The epistemic fallacy is, says Bhaskar, ‘the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge’,6 including statements about how we might acquire knowledge of the world. Empiricist philosophy of science commits the epistemic fallacy, Bhaskar rightly notes, because empiricists regard as scientifically meaningful only the objects of sensory experience, so that statements about objective reality are reduced to statements about what immediate sense-data can tell us about that reality. From this perspective, since unobservable structures (such as subatomic particles, minds and class systems) cannot be apprehended by humans as raw sense-data, they cannot be treated as real objects of knowledge: mind states are really just brain states, subatomic particles are simply convenient hypothetic constructs of science, and class systems are simply collectivities of individuals acting on their rational economic interests. Idealist philosophy of science (in its subjective and objective forms) also commits the epistemic fallacy, as Bhaskar rightly suggests. This is because idealists either regard the objective world as constituted by consciousness (in which case non-cognitive objects are either unreal or caused by some kind of supermind), or as dependent on consciousness (in the Kantian sense that unknowable things-in-themselves are constructed as thought-objects in ways determined by human cognitive interests). In each case, ontology is reduced to epistemology, since either there is no world outside consciousness (or this world is a construct of consciousness), or the world outside consciousness is interpreted in ways determined by the inner rationality of the human mind. Ontological depth, stratification and emergence An important function of Bhaskar’s philosophy is to establish the case for endorsing a ‘depth model’ of reality in opposition to the claims of classical empiricism (the view that only ‘impressions’ or ‘sense data’ can be said to comprise the real) and ‘empirical realism’ or ‘actualism’ (the view that the real is comprised of both ‘impressions’ and ‘events’, the former being experiences of the latter). By means of transcendental arguments, Bhaskar has little difficulty disposing of the ontological claims of classical empiricism: The intelligibility of sense-perception presupposes the intransitivity of the objects perceived. For it is in the independent occurrence or existence of

Critical realism and dialectic 11 such objects that the meaning of ‘perception’, and the epistemic significance of perception, lies. Among such objects are events, which thus must be categorically independent of experiences. . . . If changing experience of objects is to be possible, objects must have a distinct being in time and space from the experiences of which they are the objects. For Kepler to see the rim of the earth drop away, while Tycho Brahe watches the sun rise, we must suppose that there is something that they both see (in different ways). Similarly when modern sailors refer to what ancient mariners called a sea serpent as a school of porpoises, we must suppose that there is something which they are describing in different ways. The intelligibility of scientific change (and criticism) and scientific education thus presupposes the ontological independence of the objects of experience from the objects of which they are the experience. . . . Events then are categorically independent of experiences.7 Bhaskar thus establishes that the basic problem with classical empiricism, which reduces reality to sense impressions, is that it leaves the ‘experiences’ of which sense data is composed unexplained. This approach also rides roughshod over the obvious fact that not all events are the subject of experience.8 For these reasons most empiricists are prepared to endorse actualism. Actualists introduce a second level or dimension into their explanatory models. This is, of course, the level of ‘events’, which experiences are about, and which may often occur unexperienced, but whose reality can nonetheless be established by observing their empirical effects (i.e. the ‘happenings’ which are caused by other ‘happenings’). Although Bhaskar’s argument disposes of the warranty of classical empiricism (in its Berkeleian and Humean forms), by demonstrating that experience presupposes the intransitivity of the object world, it is not by itself sufficient to refute actualism. In order to achieve this purpose, Bhaskar has to be able to show that the objects of science are not only intransitive but also ‘structured’. In other words, if depth realism is to be defensible, Bhaskar has to find some means of demonstrating that real-world events are comprehensible in terms of underlying structures and attendant generative mechanisms, and not simply in terms of ‘other events’. To these ends, Bhaskar draws on another transcendental deduction: ‘It is not necessary that science exist. But, given that it does, it is necessary that the world is a certain way . . . given that science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way. Thus . . . that the world is structured and differentiated can be established by philosophical argument’.9 Bhaskar goes about this task by considering the question of what the actuality of experimental science tells us about the nature of its objects. ‘The intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes not just the intransitivity but the structured character of the objects investigated under experimental conditions’.10 Bhaskar points out that the practice of experimental science involves setting up an ‘artificial closure’ under laboratory conditions in order to establish the existence of those real structures responsible for the causal mechanisms which account for observable events. By means of experimental closure, the scientist

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triggers or activates a ‘single kind of mechanism or process in relative isolation, free from the interfering flux of the open world, so as to observe its detailed workings or record its characteristic mode of effect and/or test some hypothesis about them’.11 In this way, the scientist identifies the specificity of causal mechanisms pertaining to particular structures, and the kinds of events or effects which (in closed systems) must necessarily follow from their activation. But if causal laws are simply ‘constant conjunctures’ between events in the realm of the actual (which they must be if underlying mechanisms do not explain events), this kind of painstaking scientific endeavour must be both pointless and impossible. It is pointless for three reasons. First, because one does not need experimental closure to observe sequences of events at the level of the actual, since closure would already exist in this one-dimensional world, of which ‘constant conjunctures’ would be the inevitable expression. Second, because ‘experimental activity can only be given a satisfactory rationale if the causal law it enables us to identify is held to prevail outside the contexts under which the sequence of events is generated’, this suggesting ‘there must be an ontological distinction’ between causal laws and sequences of events.12 Third, because if experimental science is simply about engineering events so as to bring about other events, it must be a process which ‘constructs’ causal laws, not one which discovers pre-existing laws (by activating them in isolation from other variables), and is thus scientifically uninteresting. The procedure is impossible because one can establish a closed system by means of scientific procedure (in which a generative mechanism, the events it governs and the observation of these processes by a knowing subject are brought into correspondence) only on the assumption that nature is an open system, comprised of a plurality of causal mechanisms, each of which can be rationally apprehended only by means of experimental closure.13 Bhaskar’s critical realism therefore provides a philosophical rationale for holding to a conception of reality as ‘ontological depth’. But does his approach allow us to take the further step of grasping nature as stratified? My belief is that it does succeed in doing this, though it is not the only acceptable way of doing so.14 Bhaskar bases his argument for the stratification of nature on the explanatory logic of scientific inquiry itself. He makes the legitimate point that science proceeds by uncovering specific generative mechanisms, before then going on to seek out a causal explanation of these mechanisms in terms of others, which are necessarily more ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ (such as the explanation of psychological mechanisms in terms of biological mechanisms). One important feature of this process of scientific work is that, having established a ‘tree’ of sciences, each relating to real aspects of the world, it has been unable to establish the redundancy of the higher in favour of the lower. For example, despite the best efforts of many generations of practising philosophers of social science to argue the case for treating the ‘real objects’ of sociology (i.e. social structures) as epiphenomena of the ‘real objects’ of cognitive psychology and/or human biology, no practical results have been forthcoming, and nor are they expected. But this stratification of the sciences, which has proven highly

Critical realism and dialectic 13 resistant to attempts by ‘greedy reductionism’15 to dissolve, is precisely good evidence of the ‘relative autonomy’ and ‘hierarchical layering’ of their respective objects of knowledge in the real world, that is, of the ‘stratification of nature’. Bhaskar’s philosophical ontology identifies a hierarchically ordered world of distinct strata and attendant generative mechanisms governed by causal relations of vertical determination. From this it appears reasonable to draw two conclusions. First, that a materialistic view of nature (including human nature) is altogether appropriate, on the grounds that the material universe existed before there was organic life, and . . . living organisms can only exist as composed of and surrounded by matter. In this sense, matter may be said to be more ‘basic’ than life; life in turn may be said to be more basic than rationality (in the sense that we are rational animals), and hence than human society and its history. This suggests that the sciences that explain a more basic layer may have some explanatory primacy over those explaining a less basic layer. Laws of physics and chemistry may in some sense explain the laws of biology.16 Second, that a ‘naturalistic’ approach to the human and social sciences, which stress a fundamental methodological unity between these and the natural sciences, is at least possible, for the simple reason that it is now philosophically defensible to view the world ‘historically, as a complex of processes of development . . . in which there are no sharp distinctions, on the one hand, between the various domains of the physical world . . . and, on the other hand, between the physical world as a whole and the human, social world’.17 In this sense, Bhaskar’s philosophy of nature is (until his introduction of transcendental dialectical critical realism) entirely consistent with that form of ontological materialism (defended by Marx and Engels) which postulates the unilateral existential dependence of the objects of knowledge of the human and social sciences upon those of the natural sciences, and the historical development of the former out of the latter. From this point of view, the stratification of nature must be grasped from the ‘bottom up’ (so to speak), as running from the physico-chemical level to the human and socio-cultural levels, via the intermediary of the biological level. This is for the simple reason that it is impossible to conceive of social or cultural mechanisms existing in the absence of biological ones, or of biological mechanisms existing in the absence of physico-chemical ones, but perfectly possible to conceive of the converse arrangements. Nonetheless it is important to be clear that this vertical explanation of higher mechanisms by lower ones does not ‘explain away’ the latter. The higher are as real as the lower by virtue of the distinct causal powers and properties that pertain uniquely to them. Chemical structures explain biological structures, for example, in the sense that the latter arise from the former and could not exist without them, the reverse never being the case. But the generative mechanisms of organic structures are nonetheless ‘irreducible’ to those of chemical

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structures, since nothing about the organizational and behavioural properties of the first will tell us anything about those of the second. Zoological laws, not the laws of chemistry and physics, explain the development, capacities and behaviours of organisms, though not of course the micro-elements from which organisms are composed. Yet this ‘stratification model’ of nature in no way implies that more basic mechanisms or strata pack a greater causal punch than higher level ones in accounting for the constitution of ‘objects’ or ‘entities’. This point is well made by Steven Rose: ‘A living organism – a human, say – is an assemblage of subatomic particles, an assemblage of atoms, an assemblage of molecules, an assemblage of tissues and organs. But it is not first a set of atoms, then molecules, then cells; it is all of these things at the same time’.18 Nor does Bhaskar’s ontology commit us to the peculiar idea that more basic strata or mechanisms have explanatory priority over higher level ones in shaping the pattern of events in the phenomenal world. As Andrew Collier notes: ‘Being a more basic stratum does not necessarily mean being a stratum whose effects are more widespread. For though animals are governed by zoological laws while inanimate things are not, anything and everything may be effected by zoological laws, since animals have effects on the inanimate world’.19 Clearly, there is a necessary distinction being made here between relations of vertical determination between strata and relations of horizontal causality between mechanisms and events or objects. Events and things are determined conjointly by the plurality of mechanisms operative at different levels of reality. So, for instance, zoological laws presuppose chemical laws, which in turn presuppose physical laws, living creatures being a combination of physico-chemical and organic structures. This means that relations of vertical causality between strata, aside from being relations of ‘ontological presupposition’, are also often ‘one-way relations of inclusion of the various strata’.20 Thus, organic entities (such as animals) will be necessarily subject to a broader range of causal mechanisms than inorganic entities (such as rocks), just as cultural entities (e.g. individual speakers) will necessarily be subject to a wider range of causal mechanisms (those of society, mind, biology, chemistry and physics) than biological entities (to which only the last three apply). But how is it that higher-order mechanisms and structures are explainable by yet irreducible to lower-order ones? Bhaskar’s solution to this problem is to grasp the interface between the two in terms of ‘rootedness’ and ‘emergence’: higher-order strata are rooted in and emergent from lower-order strata. ‘Rootedness’ simply denotes the elementary fact that ‘the more complex aspects of reality (e.g. life, mind) presuppose the less complex (e.g. matter)’.21 The idea here is ‘of some lower-order or microscopic domain providing a basis for the existence of some higher-order property or power; as for example the neurophysiological organization of human beings may be said to provide a basis for their power of speech’.22 ‘Emergence’ is a more difficult idea to grasp, not least because it has a complicated intellectual history. For realists, however, it has two basic meanings and functions. First, as simply another way of articulating and defending their thesis of the irreducibility of the constituent levels of reality:

Critical realism and dialectic 15 We would not try to explain . . . the power of water to extinguish fire by deriving it from the powers of its constituents, for oxygen and hydrogen are highly inflammable. In such cases objects are said to have ‘emergent powers’, that is, powers or liabilities which cannot be reduced to those of their constituents. Second, as an explanatory thesis which locates the emergence of a higherorder stratum in a specific interaction or combination of generative mechanisms internal to those objects or mechanisms that exist at the stratum immediately ‘basic’ to it. In this sense, ‘emergent properties’ are a function of internally related objects or structures, because the relations which define or comprise them as such grant their constituents powers and capacities they would not possess apart from their interaction or combination as parts of a whole: The nature or constitution of an object and its causal powers are internally or necessarily related: a plane can fly by virtue of its aerodynamic form, engines, etc.; gunpowder can explode by virtue of its unstable chemical structure; multinational firms can sell their products dear and buy their labour power cheap by virtue of operating in several different countries with different levels of development; people can change their behaviour by virtue of their ability to monitor their own monitorings, and so on.23 Biological reality, for instance, is ‘emergent’ from a specific combination of generative mechanisms internal to the chemical level, just as socio-cultural reality is ‘emergent’ from a specific interaction of causal powers internal to the biological level. Emergent properties are also to be found within particular domains of reality. Thus, the ‘physical’, the ‘chemical’, the ‘biological’ and the ‘human–social’ level each give rise to higher and lower strata. For example, totally novel powers arise within the socio-cultural domain as a result of social interaction. ‘Even though social structures exist only where people reproduce them, they have powers irreducible to those of individuals (you can’t pay rent to yourself)’.24 In this situation, individuals obtain novel characteristics by virtue of their insertion within specific kinds of social relations, not simply by pooling their individual capacities or powers. Because such properties and powers of individuals are not merely ‘aggregative’ products of their interaction, they must instead be recognized as ‘emergent properties’ of the ‘societal organization’ in which their interactions are situated. Such is what renders meaningful the idea that society is more than the sum of its parts, and that its ‘parts’ (i.e. people and their interpersonal relations) are transformed by being parts of the social whole.

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Evaluative realism A crucial achievement of Bhaskar’s critical realist philosophy is that it has destroyed one of the most tenacious, pervasive and pernicious dogmas of philosophy: the notion that it is impossible to derive ‘what ought’ from ‘what is’ (or that no truth-statement can sustain or support or entail a value-judgement). Bhaskar argues for the contrary in his The Possibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. However, it should be noted at once that Bhaskar is clear that there is an obvious epistemological limit on deriving valuejudgements from validity-claims. This consists of the fact that such moves are possible only in the social sciences, whose objects of knowledge (human relations and institutions and forms of cultural belief) are the products of intentional human agency, and which can be remade by the self-same human agency. Only the social sciences can be critical theories, in the sense of offering explanatory critiques of their objects of knowledge, or in the sense of moving from a description to evaluation of phenomena. By contrast, it makes no sense to apply a value-judgement to quantum phenomena in the physical domain or the mechanism of natural selection in the biological and ecological spheres. Subatomic particles and natural selection are just facts, and that is all there is to say on the matter. It makes no sense to inquire from the facts of the matter what ‘ought’ to be done about them. Societies, on the other hand, are not mere natural facts, but are the historical constructions of the actions of generations of people, whose actions were and are motivated by ideas. Unless people have ideas and have acted socially on them, the objects of the social sciences would not exist. But, of course, people can be mistaken or misled in their ideas or beliefs about society, and their activities can reproduce social forms that are contrary to their interests. This is particularly the case since the ideas and actions of people that reproduce social structures are themselves always situated in a pre-existent social environment, which tends to be organized hierarchically (with certain groups enjoying material and cultural advantages or benefits over others, and often at their expense). In these circumstances, powerholders and superordinate groups have both vested interests and the institutional and cultural capacities to disseminate their own self-justificatory beliefs across the rest of society, to misrepresent unegalitarian social relations as in the interests of everyone, or to justify publicly their own oppressive or exploitative institutions in the eyes of the downtrodden or subordinate. But there are other reasons why people may be wrong or deceived in their beliefs about society and act socially in ways detrimental to their real needs and interests. There is, of course, Bhaskar’s non-isomorphism of the levels of the empirical, the actual and the structural, which is as true of social reality as of natural reality, which means that knowledge can never be a mere ‘reflection’ or ‘mirror’ of the world. There are also, as Marx correctly diagnosed, certain types of social relations (i.e. those of generalized commodity production) which spontaneously generate ideological forms that mystify their real causes or conditions.

Critical realism and dialectic 17 If an important part of social reality (and hence of social analysis) is the ideas or beliefs of people, and if it is admitted that such ideas or beliefs will often be about society and may be partial, inexact or plain wrong, it is a legitimate part of social scientific enterprise to both demonstrate the ways in which such ideas or beliefs are problematic and to explain why this is so. Such explanations of false consciousness will sometimes have to be evaluative, whether these evaluations are in terms of the ideological use of cultural resources by dominant vested interest groups to sustain their power and privileges, or in terms of Marx’s commodity fetishism sustained by capitalist institutions. As Bhaskar puts it: ‘If . . . one is in possession of a theory which explains why false consciousness is necessary, then one can pass immediately, without the addition of any extraneous value judgements, to a negative evaluation of the object (generative structure, system of social relations or whatever) that makes that consciousness necessary (and, ceteris paribus, to a positive evaluation of action rationally directed at the removal of the sources of false consciousness)’.25 Or as Collier summarizes Bhaskar’s view: ‘To say that some institution causes false beliefs is to criticize it. Given that (other things being equal) it is better to believe what is true than what is false, it is also better (other things being equal) that institutions that cause false beliefs should be replaced by, or transformed into, those that cause true ones’.26 But Bhaskar’s defence of fact-to-value judgements is not only relevant to the simultaneous diagnosis/criticism of false beliefs, but may also be applied to social institutions or social systems, irrespective of whatever beliefs people happen to have about them. By way of illustration, consider Marx’s analysis of the wage-form under capitalist social relations. One cannot diagnose the nature of the wage-form objectively or truthfully without advancing a critique of capitalism as a system of class exploitation. This is because the nature of the social object (the wage-form) determines its scientific cognitive potentials for human beings. A scientific diagnosis is simultaneously a politico-ethical critique, if, as Marx believes, the wage-form is a mechanism of alienation and exploitation. And, if this is so, specifying the nature of ‘what is’ (capitalism as a system of class exploitation) logically entails a specification of ‘what ought’ (an alternative social system in which class exploitation is abolished). This is simply unavoidable, since capitalism is not a force of nature, is not governed by natural necessity, and so is not beyond rational criticism or the powers of human agency to ameliorate or abolish. So Bhaskar’s point is that certain propositions in the social sciences, if they are held to be true, provide us with moral obligations by force of logical necessity. If, for example, the sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis demonstrate that children who are subject to abusive relations at the hands of their carers (or others) will grow up as unhappy, flawed, dependent and sometimes abusive personalities, the conclusion must follow that such abusive relations are wrong, and the task must be to eliminate them from social life. It makes no sense to assert that children have basic emotional needs that must be met if they are to become productive and happy adults, but then to inquire whether one ‘ought’ to ensure that this happens.

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Thus, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences, if they are doing their job, must be inherently and unavoidably critical of at least aspects of their objects of study. To diagnose an ‘is’ that is detrimental to human self-knowledge or self-emancipation, and which is an unneeded determination of human unenlightenment and unfreedom, is necessarily to specify an ‘ought’ (a new state of affairs that replaces these unneeded determinations with needed ones). In other words, descriptive and analytical accuracy in social science is necessarily supportive of evaluative judgements about the rights and wrongs of social and cultural forms. Indeed, in certain circumstances, where ‘particular institutions and false beliefs about them may be in a functional relation, such that the false beliefs serve to preserve the institutions that they are about, . . . propound the truth is not just to criticize, but to undermine the institution’.27 Not only is social scientific knowledge necessarily critical or evaluative of its objects but, inasmuch as it is, it is also corrosive of these objects as well. For example, to criticize the wage-form is to criticize an institution that secures acquiescence to class exploitation by disseminating the false belief that wages are commensurate to the real value of the commodities that wage-labourers produce for their employers. Insofar as such a diagnosis undermines the ideology of a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, it may contribute to proletarian struggles for abolition of the wages system. Bhaskar’s theory of explanatory critiques (moral realism) presupposes, I think, ethical naturalism. As I have argued elsewhere: The simple fact that human beings have basic material needs (i.e. for sufficient food, clothing, shelter, hygiene, sexual relations, leisure, voluntary or ‘free’ social intercourse, fellowship and identity with their own kind, ‘breadth and variety of activity’, ‘fresh air and sunlight’, health and safety at the workplace, etc., to ensure their psychological and physical ‘wellbeing’), and thereby possess interests in ensuring that these needs are met, supplies them with urgent imperatives to modify or even overthrow those hierarchical or unegalitarian (i.e. class-divided) social relations (and attendant vested social interests) which retard or deny all of them.28 Critical realist Bhaskar, in common with Marx, would not affirm that basic human needs and interests are reducible simply to a ‘biological substratum’, definable in terms of access to those material necessaries (of food, clothing and shelter, etc.) which ensure human survival. On the contrary, critical realist Bhaskar would say, with Marx, that these are developed socially and historically, as the productivity of human labour is built up over successive generations. From this perspective, human needs and interests are those which ensure the physical and psychological well-being of the subject, and this well-being is always defined by cultural standards, which are themselves determined objectively by the level of development of social labour, and the degree of welfare and self-autonomy this allows individuals to reasonably expect from the societies to which they belong. Now these historically generated human needs and

Critical realism and dialectic 19 interests are not mere artificial socio-cultural wants or desires. This is because, inasmuch as social relations are capable of sustaining a level of economic output which is capable of improving the life-chance of the entire societal community, it is perfectly acceptable to regard the continuing frustration of these by vested social interest groups as a denial of real needs and interests. Such constraints on human freedom would be socially and materially unneeded, because they are not determined by natural fetters (e.g. insufficiency of resources). Rather, they are determined by social structures and social practices that are organized in ways which preserve the power and privileges of superordinate classes or elites at the expense of the life-chances of subordinate groups or classes. Such elite groupings or classes are, as Marx demonstrates, invariably the beneficiaries of mechanisms of class exploitation – the appropriation of surplus labour or surplus value from those whose labour generates productive wealth. This is how they obtain for themselves a ‘surplus’ over and above their objective human and social needs (as these are defined by elementary survival needs plus those average cultural and welfare entitlements made possible by the level of economic production of society). For this reason, such social practices and structures are morally wrong, and objectively so, and it should therefore be the task of critical theory to undermine their ideological legitimations and articulate the kinds of political practices required to absent them. By contrast, the social struggles of the oppressed and exploited against such structures and their beneficiaries are morally right. These are, objectively, ethico-political ‘right-action’. Thus, Bhaskar’s theory of explanatory critiques (developed within the framework of critical realism) is logically dependent on the philosophical affirmation of the material reality of human-being-in-nature. This is made quite specific where Bhaskar elaborates dialectic as the ‘pulse of freedom’ on the terrain of his dialectical critical realist system. This ethical naturalism underpins Bhaskar’s evaluative realism (or moral realism). By evaluative realism I mean a philosophical position which rightly affirms that normative and political judgements, like scientific ones, are capable of being rationally adjudged right or wrong, true or false, objective or ideological. By ethical naturalism I mean the philosophical position that such judgements can be made by virtue of the fundamental nature of humanity and its natural relations with the rest of the world. As I put it in my Marxism and Realism, Bhaskar’s evaluative realism ‘provides an ethical basis for championing the struggles of the oppressed and exploited against their oppressors and exploiters (a naturalistic principle of justice)’.29

Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism Bhaskar has always defined himself as a philosopher of the left, and in the past he has made no secret of his Marxist sympathies. He has identified his role as contributing to the project of human emancipation by providing the New Left with better philosophy. This was central to his work prior to his ‘dialectical turn’ of the 1990s. But Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom (1993), which marked the preservative sublation of Bhaskar’s critical realist system within his dialectical

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critical realist system (and is regarded by many as Bhaskar’s finest accomplishment to date), makes this commitment quite explicit. This situates Bhaskar’s work within the dialectical tradition of Hegel and Marx, and attempts to develop a materialist diffraction of dialectic which is broadly consistent with Marx’s own theoretical and methodological commitments. The stated aim of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist project is extraordinarily ambitious. This is basically threefold. First, the ‘dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism – understood as consisting of transcendental realism as a general theory of science and critical naturalism as a special theory of social science’. Second, ‘the development of a general theory of dialectic . . . which will . . . be capable of sustaining the development of a general metatheory for the social sciences, on the basis of which they will be capable of functioning as agencies of human self-emancipation’. Finally, ‘the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of western philosophy, in its various (including hitherto dialectical) forms . . . [that is] capable . . . of casting light on the contemporary crisis of socialism’.30 All of this was to be achieved primarily through the ‘nonpreservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic’31 and the preservative sublation of Marxian dialectic. Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom thus offered the prospect of providing ‘a philosophical basis for Marxian social theory consistent with Marx’s own undeveloped methodological insights’32 and of philosophically under-labouring a genuinely emancipatory socialist political project. In Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom, Bhaskar sets himself the task of reinterpreting and reconstructing critical realism as a system of dialectical philosophy, which he believes is necessary to establish it as a thoroughgoing critical and emancipatory discourse. His starting point in this task is a comprehensive critique of the irrealist dialectics of Hegel. For Bhaskar, the principal difficulty of Hegel’s logic is its eradication of the dualism of thought and reality, of subject and object, by means of ‘a complete and self-consistent idealism’, which vindicates ‘the identity of being and thought in thought’. Hegel, says Bhaskar, conceives of dialectic as a ‘logical process . . . of reunification of opposites, transcendence of limitations and reconciliation of differences’:33 From the achieved vantage point of (positive) reason the mutual exclusivity of opposites passes over into the recognition of their reciprocal interdependence (mutual inclusion): they remain inseparable yet distinct moments in a richer, more total conceptual formation (which will in turn generate a new contradiction of its own). It is the constellational identity of understanding and reason within reason which fashions the continually recursively expanding kaleidoscopic tableaux of absolute idealism . . . Dialectic . . . is . . . the process by which the various categories, notions or forms of consciousness arise out of each other to inform ever more inclusive totalities until the system of categories, notions or forms as a whole is completed.34 Enlightenment is thus a process of negating negation, and it culminates in the ‘achieved constellational identity’ of subject and object in consciousness, as

Critical realism and dialectic 21 thought finally grasps the world as rational totality, as part of itself, which exists as rational totality in order to enable philosophical self-consciousness to be achieved. The unification of subject and object is, then, simply the process by which Reason becomes self-conscious. This constitutes the telos of Hegel’s system, the historical moment where totality becomes ‘constellationally’ closed or completed.35 For Hegel . . . truth is the whole, the whole is a process and this process is reason. . . . Its result is reconciliation to life in (Hegelian) freedom. Error lies in one-sidedness, incompleteness and abstraction. Its symptom is the contradictions it generates and its remedy their incorporation into fuller, richer, more concrete, inclusive, englobing and highly mediated conceptual forms.36 The chief problem with Hegel’s method, argues Bhaskar, is that it rides roughshod over the ontological reality of stratification and emergence, which the ‘first wave’ of his critical realist philosophy was concerned with demonstrating. In effect, Hegel’s dialectic parcels itself out by resorting to ‘cognitive triumphalism’. ‘Cognitive triumphalism’, says Bhaskar, involves postulating the identity of being and consciousness, thought and existence. But this identity is possible only given Hegel’s ‘anthropomorphic’ conception of knowledge (i.e. his assumption that the totality of strata are in principle fully knowable), and his imposition of an artificial closure on totality (to allow the possibility of a correspondence of knowledge and reality once the former has ‘caught up’ with the latter). Bhaskar wishes to show that the realist concepts of stratification and emergence cannot support Hegel’s notion of a closed totality, this undermining his identity of subjective and objective dialectics. For Bhaskar, by contrast, ‘[g]ood totalities are . . . open; bad totalities are . . . closed . . . the exact opposite of Hegel’s point of view’.37 But, says Bhaskar, ‘the non-identity of subject and object ensures that there is no reason why all being must be conceivable being, let alone why all being must be conceived of already. The fact that the cosmos is an ‘ “open totality” ensures that there is always the possibility, indeed likelihood, of newly emergent strata (most importantly, the possibility of new social structures brought about by human agency), so that reality is forever incomplete and inherently impossible to grasp fully’. Bhaskar’s critique (whatever the merits of his interpretation of Hegel) thus lends support and real theoretical content to the key term of materialist dialectic: the unity-in-difference of being and consciousness. For Bhaskar, because strata are ‘equal members of the same hierarchy, [they have] an aspect of unity (dualism or pluralism is rejected)’; at the same time, because ‘the strata are not the same as, nor reducible to, one another . . . they have an aspect of difference (reductionism is rejected)’.38 By contrast, cognitive triumphalism, argues Bhaskar, involves reducing the world to a non-hierarchical flat space with fixed or determinate boundaries and dimensions, calling to a halt the ongoing process of determinate negation in physical and social systems. This denies the existence

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of ‘multiple totalities’ and of the openness and incompleteness of each of these, and can lead to the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of treating questions about knowledge and questions about the world as identical, thereby reducing ontology to epistemology.39 Yet Hegel’s cognitive triumphalism is logically internally questionable as well as insecure on substantive theoretical grounds, says Bhaskar. For Hegel, ‘truth consists in totality and the conformity of an object to its notion’. This being the case, Hegel ought to accept that ‘the concept of an open totality must be more true (complete and adequate) than the concept of a closed totality, because it is more comprehensive, englobing and contains the latter as a special case’.40 But Hegel’s view is exactly the opposite, claims Bhaskar. Thus Bhaskar’s attribution to Hegel of a ‘principle of identity’, interpreted as the view that there must be no discrepancy between thought and its objects, stands in contradiction to the rational unfolding of Hegel’s conceptual dialectic. Logically, the structures of reality have to be grasped as ‘open-ended’, if Hegel’s ‘progressivist’ conceptualization of dialectic as the movement towards a richer, fuller, more universal philosophical consciousness is to be upheld. Bhaskar’s dialectic Bhaskar’s dialectic has a number of fundamental features that are especially worthy of note. First, Bhaskar rejects the ‘traditional’ (Hegelian?) understanding of dialectic as the linear triadic process of negation (thesis–antithesis–synthesis), though he does not explicitly identify this understanding with Hegel. Bhaskar wishes to break with the view that dialectic is simply about the ‘law’ of the interpenetration of opposites in a given structure or system, which leads to their preservative sublation in a higher totality (a new structure or system). Instead Bhaskar argues that ‘dialectical processes and configurations are not always sublatory (i.e. supersessive), let alone preservative’. Nor is dialectic necessarily characterized by opposition or antagonism. On the contrary, often dialectical processes and configurations are characterized by ‘mere connection, separation or juxtaposition’.41 As Bhaskar puts it, dialectical mechanisms and configurations are ‘[a]nything from any relation between differential elements to the absenting of constraints on the absenting of absences, or ills’.42 At the most abstract level, then, Bhaskar wishes to grasp dialectic as ‘any kind of interplay between differentiated but related elements’.43 But, more concretely, he wishes to define dialectic as a specific kind of process or configuration, the logic or dynamic of which is a function of its structure. Dialectic is structure-in-process and process-in-structure by virtue of the interconnections and oppositions which bring about the elaboration or transformation of a given system or totality or of some or more of its elements. Thus, it follows that dialectical thinking is ‘the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections’.44 Second, although Bhaskar recognizes that Hegel describes reality as a ‘differentiated totality’, his view is that the idealist and teleological logic of Hegel’s

Critical realism and dialectic 23 dialectic ends up denying this in practice. ‘Difference’ is subordinated to ‘unity’ in Hegel’s system. Now Bhaskar wishes to reverse this order of priority. As Andrew Brown points out, for Bhaskar, given that each stratum is constituted by its own sui generis causal powers (and liabilities), which can be adequately conceptualized in isolation from any concept of the root stratum, it follows that ‘in reality there is nothing present in the emergent stratum connecting it to the root stratum. Because of this . . . it is the aspect of difference that requires emphasis within the critical realist ontology’.45 Third, despite Bhaskar’s powerful – though arguably sometimes misplaced – attack on Hegel’s system (which, aside from the polemic against Hegel’s cognitive triumphalism, ontological monovalence and attendant theory/practice inconsistency, also rips into Hegel’s monism, his ‘logicisation of being’, his ‘mysticism’, his ‘preservative sublationism’, his ‘centrism’, his ‘primal squeeze’ and other things besides),46 he nonetheless wishes to preserve the ‘rational core’ of Hegel’s dialectic.47 This is Hegel’s notion that dialectical process is essentially expressive of the logic of negation. Bhaskar wishes to grasp ‘negative dialectics’ as most generally the ‘absenting of absence’,48 and most specifically as ‘the absenting of constraints on absenting absences or ills’.49 Bhaskar points out that the rational kernel of Hegel’s dialectic is its grasp of scientific development and conceptual thought generally as expressive of the logic of negating negativity (or absenting absence on Bhaskar’s gloss). But Bhaskar regards both subjective and objective dialectics as being characterized by the absenting of absence. Thus, although Bhaskar distinguishes between conceptual, social and natural dialectical processes (and their various subsets), he nonetheless regards all of these as energized by the logic of absence or negation. Ontologically, the process is synonymous with social and natural geo-history. Epistemologically, the process is synonymous with progress in philosophical and theoretical thought, particularly the logic of scientific discovery. Normatively-practically, the process is precisely ‘the axiology of freedom’. Finally, Bhaskar wishes to both substantiate and radicalize this Hegelian insight. This he does by defining the central or basic dialectical category as ‘real determinate absence or non being’.50 ‘Negativity’, for Bhaskar, is thus grasped as ‘the linchpin of all dialectics’. He makes the claim that his ‘is the only system of dialectical philosophy . . . to sustain an adequate account of negativity . . . and [therefore] of dialectic itself’.51 But this absence or negativity is not simply a property of conceptual thought (or rather its incompleteness), but of the ontological status of reality itself. Bhaskar is against what he calls ‘ontological monovalence’, which he defines as a ‘purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of reality’.52 For Bhaskar the necessity of absence or non-being (‘negative dialectics’) is given by the open-ended nature of reality. Without absence or negativity there can be no dialectic, he argues. If negativity or absence were entirely cancelled out by positive being, the dialectic would cease, and with it change, development, evolution, emergence, leaving us with Hegel’s ‘constellationally’ closed totality (‘endism’). At first sight, charging the founder of modern dialectics with ontological

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monovalence is logically indefensible. But, if one accepts Bhaskar’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, his claim can be substantiated. As Andrew Collier puts it: ‘Hegel’s conception is [that] what appears to be reality contains (logical) contradictions, and therefore can’t ultimately be reality at all, but mere appearance’.53 On Bhaskar’s view, Hegel’s negation of the negation eventually parcels itself out with the eventual historical reunification of subject and object. Hegel’s ‘master concept which drives his dialectics on (for the most part teleologically) – lack or absence . . . – is not preserved within his system. . . . Positivity and self(-identity), the very characteristics of understanding, are always restored at the end of reason’.54 So Hegel’s ‘absenting of the notion of absence . . . checks genuine change, betrays the positivity of absolute idealism, and renders Hegel vulnerable to . . . ontological monovalence’.55 For Hegel, there was history, but in capitalist modernity there is no longer. Positive being reigns supreme. Argues Bhaskar, ‘the chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialise and detemporalise being’.56 Thus, Bhaskar would claim for Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom that it marks a decisive break with the dominant tradition in philosophy, commencing with Parmenides, which treats reality as entirely positive being. Bhaskar identifies ontological monovalence as the key philosophical error that Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is concerned to combat, just as the epistemic fallacy was the key target of his earlier work in its pre-dialectical critical realist mode. Now, for Bhaskar, ‘negativity is a condition of positive being’.57 Thus absence or non-being is ontologically fundamental or prior to presence or being: If a totally positive material object world – a packed world without absences – is impossible, there is no a priori reason to exclude the opposite – namely a total void, literally nothing. Negativity is constitutively essential to positivity, but the converse does not follow. . . . Non-being is a condition of possibility of being. No non-being is a sufficient condition of possibility of being. But there is no logical incoherence in totally no being . . . if there was an originating Absolute, nothing would be its being or form.58 Indeed, Bhaskar even goes so far as to say that non-being or absence is an ocean, whereas being and presence are merely the ripple on its surface. Real determinate absence or negativity energizes the struggle for presence or positivity.59 This is the essence of dialectic. Bhaskar here also usefully distinguishes between three types of negation – ‘ “real negation”, “transformative negation” and “radical negation” ’. Of these, ‘the most basic is real negation’, which denotes a wide range of things, including an ‘absence from consciousness (e.g. the unknown, the tacit, the unconscious)’, or ‘an entity, property or attribute (e.g. the spaces in a text) in some determinate space-time region’, or ‘a process of mediating, distancing or absenting’. Bhaskar sees real negation as the motor of dialectic, of which the other

Critical realism and dialectic 25 modes of negation are subsets. ‘Transformative negation refers to the transformation of some thing, property or state of affairs. Such a transformation may be essential or inessential, total or partial, endogenously and/or exogenously effected.’ This is a particular kind of real negation, though not all real negations are transformative. Such processes ‘involve the cessation or absenting of a preexisting entity or state’. These seem to fit the bill in accounting for processes of stratification and emergence generally, though here it seems to me that the negations are inherently sublative. Finally, radical negation ‘involves the auto-subversion, transformation or overcoming of a being or condition’, and is a special case of transformative negation, and therefore of real negation.60 This is negation as self-transformation. This mode of negation appears to fit the bill in accounting for processes of internally generated or ‘organic’ development or evolution, such as the dialectic of life or consciousness. Bhaskar’s account of negativity provides the basis of his analysis of contradiction. Bhaskar argues that the ‘concept of contradiction may be used as a metaphor (like that of force in physics) for any kind of dissonance, strain or tension’. Bhaskar identifies several different types of contradiction. The nodal meaning of contradiction ‘specifies a situation which permits the satisfaction of one end or more generally result only at the expense of another; that is, a bind or constraint’. The concept of ‘internal contradiction’ refers to a ‘double bind or self-constraint (which may be multiplied to form a knot). In this case a system, agent or structure, S, is blocked from performing with one system, rule or principle, R, because it is performing with another, R; or, a course of action, T, generates a countervailing, inhibiting, T. R and T are radically negating of R and T respectively’. Bhaskar sees such internal contradictions as essential to the possibility of emergent entities and of change as a self-implementing process inherent to its bearer. The concept of ‘external contradiction’ refers us to ‘the laws and constraints of nature (such as the speed of light), to be established by the mere fact of determinate spatio-temporal being’.61 By ‘external contradictions’, then, Bhaskar would appear to have in mind the limiting conditions or binds imposed on human beings and societies by force of natural necessity. In terms of society, the concept may perhaps also usefully refer to the inter-relations that exist between structures of a given social system or social formation, insofar as these are not relations of mutual presupposition (i.e. internal and necessary connections between elements of an institutional whole), but insofar as these entail mutual incompatibilities or strains between elements of the total system. But, in fact, these can be said to be simultaneously external and intrinsic contradictions: intrinsic insofar as these are strains or incompatibilities between the constitutive structures of a unitary social system (e.g. those between capitalism and liberalism’s own legal and political norms of ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’); external insofar as each constituent structure of a social system (economic, political, religious, educational, etc.) is constituted and defined by a specific configuration of roles, rules, norms and positions, which are mutually antagonistic.62 The concept of ‘formal logical contradiction’ refers to a ‘type of internal contradiction,

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whose consequences for the subject, unless the terms are redescribed and/or the discursive domain is expanded, . . . is axiological indeterminacy’63 – i.e. the lack of rational grounds for action. The concept of dialectical contradiction is also a species of internal contradiction, though of a different kind. This ‘may best be introduced as a species of the more general category of dialectical connections’.64 Dialectical connections require us to think in terms of ‘entity relationism’.65 These ‘are connections between entities or aspects of a totality such that they are in principle distinct but inseparable’. These are relations of existential presupposition, of intra-action rather than interaction, involving the permeation of co-constituents within a relationship or configurational whole. But dialectical contradictions, although possessing all of these features of dialectical connections, ‘are also opposed, in the sense that (at least) one of their aspects negates (at least) one of the other’s, or their common ground or the whole, and perhaps vice versa, so that they are tendentially mutually exclusive, and potentially or actually tendentially transformative’.66 Dialectical contradictions may be radical or transformative, depending on whether these negate the source of the existential incompatibility between elements of the totality or the common ground of the totality itself, or whether these accommodate or inform processes of dynamic restructuring which can be contained within a given totality or which do not sublate its common ground. Bhaskar and Marxian dialectic The moment of transition of Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom from critique of Hegelian dialectic to articulation of a system of dialectical critical realism begins with Bhaskar’s account of Marxian dialectic. Bhaskar endorses much of Marx’s critique of Hegel, this constituting the starting point of his own critique of Hegel and ‘dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism’.67 Bhaskar says that in Hegel contradictions are resolved or cancelled by being ‘retrospectively redescribed as moments of a transcending totality’, therefore being resolved in thought. Ultimately objective dialectical contradictions are dissolved into subjective logical contradictions, which are then transcended by virtue of progress in conceptual thought (the ‘logicisation of being’). This means that ‘Hegelian dialectic . . . is never simultaneously dialectical and contradictory’.68 Marxian dialectic does not make this mistake, says Bhaskar. Materialist ‘dialectical contradictions . . . such as those identified by Marx in his systematic dialectics, describe (dialectical), but do not suffer from (logical), contradictions. . . . The practical resolution of the contradiction here is the non-preservative transformative negation of the ground’ of the internally relational but ‘tendentially mutually exclusive’ totality of which they are a part,69 this requiring the intervention of practical human agency in the social and material worlds. Marx’s critique of Hegel thus opens up the possibility of a ‘materialist diffraction of dialectic’, i.e. the articulation of a pluriform dialectic, unfolding at various levels of conceptual thought and objective reality. This being the case,

Critical realism and dialectic 27 Bhaskar’s ‘four levels’ of dialectical critical realism are ‘perhaps best seen as four dimensions of this diffracted dialectic, each with its own distinctive concepts, scientific applications, and philosophical problems’.70 But Bhaskar’s plural dialectic, though starting from Marx’s own diffracted dialectic, is a far more elaborate and complex proliferation of concepts and applications than anything in Marx or Marxism, and involves the working of these into a unified philosophical system. Before examining the conceptual structure of dialectical critical realism, and in order to better grasp its relationship with Marxism, it is necessary to briefly recap the basic nature of Marxian dialectic. In the next chapter I argue that materialist dialectics, as developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, are based upon certain fundamental principles of Hegel’s dialectic that are defensible, yet at the same time claims to transform the manner of the application of these Hegelian concepts, in such a way that it is correct to speak of an ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s dialectic. There I will argue that the ‘rational core’ of Hegel’s dialectic, for classical Marxism, is precisely the fundamental principles of ‘totality’, ‘mediation’, ‘transformative change’ and ‘contradiction’, which constitute the theoretical foundations of the Hegelian system. I will show that these can be seen at work in the methodological framework that informs all of the theoretical positions and specific explanatory hypotheses of Marx and Engels’ body of work, and are also manifested in Lenin’s and Trotsky’s philosophical commentaries on the nature of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic, and specific applications of materialist dialectic to problems of Marxian theory and socialist politics. But here I will consider a single example: Marx and Engels’ ‘dialectic of labour’.71 The basic theoretical structure of Hegel’s dialectic is clearly visible here. On the one hand, Marx argues that the relationship between human beings and their sensuous physical environment has to be grasped as a contradictory totality, a unity of opposites. The unity is derived from the fact that nature is the ‘inorganic body’ of human thought and action, with which human beings ‘must remain in continual interchange’ if they ‘are not to die’, humanity being ‘a part of nature’.72 The opposition is derived from the fact that, although human consciousness is a product of nature, it is nonetheless a qualitatively distinct part of nature, by virtue of its power to reflect upon and transform nature in the service of human needs, and because it must still encounter the world as an objective power, as a set of circumstances which confront and constrain thought and action from without.73 On the other hand, this contradictory totality, which constitutes the relationship between human subjects and objective conditions, is a dynamic one, in continual interaction and development. This is because collaborative labour on the material world, in the service of human needs and interests, mediates the two poles, bringing thought into closer correspondence with its objects, combining materiality and consciousness as conscious practice, thereby transcending, without harmonizing, the abstract polarities represented by both sides of this existential contradiction. In the next chapter I will make a number of points about the nature of Marxian dialectics. First, I will show that these are not (contrary to the claims of

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many critics) ‘endist’, ‘stageist’, ‘teleological’ or ‘historicist’. Second, I will also demonstrate that these are neither reductive nor monistic. That is to say, these are pluriform, a materialist diffraction of dialectic, in the Bhaskarian sense. Finally, I will show materialist dialectic derives enormous explanatory power from a precise, flexible, yet remarkably uncomplicated configuration of dialectical categories (as listed above). Thus, simplicity (as far as is possible in dialectical analysis!) is combined with excellent explanatory reach and circumnavigation of the fundamental errors that Bhaskar would attribute to Hegelian dialectic (including ontological monovalence, cognitive triumphalism, the epistemic fallacy, teleological determinism, etc.). If I might briefly state in advance the argument of later chapters (2, 5), these features are most obviously true of Marx’s socio-historical materialism and Engels’ dialectical materialism. The 1859 Preface of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, for example, manifestly does not speak of relations of monocausal determination between base and superstructure or between forces of production and relations of production, but instead speaks the language of ‘correspondence’, ‘conditioning’, rootedness and structural interdependence,74 all of which is consistent with a critical realist reading of social processes.75 In Engels’ Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring, objective and subjective dialectics are grasped as unified but distinct properties of being, and objective dialectical processes and configurations do not constitute a uniform substance, but unfold relatively autonomously at a variety of different levels, in accordance with the distinctive relational properties of their objects or structures. According to Marx and Engels, the dialectic of capitalist modernity involves multiple configurations and contradictions;76 the dialectic of society is irreducible to the dialectic of life; and the dialectic of life is irreducible to the dialectic of inorganic matter.77 These are especially important points to bear in mind as we consider the efficacy of Bhaskar’s radicalization/transformation/overreach of materialist dialectic. What is added to Marxian philosophy by Bhaskar’s highly complex dialectical critical realist system that it previously lacked? And does the analytical and theoretical pay-off of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, in terms of the benefits its elaborate proliferation of dialectics provide for the social researcher, render it philosophically indispensable to Marxian social theory and emancipatory socialist politics? This is the claim Bhaskar would make for Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. Before addressing this issue, however, it is necessary to grasp how Bhaskar’s diffraction of dialectic articulates at the distinct levels of his dialectical critical realist system. The four levels of dialectical critical realism Bhaskar constructs his dialectical critical realism on the basis of his critique of Hegel’s dialectic of identity, negativity and totality. These Hegelian concepts are replaced with his own reworked dialectical concepts of non-identity, negativity, totality and transformative agency. These are mapped onto the ‘four levels’ of

Critical realism and dialectic 29 dialectical critical realism. The ‘first moment’ (1M) basically corresponds to the key concepts of critical realism (stratification, emergence, the non-identity of thought and being, systemic openness, etc.). The ‘second edge’ (2E) ‘is the abode of absence – and, most generally, negativity’.78 This entails the remodelling of 1M concepts ‘in the light of dialectical categories such as negativity, negation, becoming, contradiction, process, development and decline, mediation and reciprocity’.79 Bhaskar argues that this ‘dialectical moment’ is necessary to impart dynamism and movement to the relatively static or synchronic concepts of critical realism and to situate processes of change spatially and temporally. This is the ‘reassertion of the geo-historicity of being, of tense and place as irreducible and spatio-temporality as real, of the tri-unity of space, time and causality in tensed spatializing process, of emergent, divergent, possibly convergent, causally efficacious spatio-temporalities and rhythmics, of the constitutive presence of the past and outside’.80 The ‘third level’ (3L) corresponds to ‘totality’ and ‘totalising motifs’. The concept of totality denotes ‘intra-actively changing embedded ensembles, constituted by their geo-histories . . . and their contexts, in open potentially disjointed process’.81 And the ‘internal and intrinsic connectedness of phenomena deduced from the dialecticization of 1M at 2E reveals the implicit need for totalising motifs which can theorize totality . . . and constellationality’.82 This gives rise to the ‘fourth dimension’ (4D): ‘the zone of transformative agency’,83 ‘the unity of theory and practice in practice’.84 This is the process of human practical engagement in the world, in society and nature, which also mediates the poles of consciousness and being, bringing thought into a ‘lived relation’ with the world, thereby transcending (though without harmonizing) the abstract polarities represented by subject and object. Here Bhaskar discusses the range of erroneous interpretations of this ‘zone’ (physicalism, idealism, dualism, reification, fetishism, commodification), the classical errors of social theory, and the conceptual means of their resolution, which hinges on synchronic emergent powers materialism at the level of subject and the dialectic of structure and agency at the level of society. The interface between (3L) and (4D) can also be interpreted as the ‘moment’ of ‘dialectical critical naturalism’, the analysis and theorization of human society as unity-in-difference, and maps on to Bhaskar’s famous transformational model of social action. Bhaskar first introduced the transformational model of social action in The Possibility of Naturalism. This is Bhaskar’s basic critical realist ontology for the social sciences. According to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action, social forms (institutions, roles, positions, belief-systems, etc.) are legitimate objects of scientific knowledge, because they are autonomous of the human agents that reproduce them through their activity, and because they possess their own causal efficacy. These properties (autonomy and causality) secure the objects of the social sciences as real. This autonomy of social forms does not consist of activity-independence, but rather of their anteriority or pre-existence to any specific passage of human interaction across time and space. Bhaskar’s argument is that human agents never create society, but

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always find it ready-made, thus reproducing or transforming it through their interaction: Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. . . . Society . . . provides necessary conditions for intentional human action, and intentional human action is a necessary condition for it. Society is only present in human action, but human action always expresses and utilizes some or other social form. . . . People do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism).85 So too is the problem of hydraulic social determinism avoided, on Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action. This is because social structures are conceived ‘as in principle enabling, not just coercive . . . irreducible to their effects, and yet . . . only present through their effects’.86 Thus, for Bhaskar, the transformational model of social action demonstrates the falsity of the three dominant non-realist social ontologies: Model (I) individualism (Weber); Model (II) collectivism (Durkheim); and Model (III) phenomenology (Berger). Individualism fails, because it denies that ‘the material presence of society  persons and the (material) result of their actions’,87 so that there are only human actions and no social conditions of actions. Collectivism fails, because it withholds intentional agency from human beings, attributing causality solely to the being of society, so that there are social conditions but no human actions. Phenomenology fails, because it sees both society and individual agents as different sides of the dialectic of ongoing socio-cultural practices, so that social conditions and human actions are simply conflated or confused (individuals being constituted by means of ‘internalization’ of society and society being constituted by means of the ‘externalizations’ of individuals). Contrary to these ontologies, for critical realism, the task of social science should not be to analyse individuals or groups, but to explore the relations between individuals and groups, and the relations between these relations (structures and systems of structures). Thus, the transformational model of social action went hand in hand with a relational, not collectivist or individualist or interactionist, conception of society, so that the task of the social sciences was to investigate social order as a ‘position–practice system’.88 This is not to say that the transformational model of social action, as Bhaskar elaborated it under the auspices of critical realism, is without significant problems. Notably, Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action provides no theoretical guidance as to whether or why structural transformation should prevail over structural reproduction. Given intentional agency must have its conditions or grounds in anterior structural properties of social systems, the transformational model of social action would seem to privil-

Critical realism and dialectic 31 ege societal replication over societal change. But Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist system, as this is deployed on the terrain of social ontology, deprives the second element of critique of much of its force, since his new grasp of society (in common with all natural systems) as a dialectically structured totality places the transformative capacities of agency at the centre of analysis. Insofar as structures are ‘contradictory totalities’, they will be experienced by agents in different ways, and they will distribute opposed vested interests in societal replication or transformation to differently situated agents. This ensures that social malintegration and conflict are at the empirical or phenomenal level of society reflexive responses by agents to the experienced effects of the underlying structural contradictions or incompatibilities, and societal transformation is an ever-present possibility of the flux of social interaction. More generally, Bhaskar’s task (at the interface between 3L and 4D) is to ‘generalise, dialecticise and substantialise the transformational model of social action’89 by placing it within a far richer and more englobing totality, which is sensitive to the complexities of power and conflict. This is dialectical critical realism as sociology, politics and ethics. ‘Social life, qua totality, is constituted by four dialectically interdependent planes: of material transactions with nature, inter-personal action, social relations, and intra-subjectivity’.90 This ‘naturalistically grounded four planar theory of the possibilities of social being’91 is or pertains to ‘the social cube’, a complex multi-dimensional articulation of ensembles of structure–practice–subject in process. This four-planar-social-being formula adds much theoretical content to the bare bones of the transformational model of social action. As we have seen, under the terms of the transformational model of social action, ‘social structure is a necessary condition for, and medium of, intentional agency, which is in turn a necessary condition for the reproduction or transformation of social forms’.92 The difficulty with this model is that it is rather too abstract or generalizing to offer much theoretical purchase on the complexity of structural conditioning and the problem of the construction of human material as subjects, actors and agents of social reproduction/transformation. Bhaskar’s four-planar-social-being has the promise of overcoming these ambiguities, offering a far more concrete and discriminating account of the interplay between structure ↔ practices ↔ agency, by conceiving of these processes as occurring on a number of interlinked levels or terrains. For Bhaskar, it is the dialectical interaction of agents with structural properties and/or practices on these analytically distinct planes (material transactions with nature, i.e. co-operative labour to produce subsistence; social relations between agents, i.e. as incumbents of structured ‘positions’ and ‘practices’ of the social system; interpersonal relations, i.e. interactions between individuals as subjects rather than as agents of positions or institutional roles; and intrasubjective relations, i.e. internal relations of the subject, such as the self-construction of personal and cultural identities), which constitute the social cube. Here ‘we have dialectics of unity and diversity, of intrinsic and extrinsic, of part and whole, of centrification and peripheralization, within partial totalities in complex and dislocated open process, substantively under the configuration of

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global commodification’.93 This revised transformational model of social action avoids the twin errors of reification and voluntarism in a ‘dislocated duality of structure and agency, while the relational conception of social life evades the pitfalls of individualism and collectivism alike’.94 By duality (or ‘hiatus-in-the duality’ as he calls it), Bhaskar means ‘the combination of existential interdependence . . . and essential . . . distinction’.95 Like society and nature, human subjects are grasped as stratified and relational entities, not as ‘fixed and abstractable from their environment’, but ‘as ‘existentially constituted by their rhythmics or geo-histories and the totality of their relations with other things’.96 At this level, the concept of ‘power2’ relations is central to the analysis. These are defined as ‘generalised master–slave type relationships’.97 That is, social relations which govern the distribution of material goods, political and military authority, and cultural status (e.g. stratification by class, gender, age and ethnicity). Power2 relations are those which enable human and social agents to defend their sectoral advantages by prevailing ‘against either . . . the covert wishes and/or . . . the real interests of others (grounded in their concrete singularities)’.98 This is a sociological concept of power, referring us to power as structurally rooted domination and exploitation in its various forms. These power2 relations are to be distinguished from ‘power1’ relations, which refer instead simply to ‘the transformative capacity intrinsic to the concept of agency as such’.99 The significance of Bhaskar’s distinction between power2 and power1 relations is that he wishes to establish that ‘power’ as such is not simply repressive but enabling, or literally empowering, as well. The significance of power2 relations, argues Bhaskar, is not that they grant agents the capacity to exercise control over the social and natural environments, the capacity to intervene causally in the world, which is an unqualified good, but that they organize or structure an uneven distribution of the capacity of human agents to exercise transformative power over their conditions of existence, and so restrict the autonomy and free-flourishing of people subject to their governance. Bhaskar also introduces his politico-moral theory at this stage or level of his analysis, in which ‘concrete singularity’ (the free flourishing of each) ‘is the relational condition of concrete universality’ (the free flourishing of all). This is understood as ‘an immanent and tendential possibility . . . necessitated by structural conditions . . . [though] held in check by global discursively moralised power2 relations’.100 Bhaskar argues that dialectic here is ‘the logic of freedom’.101 This is because dialectic imparts ‘a certain, if highly contingent, directionality to geo-history, presaging a society in which the free flourishing of each is the condition for the free flourishing of all’.102 This is a progressive tendential movement of humanity towards ‘eudaimonia’ or universal emancipation. How does this work? The starting point is Bhaskar’s definition of dialectic as the process of ‘absenting absence’. The next step is Bhaskar’s argument that ‘any ill can be seen as a constraint and any constraint as the absence of a freedom’.103 From this it follows that dialectic entails ‘absenting most notably of constraints on desires, wants, needs and interests’.104 At its simplest, then, the dialectic of

Critical realism and dialectic 33 freedom is powered by the interface of absence and desire, since ‘absence is paradigmatically a condition for desire’, on the grounds that desire presupposes lack.105 For Bhaskar, humanity is bestowed with the ‘inner urge’ to struggle against lack ‘that flows universally from the logic of elemental . . . need, want’, and this is manifested ‘wherever power2 relations hold sway’.106 This is because power2 relations function to negate the needs of most human beings (whether basic survival needs or those defined by wider cultural horizons), giving rise to a desire for freedom from ‘absenting ills’. This marks a welcome departure from the ‘mutual constitution’ model of structure–agency linkages of the original transformational model of social action, whereby structures govern all intentional acts of human agents. This is because it is clear here that Bhaskar wishes to invoke the enduring needs and interests of human nature to naturalistically ground resistance to those social relations that would deny or curtail or limit those needs or interests. It is this process of struggle against absence or lack that offers the tendential possibility or even geo-historical impulse of moving ‘from primal scream to universal human emancipation’.107 Since ‘every absence can be seen as a constraint, this goal of human autonomy can be regarded as implicit in the infant’s primal scream’.108 This is because the unfolding dialectic of absenting absence on freedom (as agents struggle against successive forms of power2 relations), in tandem with expanding cultural definitions of needs and wants constructed in part through this struggle, gives rise to a logic of more inclusive, englobing definitions of and aspirations towards freedom. However, it is important to note that by specifying the dialectic of freedom as a process of ‘acting’ to absent constraining ills, Bhaskar does not simply have in mind practical agency energized by material interests, but also communicative action generally, including and especially moral or ethical judgements: Insofar as an ill is unwanted, unneeded and remedial, the spatio-temporalcausal-absenting or real transformative negation of the ill presupposes universalizability to absenting agency in all dialectically similar circumstances. This presupposes in turn the absenting of all similar constraints. And by the inexorable logic of dialectical universalizability, insofar as all constraints are similar in virtue of their being constraints, i.e. qua constraints, this presupposes the absenting of all constraints as such, including constraints2 (i.e. the abolition of all master–slave-type relations) and other inequities. And this presupposes in its wake a society oriented to the free development and flourishing of each and all, and of each as a condition for all, that is to say, universal human autonomy as flourishing. . . . So the goal of universal human autonomy is implicit in every moral judgement. But, as by a valid transcendental perspectival switch, theoretical can be seen under the aspect of practical reason, the objective of the eudaimonistic society is contained in every expressively veracious assertoric utterance. Furthermore, in virtue of the quasi-propositional character of every act, it is arguably implicit in every intentional deed.109

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Bhaskar argues that ‘to act is to absent is to presuppose universal human emancipation’.110 This is tantamount to a dialectic of universalization in practical and ethical interests and consciousness, which is conceived as having a progressive directionality, precisely because agents in recognizing and acting to negate the constraining ills that blight their own ‘concrete singularity’, are objectively committed to recognizing and acting to negate the constraining ills that blight others who share common situations and a common human-social-being-in-nature (‘concrete universality’). Not to do so is to act in ‘bad faith’ and to become embroiled in a theory-practice inconsistency. Bhaskar thus naturalistically grounds his moral realism and ethical naturalism ‘in a four-planar theory of changing and changeable human nature-in-nature’,111 by virtue of which human interactions objectively presuppose trust, solidarity and mutual aid. From this point of view, ‘a core human equality based on our shared species-being concretised as equity will vastly extend the scope of the criterion of consistency (and fortiori universalizability)’.112 However, Bhaskar is quick to add that the ‘objective’ moral and practical rationality of the move from ‘primal scream’ to ‘universal human freedom’, though it translates into a powerful impulse in real geo-history, nonetheless cannot ‘predict the future course of events’.113 This is because ‘it is deeply contingent and dependent on that totalizing depth praxis, in a multiply fractured world . . . whether this is the path humanity will tread or not’.114 These four ‘moments’ or ‘levels’ of dialectical critical realism are moments of its own progressive dialecticization. ‘At the beginning of this new dialectic, there is non-identity – at the end, open, unfinished totality’,115 along with the unity-in-difference of consciousness and being. This dialectical movement is regarded by Bhaskar as the antithesis of Hegel’s dialectic, where non-identity of consciousness and being is eventually transformed into its opposite.

Critical realism and dialectical critical realism: strengths and advantages This concludes my account of the conceptual ‘nuts and bolts’ of Bhaskar’s critical realism and dialectical critical realism. I will now address the issue of the adequacy of Bhaskar’s two philosophical systems. The advantages of critical realism command greater consensus amongst Marxists than those of dialectical critical realism. I will summarize these quickly. First, Bhaskar’s philosophy of science does powerfully substantiate an account of natural reality as intransitive, transfactual and stratified, and he grasps the implications of this in terms of the possibility of acquiring rational knowledge of natural processes and mechanisms. Bhaskar’s transcendentalrealist method of argument from the possibility of experimental scientific practice does sustain his concept of reality as ‘ontological depth’, though the summation of the historical resultants of science (insofar as these have shown that ‘greedy reductionism’ of higher to lower structures fails) can be viewed as providing empirical corroboration of this thesis as well. Here Bhaskar’s ‘stratified model’ of reality is inherently corrosive of both dualism and reductionism.

Critical realism and dialectic 35 Second, Bhaskar’s differentiation of the world into the domains of the empirical, the actual and the structural is also substantiated by the practice and logic of experimental science, providing philosophical flesh to Marx’s own insight that all science would be pointless if the phenomenal form and deeper nature of real objects coincided.116 This key tenet of the critical realist system, along with the non-isomorphism of the transitive and intransitive domains, allows Bhaskar to decisively undermine the epistemological foundations of rival idealist and empiricist philosophies of science. He is right that neither idealism nor empiricism can avoid the epistemic fallacy. Third, Bhaskar’s insistence on the possibility of naturalism, on some form of methodological unity between the natural and social sciences, is defensible. Marx, the scientific realist, affirmed this kind of naturalism too, but he did not justify it epistemologically. This is exactly what Bhaskar does. He rightly argues that such naturalism is possible without reducing the concepts of the social sciences to those of the natural sciences, or seeing them as possessing an identity of method. Positivism provides an indefensible model of science, whether social or natural. This is on the grounds that the sciences are all governed by the nature of their objects (and so are naturalistic) and share a common goal of causal explanation of behaviour in terms of structural mechanisms. Fourth, Bhaskar’s judgemental realism in explanatory critiques establishes that theories and research programmes in the social sciences are inextricably value-laden, yet that this does not in the least compromise their potential objectivity. Of course, all science (natural and social) is value-laden in the sense that certain things must be valued if science is to be possible (such as truth), and scientific methods and procedures have to be found worthy (i.e. valued) as routes to truth if scientific progress is to occur. Rationality in science depends in part on its protection from those ‘external’ social values and beliefs that are harmful to the pursuit of truth, not its purging of ‘internal’ (scientific) values. But Bhaskar is making the deeper point that the social sciences, if they are doing their job as critical-evaluative discourses, are logically corrosive (by virtue of moral necessity) of certain external social states of affairs (institutions, values, practices, societies), which are unnecessary (i.e. unnatural) constraints on human freedoms, and thus supportive of contrary freedom-enhancing social states of affairs. For this reason, Bhaskar’s defence of fact-to-value judgements provides indispensable under-labouring for any emancipatory social theory, including Marx’s socio-historical materialism. Finally, Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action, articulated on the terrain of his critical realist philosophy, is also an unqualified advance for the social sciences. This is because it does indeed provide a coherent ontology of the social world that avoids the unpalatable alternatives of voluntarist idealism (individualism), structural determinism (holism or collectivism) and unstable combinations of the two (the treatment of individuals and society as constructed by cultural processes of internalization and objectification, as in Berger’s phenomenology). Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action recognizes the activity-dependence of structures, so that only human agents possess the

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causal powers that make possible societal reproduction or transformation, and structures are rightly denied the status of self-maintaining systems operating ‘behind the backs’ of human agents. At the same time, Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action recognizes the causal efficacy and hence explanatory autonomy of structures in social analysis, which is substantiated by the fact that reference to social forms is ineliminable in both the description and explanation of individual agency. Structural causality, though real, is however a long way from Durkheim’s hydraulic socialization or enculturation of ‘indeterminate’ human organisms, whereby these are moulded into agents of societal order. Instead structural causality works by placing individuals in specific ‘situational logics’ within social practices, whereby their choices or options for agency or beliefs undergo directional guidance because subject to a determinate range of liabilities and enablements erected by previously materialized human agency and practices. Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action allows society to be grasped as a dialectic between structure and interaction, not as reducible to one or other of these strata. This, I contend, adds something of enormous value to Marxian social theory at the ontological level. Neither Marx nor Engels articulated specifically (or theorized) a realist or ‘emergentist’ social ontology (though I will argue, in the next chapter, that Engels does provide a ‘first approximation’ to a realist natural ontology). That is to say, neither Marx nor Engels distinguish between the ‘structural’ and ‘activist’ properties of the modes of production, or between the modes of production as the ‘core’ or ‘fundamental’ social practice and the modes of production as a configuration of social structures which are ‘basic’ to other social structures in a social system. This is not to say that one cannot read such a distinction into their sociohistorical analyses. Marx and Engels often treat the mode of production as synonymous with the labour-process.117 But they also address it in such a way that it seems they regard it sometimes as a kind of action-environment. Thus, Marx describes how economic agents enter into ‘definite relations’ and encounter ‘specific circumstances’, which are ‘independent of their will’, not of their own making, and which correspond to a ‘definite stage’ of development of the productive forces.118 Now Marx and Engels’ focus on the dual nature of the mode of production is quite legitimate, and is implicitly realist. But it is not conceptualized, and so its realism is not explicit. They sometimes discuss the mode of production as agency, and sometimes as structure, but they do not draw out how it might be both of these things, or the nature of the connection between them. My contention is that Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action does this under-labouring work on behalf of socio-historical materialism, and so is indispensable for an emancipatory social science, such as Marxism. Turning now to dialectical critical realism. The great power of Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is that it does succeed in a number of important tasks it sets itself. (1) Dialectical critical realism succeeds in strengthening the anti-reductionist credentials of critical realism. The understanding of reality as comprised of multiple totalities, in constant movement and change, is a powerful

Critical realism and dialectic 37 ontological barrier to anti-realism and cognitive triumphalism. Thus, the critique of the epistemic fallacy is given a new slant and is considerably enriched. (2) Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism does demonstrate that the essence of dialectic (at least when applied to cognition, life and society) is the absenting of absence, and in so doing articulates an effective critique of ontological monovalence. The ingenuity of Bhaskar’s argument for treating absence as real, and as key to at least a particular class of dialectic, is that it establishes its point not by inference from perceptual criteria (I know from the fact that Pierre has been present in the café in the past that he is now absent from the café), or from causal criteria (absence as pure negativity must by definition lack causal efficacy), but rather on the grounds that it is simply impossible to conceive of agency and change other than in terms of negativity. ‘All causal determination, and hence change, is transformative negation or absenting’.119 To act is, indeed, to absent, even if this is sometimes only trivially true (as, for instance, entering the café ‘absents’ standing in the street). (3) In large measure because ‘negativity wins’ (though as we shall see only up to a point),120 Bhaskar’s dialectic does reveal the relatively static nature of critical realist concepts and breathe movement and life into them. (4) Ontologically, Dialectic does present good arguments as to why theory cannot afford to abstract from space, time and the process of change, and offers the promise of a thoroughgoing historicization of stratification and emergence; and it does invest in these processes spatial and temporal context. (5) Conceptually, a great deal of the theoretical and analytical content is interesting and challenging, particularly I would say at the levels of (3L) and (4D). Here Bhaskar does successfully argue the relevance of his reworked dialectical concepts of totality and negation and mediation to theorizing the relational stratified self (as an ‘open ended’ construct of multi-layered geo-historical and socio-cultural processes) and the transformational model of social action, of the interface between them, and of the dialectical interpenetration of consciousness and reality through practical constitutive human agency. Most notably, the remodelling of the transformational model of social action as four-planar-social-being incorporating the ‘social cube’ seems to me to draw out the multi-dimensional texture and open-ended dynamism of social being. The abstract model of structure and subject of The Possibility of Naturalism and Reclaiming Reality is refashioned as a ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’, and one in which power is rightly situated at the centre of analysis. This is a parts-whole, unity-in-diversity, process-in-product, product-in-process mode of analysis, involving the interpenetration of subject, social practices and structural properties, in concretely situated processes of geo-historical development, powered by the dialectical interface between power1 and power2 relations. A broadly progressive tendential directional logic of socio-development, and with it a tendential impulse towards universal human freedom, is advanced, which I fully endorse. This is powered by the dialectic of absenting absence (in both ideal interests and practical interests), which seems consistent with the tendential structural impulse towards eudaimonia that Bhaskar proposes. I will

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argue (Chapters 3 and 5) that the idea of tendential progressive geo-historical development is a defensible one, though this is a very unpopular idea in contemporary social theory, and that Bhaskar’s conception of it (the dialectic of universalizing freedom from constraining ills) is compatible with Marx’s theory of epochal transformative change, and indeed philosophically and ethically under-labours this in important ways. But here I will lay out the chief advantages of Bhaskar’s dialectic of universal freedom, and identify its chief weakness, before revisiting the issues in the later chapters. Bhaskar claims that ‘all the decisive moments in social life are negative’.121 This, I think, is a golden nugget of an insight, and one that connects Bhaskar’s dialectical critical naturalism (as articulating the pulse of freedom) with Marx’s theory of history. Bhaskar’s point is that, although on the terrain of four-planar-social-being, positivity and negativity are necessarily ontologically co-existent, it is negativity (constraining ills) that is the dynamic element in forcing through progressive structural or systemic transformations. ‘If a particular social cube is dialectically contradictory it may induce crisis tendencies which are (a) systemic and/or (b) structural. . . . Crises may mark nodal points or episodes and/or stimulate or release transformative mechanisms and agencies’.122 Marx would agree with all of this. But what are the distinctive structural properties of specific social systems and institutionalized transformative capacities of agents within specific social systems that would allow the possibility of collective aspirations towards and struggles for freedom by the oppressed to succeed? Bhaskar does not address this fundamental issue, because his emancipatory dialectic is not socially or historically rooted, but dwells on the terrain of an ethical politics informed by humanist philosophy. Bhaskar’s naturalistic ethics are, in fact, defensible, and they do provide emancipatory theory and politics with an important normative dimension. However, few would doubt that a fully adequate social theory capable of substantiating Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom does need to do more than address universal human interests, referring also to the socially constructed vested interests that agents acquire by virtue of their positioning and ‘situational logics’ within historical social systems. Nonetheless Bhaskar is right to make the point that it is the accumulation or deepening ‘absences’ on freedom, generated by the structural and social contradictions of social systems entering into systemic crises, which motivate the groundswell of struggles for freedom from constraining ills, and the corresponding concerted efforts by the powerless to theorize the circumstances necessary to achieve their emancipation, to move towards the ‘concrete universal’ in emancipatory theory and practice. This, of course, is a necessary condition of tendential progressive geo-historical directionality in processes of social change, even if it is not a sufficient one. In the concluding chapter I will argue that a sociological specification of the structural and systemic constraints and impulses and enablements of different modes of social being, such as that articulated by Marx’s socio-historical materialism, allows a fleshing out of Bhaskar’s dialectic as the ‘pulse of freedom’. This makes possible what Bhaskar’s philosophy

Critical realism and dialectic 39 claims to do but does not fully accomplish – a defensible articulation of geohistory as directional impulse towards eudaimonia, partially offset but not extinguished by discursively moralized power2 relations. (6) Epistemologically, Bhaskar is right to see dialectic as the ‘great loosener’.123 Here he has done Marxism a great service by decisively rebutting the influential criticism ‘which claims that the notion of dialectical contradictions in reality is incompatible with . . . formal logic, coherent discourse, scientific practice or materialism’. As Bhaskar rightly points out, ‘[t]his is not so’, for real contradictions ‘may be straightforwardly consistently described and explained [and] only if logical . . . contradictions are committed, as distinct from described, that the norm of non-contradiction is infringed’.124 Epistemologically, too, it does seem useful to grasp dynamism in conceptual ideas (whether these are philosophical or scientific or commonsense in nature) in terms of the ‘negation of the negation’ or the ‘absenting of absence’, as Hegel and Bhaskar recommend. (7) Finally, as social ontology and analytical method, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist dialectic is broadly consistent with Marxian social theory. Bhaskar’s dialectic is based foursquare on the categorical rejection of what he sees as Hegel’s idealism. The dialectic he outlines is a property of the structures of material and social reality, and of the interplay of these with human consciousness, as this is mediated by practical human agency. Dialectic is not simply the autobiography of Reason, as it strides along the path towards absolute self-knowledge. Contradictions are an objective property of the real, and these are not to be conflated with contradictions in thought or social consciousness, and nor treated as illusions sustained by the imperfections of rational knowledge. Bhaskar’s dialectic is materialist dialectic, in the Marxian sense. Nonetheless, Bhaskar’s critical realism and dialectical critical realism are not without ambiguities and difficulties, and, despite its overreaching of critical realism, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism does suffer substantial problems, by virtue of the manner of its appropriation and deployment of dialectics. I will address the ambiguities and lesser difficulties first, before then considering the more substantial problems.

Critical realism and dialectical critical realism: ambiguities, difficulties, etc. The chief difficulties with critical realism centre on the issue of evolutionary development in natural systems, and the status of the transformational model of social action and synchronic emergent powers materialism. Bhaskar’s concepts of stratification and emergence do not provide us with much purchase on the issue of the historicization of change, whether in social or physical structures. In the next chapter, I will argue that this is not a problem for Engels’ dialectical materialism, and certainly Bhaskar’s ‘dialectical turn’ is intended to overcome this shortcoming. I have already noted how the transformational model of social action appears better equipped to explain the routine reproduction of social

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forms than their transformation over time. But there is also more than a suggestion of sociological imperialism (or cultural reductionism) in the transformational model of social action. For, when addressing the role of structural properties in social systems, Bhaskar sees these as indispensable to every intentional act of human agency. This is questionable, since a good case can be made that ‘natural interaction can supply the necessary and sufficient conditions for intentionality’.125 The capacity of individuals to act intentionally and rationally is a function of subject–object interactions generally (mediated by practical interests), rather than simply of social interaction and enculturation.126 There are not only good arguments, but also obvious advantages, in favour of insisting that there are naturalistic foundations and sources of human subjectivity and agency, notably those of circumnavigating cultural relativism and defending a realist construal of knowledge. Bhaskar’s solution to the mind–body problem (synchronic emergent powers materialism) is scarcely satisfactory. He is undoubtedly correct to claim that mind is emergent from a particular complex structure of matter (the human brain and central nervous system), so that mind-states are explainable by, yet nonidentical with, brain-states. But Bhaskar does not explain how this emergent structure arose from its root structure. For that we need evolutionary (‘diachronic’) theories of mind (which theorize the selective mechanisms and pressures and advantages behind cognitive development), such as that provided by the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett.127 Such naturalistic theories also need to be linked to theories of the socio-cultural evolution of archaic and early modern Homo sapiens. This is because modern palaeoanthropology and archaeology have substantiated Engels’ argument that the hunter-forager practices of humans and their hominid ancestors made possible selection in the direction of mind and consciousness. Such traits facilitated the complex modes of co-operation and communication required to develop such an economy, and hence boosted the adaptive success of the hominids and archaic human evolutionary lines.128 Turning now to dialectical critical realism. There are a number of issues here. First, there is the question of the extent to which Bhaskar’s ‘second wave’ of realism is indispensable for Marxism, in order to provide it with the formal specification of its dialectics. Some of his individual insights and arguments are undoubtedly outstanding. But such is the high level of philosophical abstraction of Bhaskar’s work, and the bewildering array of unfamiliar concepts, positions, tropes and motifs it contains (many of which are not adequately theorized or argued), it is uncertain to what extent much of it has genuine practical utility. And this is both in terms of furnishing social analysis with methodological or theoretical guidance, and in terms of under-labouring a genuinely emancipatory political project, such as it claims to represent. Much of it seems simply superfluous (though much of it obviously is not) to the task of deploying dialectic effectively and incisively in social research or analysis.129 This certainly could not be said to be a weakness of the work of the best of the classical Marxists. Here philosophy and social theory was always disciplined

Critical realism and dialectic 41 by its ‘lived relation’ with class struggles and the international labour movement, and hence by the litmus test of political practice.130 Although Marx himself did not find the time to submit his own dialectical method to systematic analysis, and did not theorize its points of contact with and departure from the Hegelian dialectic, his social theory is nonetheless an object lesson in applied dialectics. Certainly, as a model of practical social research, it has yet to be surpassed by anything produced within critical realism. I have pointed out that Marx’s dialectic has the virtue of (relative) incisiveness and clarity. In sociohistorical materialism, for example, the model of transformative change is relatively simple, yet has tremendous explanatory power. Here the hinge connecting totality (social formations or social systems) to transformative change is the concept of structural, i.e. internal and necessary, contradictions or inversions. For Marx, transformative negations are a function of incompatibilities between internally related elements of a totality, and it is this which is the essence of dialectic. By contrast, Bhaskar’s looser understanding of dialectic as simply involving ‘any kind of interplay between differentiated but related elements’131 loses sight of what made the dialectic revolutionary for Marx and an abomination (he says) for the bourgeoisie. Why does scientific analysis have to invoke ‘dialectics’ to make sense of relatively straightforward interactional and intraactional processes in society or nature? Matters are not helped by Bhaskar’s claim that ‘there is no . . . reason why all dialectics should . . . involve contradictions, whether dialectical, logical or both’.132 Instead, Bhaskar wishes to designate the concept of ‘contradiction’ as simply metaphor for ‘any kind of dissonance or strain or tension’.133 Again, this gives little purchase on the problem of ‘transformation-inducing antagonisms between internally related aspects of a whole’,134 which for Marx was the whole point of dialectical analysis. Marx’s insight that ‘if a contradiction motivates change, it does so by virtue of the inner antagonism that it generates in the system in which it is a contradiction’, is thus diminished. As Collier rightly points out: ‘If every difference is a contradiction then everyone is a dialectician because everyone . . . recognises difference. . . . What [is] slightly regrettable [in Bhaskar’s system] is that the really valuable nut-pieces [of Marx’s dialectic] – the concepts of structural contradictions and inversions on which human emancipation depends – get rather lost in this dialectical pudding’.135 Thus, Marx’s social theory is as complex and comprehensive as it needs to be, no more. The same is true of the best work of the leading theoreticians of classical Marxism – especially Engels, but also Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács and Gramsci, and a host of lesser figures. It is instructive that even today the bulk of the more interesting and innovative work in dialectical social theory is far more influenced by Marxism than Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism.136 Engels’ dialectical materialism, though much maligned and misunderstood by philosophers and social scientists, has had and continues to have a significant impact on the thinking of a number of distinguished natural scientists,137 whereas the impact of Bhaskar’s alternative, outside a narrow academic circle of professional philosophers and social analysts, remains negligible. Indeed, even within the

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camp of critical realism, only a minority have read Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom, and even fewer profess to understand it. Part of the problem is that the book is appallingly written. As Alex Callinicos points out: Even as sympathetic a critic as Andrew Collier, who calls Bhaskar’s work ‘the most exciting development in Anglophone philosophy in this halfcentury’, admits that his recent writings have been characterised by a ‘tendency to condense complex thought into brief formulae . . . combined with a large crop of unfamiliar expressions, acronyms and semi-formalised arguments (not to speak of typographic errors and sometimes obscure syntax)’. All of this and more is true of Dialectic, where neologisms and idiosyncratic uses of familiar terms proliferate until they form what verges at times on a private language. Arguments are illustrated by figures whose frequency and complexity obscure rather than instruct. And all too often Bhaskar’s prose becomes clogged by what seems the irresistible need to say everything, to add to some specific assertion references to connected considerations and qualifications until the original point is in danger of being lost.138 The theoreticism of Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom problematizes its claim to under-labour the social sciences or provide an emancipatory critique of either capitalism or power2 relations more generally. It appears (often wilfully) inaccessible to all but the tiniest academic elite, and therefore has nothing to say to the billions who urgently require the ‘eudaimonistic society’ of which it speaks. This is a shame, because Bhaskar is right to claim that dialectic is the pulse of freedom. Today those who wish to struggle against globalized ‘master–slave-type social relations’ are more likely to draw their inspiration from the new theoreticians of the anti-capitalist movement than from Bhaskar.139 This weakness is particularly lamentable given that Bhaskar’s reason for writing Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom was explicitly political. Thus, for him, socialism is undone because the required ‘unity of explanatory critical social theory and emancipatory axiology’ has yet to be achieved. ‘This is the ultimate absence this book aims to repair’.140 However, there is more to explaining the book’s uncertain status and limited appeal than its difficult prose.141 More seriously, despite a wealth of condensed analysis, and many intriguing insights on the nature of dialectic, and despite its thoroughgoing (though largely unoriginal) critique of Hegel, too many of the arguments it contains are simply perfunctory or under-theorized, either excessively condensed or extremely brief, in the latter case often little more than scattered jottings. Overall, then, there is an unfortunate tendency to present sweeping claims, which are simply lacking in sufficient supporting arguments or illustrations, whatever one makes of their truth or falsity. For example, Bhaskar’s treatment of the way in which communication presupposes the possibility of human liberation, his demonstration of the ontological primacy of nonbeing over being, his positive argument against the denial of intransitivity, his

Critical realism and dialectic 43 argument against Leibniz’s principle of non-contradiction in being as well as thought, and against Kant’s notion of unitary time, and attempts more generally to demonstrate complex arguments with resort to cursory ‘transcendental proofs’, all of these fall into these sorts of category. Sometimes the over-compressed and sketchy character of Bhaskar’s analysis raises more questions than it answers. This is especially apparent at the level of his dialectical critical naturalism (Bhaskar’s social ontology). Here there is an element of uncertainty of focus concerning the ontological status of social structures vis-à-vis human agents, which would benefit from further clarification. Bhaskar’s description of the relationship between structure and agency in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom as duality142 at first would appear to suggest that he sees social structures, not as to a certain extent autonomous of and efficacious apart from the social activities and concepts of those subject to their influence or governance, but as existing materially only by virtue of the social agency and concepts which reproduce them. This impression is reinforced by his claim that the analysis of the interrelationship between structure and interaction in social systems requires not analytical dualism (the investigation of the interconnections between ontologically distinct realities) but ‘perspectival switches’ from one ‘side’ or ‘dimension’ of a unitary though internally differentiated whole to another (either agency-within-structure, or structure-within-agency).143 Certainly, this interpretation is not decisively rebutted in his earlier work),144 despite his claim that: ‘People and society are not related dialectically. They do not constitute two moments of the same process. Rather they refer to radically different things’.145 This is because Bhaskar also argues here that social structures ‘only exist in virtue of the activities they govern . . . and cannot be identified independently of them’ and that ‘they do not exist independently of the conceptions that the agents have of what they are doing in their activities’.146 This seems, at this stage of his intellectual journey, to be suggestive of a close affinity between Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action and Giddens’ structuration theory, the latter of which endorses a ‘simultaneity model’ of the subject–society connection, according to which structural properties and selfidentity are simply ‘two sides’ of the same coin of ongoing social practices.147 If so, however, Bhaskar’s model is not entirely adequate. The capacity of individuals to act intentionally and rationally is a function of subject–object interactions generally (mediated by practical interests), rather than simply of social interaction and enculturation.148 Structural properties (e.g. distributions of property and cultural capital) often persist in the absence of agency that would reproduce them, and despite the concerted efforts of collective social action to remove or ameliorate them (an issue I will return to shortly). This is because they are the emergent properties of the ‘dead generations’ and confront the living as pre-structured distributions relatively independent of and resistant to their will.149 Yet first impressions in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom are obviously misleading on this issue. For here the weak ontological status of structures suggested by Bhaskar’s talk of duality and ‘perspectival shifts’ (reinforced by his

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earlier formulations of the transformational model of social action) is then apparently decisively dispelled by his claim that ‘a structure may survive . . . without any human agency, and even . . . despite any human agency . . . [and] in virtue of our (conscious or unconscious) attentive or inattentive . . . inaction’.150 Bhaskar elaborates on this point in a way that marks a decisive break with Giddens’ structuration theory: The negative generalisation proper . . . recalls Adorno’s famous adage that not just theory, but the absence of theory, becomes a material force ‘when it seizes the masses’ . . . Given the presence of the past and the exterior and the depthless atomisation characteristic of bourgeois individualism, but accentuated by certain features of late- or postmodernist society, by the merest transcendental perspectival switch, structure is always going to seem dislocated from, and pre-existent to, agency. We are faced starkly with the predicament [that only] . . . the mobilisation of the totality of the globally oppressed by power2 relations can transform, rather than transfigure, this state of affairs . . . However, here again, employing a spatio-temporal perspectival switch on the negative generalisation, we can sustain the thesis of the activity dependence of social structures on the condition that they are seen as dependent upon the activity of the dead: of past as distinct from present praxis, labour or care. That is, as long as we conceive the transformational model of social action as intrinsically tensed, geo-historicized, rhythmicized.151 But this formulation, though a welcome modification of the dialectic of structure and agency of The Possibility of Naturalism and Reclaiming Reality, remains question-begging. ‘By the merest transcendental perspectival switch, structure is always going to seem dislocated from, and pre-existent to, agency’. Bhaskar here suggests that the pre-existence of structure vis-à-vis agency is illusory, an illusion shaped to some extent by alienation, ‘the depthless atomization’ of ‘bourgeois individualism’, particularly in its ‘postmodern’ stage of development. But structure does pre-exist human action in a certain ontological sense which has nothing to do with fetishism. Bhaskar’s own concession that the activitydependence of structures may be past tense, as dependent on what the dead have done, ought to admit this point. Yet Bhaskar does not draw out the implications of this conclusion. Every generation of human agents finds structure already made, no matter how far back we push the historical record. It is the inescapable fate of all social animals to be immersed in social relationships; and it is the inescapable fate of conscious social animals to live in a social world comprised in part of social structures. Indeed, the direct biological ancestors of human beings were social beings, whose agency was structurally situated. The first humans dwelt within an environment comprised of rudimentary social structures (the hunter-gatherer mode of economic and cultural life), having inherited these from their forbears.152 So, although it is correct to say that structures are activity-dependent, in

Critical realism and dialectic 45 the sense that any specific historical social structure was once produced by the doings of agents, it is wrong nonetheless to say that structures appear to be prior to agents. Paradoxically, they are simultaneously and ontologically pre-existent and activity-dependent. It is, of course, this continuous transmission of structure into agency, and of agency into structure, which renders society a dialectical process-in-product and product-in-process. But, in fact, even to say that structures are activity-dependent in this sense is still not quite right, since the very point at which social interaction becomes ‘social environment’ is the point at which the activity-dependence of structures becomes past tense. Structures were, not are, activity-dependent on those who made them, for having been fabricated by the activities of agents, they remain real and efficacious after the agents who made them have gone, and it obviously makes no sense to say that the activities of the dead are preserving or reproducing those structures originally of their own making. Of course, structures can be reproduced only by virtue of certain appropriate modes of agency conducted by the living in the longer term. But structures nonetheless can often survive without agency aimed at reproducing them, so long as this agency does not actively undermine them. Indeed, for a period of time, structures may persist in spite of agency designed to transform or overturn them, as Bhaskar now admits. In these circumstances, the paradox arises that structures may not be reproduced by the living, nor obviously by the dead, yet for a period of time continue to exercise certain causal powers that are activity-independent. There are plenty of examples of such situations. I will dwell on some ‘absences’ or ‘negatives’. There is, for example, capitalism’s damage of the natural environment, of soil erosion and ozone depletion, which may not be remediable at all, in any kind of social circumstances, socialist or otherwise. There is, for example, the impact of educational disadvantage generated by global capitalism, which today condemns millions of people throughout the world to illiteracy. This may persist for years, even a generation, despite collective efforts to overcome it, in any conceivable eudaimonic society, where its root causes in class inequality are removed. There is, for example, the effects of particular asymmetrical distributions of capital and property, which impact crucially on the life-chances of the propertied and propertyless. These distributions may be undermined steadily by the propertied through their own inertia or profligacy, but nonetheless remain efficacious in conferring advantages denied to others in the meantime, which again could persist for a generation or more. There is, for example, the capacity of the ideological legacy of absented ‘racial stratification systems’ to continue to wreak psychological damage upon millions of racists and non-racists alike. For even where their structural conditions of existence in capitalist relations of production are dissolved, racism will undoubtedly remain a denizen of the cultural system, continuing to negatively inform the attitudes of many people for years afterwards. All of this indicates the ontological reality, relative existential autonomy and causal efficacy of structures. Structures are the products of living agents, and if they are to survive, they must ‘ultimately’ be reproduced by the living. But,

46 Critical realism and dialectic having been generated by activity and concepts, they constitute properties and powers that are ‘relatively independent’ of those of the agents who made them, and of those who have to live with them, in the sense that they exert a conditional influence on the living and resist concerted collective attempts to reform or transform them. This means, I think, that the method of ‘perspectival switches’ suggested by Bhaskar will not do. Structure is not simply a different way of looking at agency (or practices), nor agency a different way of looking at structure (or practices). Structures are always prior to the activities of the living, and so to agency itself, at every stage or ‘moment’ in human social development. Nor will it suffice to appeal to the activity-dependence of social structures to justify the language of ‘perspectival switches’. As antecedent conditions of social agency, structures always have to enter immediately into any analysis of human interaction (they cannot be ‘bracketed away’). For purposes of substantive social analysis, it is a triviality that structures are not ‘self-determining’. But nor are the structures of the non-human world: all structures emerge from interactional processes sedimented at deeper and historically distanciated levels of being, and remain dependent on the continuous ongoing functioning of these processes if they are to be reproduced. Everything is activity-dependent in a certain sense, because without movement, being ceases, and negativity wins. It would be equally valid to say that without social structures (material, communicative and ideational), many of the developed properties and powers we associate with human agents, and which are necessary for complex social relations to be possible, would be radically underdeveloped (language, culture, rationality, sociality), and some even non-existent. This makes agency as much ‘structure-dependent’ as vice versa. Bhaskar is, of course, well aware of this. Yet nowhere does he even hint that the autonomy of agency from structure is simply appearance, the effect of a ‘perspectival switch’, that structures once existed without being made by agents, that structures simply ‘produce’ the doings of those subject to their influence and governance. A further difficulty of Bhaskar’s account of four-planar-social-being is that, although this has a lot more theoretical content and analytical application than the pre-dialectical version of the transformational model of social action, it is still not sufficiently stratified. To recap: Bhaskar identifies four interdependent zones of social being (material relations with nature, social relations between practices and positions, inter-subjective or interpersonal relations and intrasubjective relations). This is fine as far as it goes, but Bhaskar needs to make it clear how these planes are internally related in social systems, and especially clarify the nature of the interplay between the ensembles of structure–agency interactions that operate on the material and social planes. Bhaskar’s own concepts of ‘structure’, ‘intra-structure’ and ‘superstructure’ might cast some light on this issue, but as things stand these are far too thin to be of much practical use. Bhaskar also needs to flesh out his planes of inter-subjective and intra-

Critical realism and dialectic 47 subjective relations and theorize their interface with the plane of social relations. The trouble with Bhaskar’s treatment here is that it is lacking in theoretical or analytical purchase on the question of the processual mechanisms that comprise what Margaret Archer has aptly termed the ‘triple morphogenesis of agency’.153 This is the dynamic stratification of what I have termed the ‘interaction order’154 into distinctive levels – subjects, agents and actors. This stratified interaction order comprises distinctive causal powers (pertaining to individuals as ‘owners’ of properties of self and personal identity, as members of agential collectivities with vested interests and attendant structural capacities for bringing about social change or stability, and as institutional role-actors with attendant social identities and functions), and mediates the biological level of human-being-in-nature (objective species needs and interests) and the structural level of social relations. Without this kind of stratified articulation of the interface between the biological, interactional and structural levels of human social being, Bhaskar’s fourplanar-social-being model cannot provide enough theoretical specification of the mechanisms of systemic statics or change. Enough has now been said about the difficulties of Bhaskar’s account of fourplanar-social-being. What of the other ambiguities of his dialectical critical realist system? More seriously, there simply is not enough in the way of startling new insights into the nature and application of materialist dialectic to justify the ‘under-labouring’ status as provider of a new philosophical foundation for Marxian social theory and the social sciences generally some would claim for it (and which Bhaskar himself hints at). Three examples will have to suffice. First, we have seen already that Bhaskar deems Hegel’s dialectic inadequate, because Hegel’s cognitive triumphalism ensures that totality for him ‘is constellationally closed . . . an achieved identity’,155 meaning that the entirety of being is in principle conceivable or knowable. Bhaskar is right to reject this absolutist conception of totality (though whether this critique of Hegel hits the mark is another issue). He points out that new ‘base’ strata may yet be discovered and that higher strata will undoubtedly emerge, so the totality is never complete or conceivable in its entirety. Yet Engels also rejects the fantastic notion of a complete or closed totality, and for the same reason, because reality for him is an ensemble of open systems in continual motion and change, meaning that knowledge can only approximate to reality without ever exhausting or mirroring it. As Engels puts it: ‘From the moment we accept the theory of natural evolution all our concepts . . . correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change. On the day when concepts and reality completely coincide . . . development comes to an end’.156 Second, Bhaskar’s observation that dialectical logic cannot simply replace conventional scientific methods or formal logic, but must ‘build . . . on the later, overreaching but not transcending it, while the latter is at a loss without the former’,157 is an interesting and defensible argument. Without subjecting theory and practice to ‘dialectical overreach’, the result is invariably TINA (‘there is no alternative’) syndrome, the fabrication of ‘internally contradictory, more or less systemic, efficacious . . . ensembles . . . displaying duplicity, equivocation,

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extreme plasticity . . . and rational indeterminacy’.158 But, again, this insight does not seem radically different from Trotsky’s own view of the appropriate relationship between dialectical method, science and logic. Trotsky argued that formal logic was adequate within certain limits, but became lost in insoluble contradictions when addressing ‘more complicated and drawn out processes’,159 this often forcing the theorist to complement formal logic with arbitrary and external empirical modifications that often contradicted or broke the chain of logical concepts. The solution was a systematic interrogation and integration of abstract logic and empirical science by and through dialectical reasoning.160 Trotsky pointed out that this does ‘not replace concrete scientific analysis’. Instead it ‘directs this analysis along the correct road’.161 Third, Bhaskar contrasts Hegelian dialectic to Marxian dialectic, the latter of which is rightly treated neither as idealist nor teleological. Bhaskar argues that Marx replaces Hegel’s concept of the ‘identity of opposites’ with the concept of the ‘unity of opposites’, since this is necessary to head off the danger of either a materialist or idealist regress. As Bhaskar puts it: ‘One might be tempted to contrast here the Kantian independence, Hegelian identity and Marxian unity of opposites. . . . Marx’s dialectical contradictions cannot be said to constitute an identity, but at most a grounded unity, of opposites. . . . Marx’s concern is with the dialectical explanation and practical transformation of capitalism, not with the transfigurative redescription of, and reconciliation to . . . the existing state of affairs’.162 Bhaskar is right about Marx, of course. As Callinicos points out, Marx applies his reworked concept of the ‘unity of opposites’ to great effect in his critique of political economy. For example, in his discussion of the classical liberal political economy of John Stuart Mill, Marx argues: ‘Where the economic relation – and therefore the categories expressing it – include contradictions, opposites, and likewise the unity of opposites, he [Mill] emphasizes the aspect of the unity of the contradictions and denies the contradictions. He transforms the unity of opposites into the direct identity of opposites’.163 But the same point is a commonplace within the wider classical Marxist tradition, which Bhaskar does not acknowledge, giving the impression that his interpretation is a novel one. Engels, too, seems to prefer this formulation to the ‘identity of opposites’, referring to the ‘unity of thought and being’ and the ‘unity of nature and mind’.164 I have outlined elsewhere how his dialectic of nature negates in practice the idea that subjective and objective dialectics constitute a unitary substance or logic.165 Lenin remarked in his Philosophical Notebooks that Marxists should replace the concept of the ‘identity of knowing and being’ with the concept of the ‘unity of knowing and being’.166 And, as Rees has argued, Trotsky built his own reconstructed dialectic around this insight of Lenin’s. This, for example, is what he had to say about the matter in his Philosophical Notebooks: According to Hegel being and thinking are identical (absolute idealism). Materialism does not adopt this identity – it premises being to thought. . . .

Critical realism and dialectic 49 The identity of being and thinking . . . signifies the identity of subjective and objective logic, their ultimate congruence. Materialism accepts this correspondence of the subjective and the objective, their unity, but not their identity; in other words it does not liberate matter from its materiality, in order to keep only the logical framework of regularity, of which scientific thought (consciousness) is the expression.167 Of course, whether all of this is interpreted as a problem for Bhaskar’s enterprise depends on how one defines the purpose of his project in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. If Bhaskar intended his contribution as a systematic enrichment or development of Marxian dialectic, rather than as a dialectical reworking of Marxism, or as specifying a realist alternative to or supercession of materialist dialectic, then in this case the difficulties reduce to mere ambiguities as to the status of its relationship with Marxism. At times Bhaskar does seem to identify his role as systematically developing and enriching Marx’s ideas – hence his oftquoted reference to Marx as ‘the comet of critical realism’. But elsewhere his grandiose claim for Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom, which is that it provides the only adequate account of dialectic, cuts against this interpretation. Since it is uncertain what kind of status more generally Bhaskar wishes to attribute to his dialectical critical realist system in relation to Marxian dialectic, the misgivings I have raised appear noteworthy. Certainly, the points of contact between Bhaskar’s realist dialectics and the materialist dialectics of many leading figures of classical Marxism (as highlighted above) are not generally acknowledged by Bhaskar, this giving the impression that they are seen by him as novel to his own system. Further, despite a generally positive appraisal of Engels’ ‘three laws’ of ontological dialectic, Bhaskar is generally dismissive of dialectical materialism.168 Since Bhaskar would claim for dialectical critical realism the role of philosophically under-labouring the social sciences, and of sublating all previous dialectical philosophy,169 this does appear to hint at a rather more ambitious project than simply the systematic elaboration or justification of Marx’s materialist dialectic. After all, though methodologically undeveloped, Marx does articulate philosophical foundations of his own for socio-historical materialism, and these have undergone elaboration at the hands of other leading figures of classical Marxism, notably Engels and Trotsky. Yet Bhaskar does not identify his project as contributing to the development of this tradition of materialist philosophy (Lenin and Trotsky are not discussed at all, nor the contemporary left Darwinians, who have developed and applied Engels’ ontological dialectic in the biological sciences). Problems and defects Enough said about some of the difficulties or ambiguities of Bhaskar’s dialectic. What of the more substantial problems I alluded to earlier? There are five in particular, or so it seems to me. First, on the terrain of critical naturalism,

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Bhaskar’s over-generalizing concept of ‘master–servant-type social relations’ is simply not adequate to the task of unravelling the complex relational determinations of the various axes of social power. What is the nature of the structured relationship between the various modes of domination, for example those of class, gender and ethnicity? Are the different modes autonomous factors of social power, or are they hierarchically structured in social systems by virtue of stratification and emergence? Which modes of domination, if any, have explanatory primacy in determining the overall socio-historical trajectory of social systems? Is Marx’s base/superstructure model of structural causality in social systems of any practical analytic use in social theory? Now getting questions of this kind right is indispensable to formulating an adequate social theory and emancipatory political practice. So too is obtaining a secure theoretical grasp of the nature and efficacy of agential properties and powers, of those of social structures, and of the interrelationship between them. After all, socialist practice has often been strung between the poles of political passivity or fatalism (influenced by the economic determinism of some forms of Marxism) and political adventurism (influenced by the humanist revolt against determinism and fatalism). Kautskyism and Third Worldism are classic examples of the opposing tendencies.170 Yet Bhaskar’s exploration of power2 relations and social being more generally is far too condensed and abstract to deal with these sorts of questions and issues. Where he does refer to some of them, his treatment is rather insubstantial, consisting in assertion rather than theoretically and empirically informed argument. A central claim of classical Marxism is, I think, the proposition that modes of production and relations of production, where these give rise to asymmetrical distributions of property, give rise to forms of domination other than class, such as stratification by gender and ethnicity. My argument (elaborated especially in Chapter 4) is that Bhaskar’s own critical realist concepts of stratification and emergence invest real theoretical content in this thesis, allowing a ‘vertical’ materialist explanation of non-economic modes of domination without ‘explaining them away’ or denying them autonomous causal powers or real-world effects. This allows Marx’s base/superstructure model of society to be placed on a defensible conceptual footing. A second important claim of socio-historical materialism, which lends theoretical support to Marx’s understanding of structural causality, is that classbased relations of production play the decisive role in determining the distribution of authoritative and allocative resources, and hence defining the vested interests and life-chances of agents, in most historical social formations. I have shown too that this position is theoretically and empirically defensible.171 This thesis provides the hinge that connects up Marx’s base/superstructure model with his materialist theory of history. This allows a ‘class struggle model’ of epochal structural or systemic transformations, supporting a tendential directionality in societal development from less advanced to more advanced socioeconomic forms, such as that articulated by socio-historical materialism.172 So Marx’s ‘primacy thesis’ is certainly heuristically defensible, I would say con-

Critical realism and dialectic 51 ceptually plausible, and it can be corroborated empirically by comparative and historical sociological research. Now Bhaskar argues for neither of these positions. Yet aspects of his analysis appear compatible with a Marxian analysis of modernity under the terms of two possible formulations of the base/superstructure model of social systems: Thus in model A . . . the global capitalist economy sets the boundary conditions on the nation state, which sets the boundary conditions on civil society, which sets the boundary conditions on the family, which sets the boundary conditions on the rights of women. In model B capitalist relations of production constitute the conditions of possibility of the inter-/intranational socio-politico-economic-military order which constitutes the conditions of possibility of civil society, state and family alike.173 But Bhaskar refers to these models simply as ‘exemplifying schematisations’, and it is unclear whether he sees others as equally relevant or useful. Are these ontological claims about the structuration of contemporary societies? Or are these simply statements of heuristic acceptability in social analysis? And what of the status of hierarchical structuration mechanisms in pre-modern societies? After all, many non-Marxist sociologists are happy to accept the idea that economic mechanisms (now that these are commodifying culture and cultural and personal identities) enjoy a crucial preponderance in the ‘global village’ that was lacking in previous historical epochs. In any case, Bhaskar’s models are conceptually weak, because no theoretical content is added to the elusive notions of ‘boundary conditions’ and ‘conditions of possibility’. Aside from Bhaskar’s brief and question-begging flirtation with the possibility of a socio-historical materialist appropriation of four-planar-social-being, there is very little in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom to suggest a substantive Marxian content to his social theory. In fact, Bhaskar’s analysis of power2 relations gives no indication that he wishes to dissent from the neo-Weberian view that society is comprised of a plurality of autonomous power centres or modes of domination, none of which can be legitimately attributed any kind of explanatory primacy over the others. This, indeed, is the logical implication of his lumping together of different modes of domination under the generalizing concept of ‘master–slave-type social relations’. If this is his view, however, Bhaskar does not take the trouble to argue for it. Rather it is taken for granted. Instead Bhaskar bizarrely accuses Marx of being ‘fixated on the wagelabour/capital relation at the expense of the totality of master–slave relations . . . most obviously those of nationality, ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, age, health and bodily disabilities generally’.174 If Bhaskar is saying that the Marxist tradition has neglected generalized master–slave-type social relations, he is simply mistaken. Marx himself sketched out the rudiments of a materialist understanding of racism, and racism has received much theoretical scrutiny since, within Marxism.175 Engels attempted (more successfully than he is often given credit for) a

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materialist explanation of women’s oppression,176 and much good work has been done to build on his analysis by a number of Marxists and non-Marxists up until the present day.177 But, of course, those who accuse Marxism of ‘neglecting’ modes of domination other than class and economy normally mean something other than neglect. What they actually mean is that Marxism is wrong to posit: (1) an explanatory reduction of modes of stratification generally to modes of production and class domination; and (2) that modes of class domination have explanatory primacy in shaping political agency and hence systemic dynamics in most historical contexts. This is the point at issue, which is obscured by the language of ‘neglect’ or ‘fixation’. The unfortunate tendency within anti-Marxist social theory is to simply assume as a matter of common sense (and without much in the way of substantive theoretical argument) that asserting either (1) or (2) is tantamount to economic determinism or ‘greedy’ class reductionism. But I suppose that Bhaskar’s claim can be read innocently as simply calling attention to the fact that not all power2 relations are class relations. To do so, however, seems a little naive. After all, that this should be asserted so forcefully against Marx, in the context of the ‘retreat from class’ in the western academy and politics, and where the overwhelmingly dominant trend in social theory has asserted that class has no priority at all on the strength of the reality of plural modes of domination, seems instructive as well as unfortunate. Clearly, there is value in Bhaskar’s recognition that emancipation depends on combating and defeating all forms of domination, but this moral imperative obviously has no bearing on the issue of how the objective structuration of the various modes of domination should be analysed. Marx’s analysis of capitalism, for example, is not concerned with non-class modes of domination (such as gender or ‘race’), because these are not essential to capitalism, and could conceivably be eliminated without eliminating capitalism, though this is unlikely given the benefits they confer on capitalism. For Marx, eliminating class domination will remove the structural mechanisms that support other modes of domination, and thus make combating them an easier task.178 And, of course, Marx’s general socio-historical materialism is simply an extension or generalization of these insights to pre-modern societies. In short, then, Marx’s position is a weakness only if relations of production/structures of class domination do not have the kind of explanatory primacy in social systems specified by his theory. If Marxism is correct to specify the primacy of class relations and modes of production in constituting social systems, including other modes of domination, it is hardly a ‘fixation’ to concentrate analysis primarily on them. In Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom Bhaskar does not consider this possibility at all. Moreover, his claim that ‘religious affiliation, . . . age, health and bodily disabilities’ are modes of master–slave-type relationships in their own right, hence presumably equivalent to those of class, gender and ‘race’, is frankly implausible and deprives the concept of power2 relations of much of its critical edge.179 Second, Bhaskar’s abstractionism seems especially damaging to aspects of

Critical realism and dialectic 53 his moral realism. Bhaskar argues that the task of politics and philosophy is to help bring about universal human freedom, which he defines as ‘autonomy in the sense of self-determination’.180 By universal human freedom, Bhaskar does not mean ‘amelioration of states of affairs’, nor ‘the absence of determination’, but rather ‘the transformation or replacement of unneeded, unwanted and oppressive sources of determination, or structures, by needed, wanted and empowering ones’.181 This notion that human emancipation does not imply freedom from natural ‘laws’ is welcome in the context of a theory whose utopianism is pronounced. Nonetheless, the problem is that ‘universal human flourishing’ or the ‘free development of each and all’, though a laudable ideal to be aimed at, is probably unattainable as an absolute, even under the terms of Bhaskar’s clarifications. Even in a genuinely socialist society, where power2 relations have been eradicated, individuals cannot enjoy absolute freedom in the sense of a total ‘absence of absenting constraints’ on their desires and wants. Even the most participatory and transparent forms of democracy, accompanied by the most radical redistributions of wealth, will not exclude specific policy-decisions that prioritize certain goals (and hence wants) at the expense of others, allocating resources here for this rather than there for that. It is likely that even the eudaimonistic society will be constraining beyond the limits of natural necessity, since there will still be unwanted (and hence oppressive on Bhaskar’s terms) socially and culturally prescribed determinations for many. The most that can be legitimately aspired to (and it is a big aspiration) is that the structured modes of domination that systematically subordinate the cultural and material needs of the global human population in the service of the vested interests of powerful elites can be dissolved, and replaced by a rational social order that combines socialized production and property ownership with participatory and representative democracy in all substantive institutional spheres. This is Marx’s communism. It is not paradise, not ‘the ideal’, nor devoid of conflict, but it is nonetheless an inspiring political and ethical goal, and one which is practically achievable. Bhaskar’s contrary view that eudaimonia denotes the unity of humankind in freedom and enlightenment does not seem radically different from Hegel’s postulation of the identity of subject and object as the telos of history. This utopianism of Bhaskar’s dialectic is thrown into sharp relief in his From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul. Here Bhaskar argues that man is essentially God (and therefore also essentially one, but also essentially unique); and that as such, he is essentially free and already enlightened, a freedom and enlightenment which is overlain by extraneous, heteronomous determinations which both (a) occlude and (b) qualify this essential fact. . . . Man has to shed both the illusion that he is not essentially Godlike and free and the constraining heteronomous determinations (constituting the object world of illusion, duality and alienation) which that illusion grounds. . . . The fundamental malaise then is self-alienation . . . To break free from it is to become what we most truly are. . . . To change the

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The problem with this kind of abstract unhistorical moralism is threefold. First, despite mention of ‘extraneous and heteronomous determinations’ (no sooner evoked than withdrawn!), it seems to ultimately dissolve the structural and cultural constraints which impede both unalienated consciousness and the construction of ‘concrete utopias’ as institutional realities. For these objective structures are now interpreted as being rooted in alienation and illusion, rather than as material causes of alienation and illusion in their own right. Second, given the stratified and open-ended nature of reality, and given that human knowledge is always culturally and socially constrained (and enabled) within determinate material circumstances, it follows that ‘enlightenment’ as a transcendental ideal is unrealizable. Our enlightenment will always be radically partial and incomplete. This being the case, ‘man’ is not ‘essentially God’, not unless God is, paradoxically, less than God. Finally, unlike ‘God’, whose essence is ‘absolute spirit’, humanity is the product of natural evolution at a certain level of its material development. This means that the essence of humankind is the specific nature of its materiality and those emergent properties that are rooted in this materiality. So our emancipatory potential is not absolute or totalizing, but is bound within the structure of powers and liabilities of our human nature. The essential liabilities of our humanity include those we share with all living things (our dependence for sustenance on a material world that frustrates as well as facilitates our wants, the likelihood of serious illness and infirmity, the possibility of injury or disability, the certainty of death), plus others more specific to ourselves as people (the psychological insecurities that follow from absences in knowledge or understanding, the fear of mortality, loneliness, bereavement, unrequited love, the multitude of personal failings or imperfections that we all have and which sometimes dog our interactions with others and prevent us fully realizing our potentials, and so on). The essential powers of our humanity consist not simply of ‘consciousness’ or ‘spirit’, but of the biologically based needs and interests common to human beings across space and time, those causal powers of sociality and labour that are specified by this embodied human constitution, and those subjective emergents of mind, self and rationality (plus their emergent properties of culture and language) that have arisen from the historical interface between these natural powers and tendencies and the object-world mediated by practical agency. Bhaskar would perhaps want to say that his definition of emancipation as something other than freedom from ‘determination’ overcomes my objection. But this is not so, because Bhaskar stresses the empowering nature of social determination freed from power2 relations, to the detriment of the necessarily constraining character of social and natural necessity under the most enlightened

Critical realism and dialectic 55 conditions. Self-emancipation, says Bhaskar, is the transformation of ‘an unwanted to a wanted source of determination’.183 But, of course, those determinations imposed by natural and social necessity are precisely unwanted and, arguably, many of them are unneeded. So, contrary to Bhaskar, it is not the case that human beings are fundamentally free, but find themselves in chains, which he indicates in his most recent writings. There is not a simple opposition between the constraints imposed by structural power and desire, as Bhaskar seems to suggest in his From East to West. Rather, humanity is essentially and simultaneously free and unfree. The task of realist ethics and politics should not be to mystify this existential reality, but to evaluate societies and systems of social relations in accordance with the respective relative degree of ‘free flourishing of each and all’ they allow their peoples. This is one of the tasks I set myself in my Marxism and Realism.184 This allows the ethical case for eudaimonia to be based on more substantive philosophical grounds, informed by the relevant human and biological sciences. Thus the historical necessity of socialism (in the moral sense) may be grasped on the basis of the greater correspondence of social forms to essential human interests it permits, as these are defined by the interface of biological and cultural needs mediated by the level of development of the material forces of production. Because socialism entails the abolition of power2 relations, the real potential it offers humanity is that of the maximum possible autonomy and free flourishing of each as the condition for the free flourishing of all within the hiatus of freedom-within-unfreedom. This concludes my critique of Bhaskar’s moral realism (as this is spiritualized under transcendental dialectical critical realism). What of the other difficulties I alluded to? Second, and at a rather more mundane level, where Bhaskar ventures beyond Hegel to make a critique of classical materialist dialectic, this is one of the least successful aspects of his enterprise. A major bone of contention is certain aspects of Bhaskar’s interpretation of the Marx–Hegel connection. For example, Bhaskar suggests that, under the influence of the closed Hegelian totality, ‘neglect of external contradictions and more generally constraints . . . has been a damaging feature of Marxian social theory in the Hegelian mode’.185 It is not clear what Bhaskar has in mind by his qualifying remark of ‘in the Hegelian mode’, since ‘Hegelian Marxism’ refers as much to the broader tradition of dialectical Marxist social theory (which is opposed to the mechanical materialist Marxist current of the Second International and Stalinism and some forms of Trotskyism) as it does to the humanist current especially characteristic of ‘western Marxism’, with which the term is sometimes associated. Bhaskar makes the same kind of point where he suggests that Marx, under the influence of Hegel, concentrated overmuch on internal contradictions. Certainly, Marx did focus on the internal (especially dialectical) contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, because his purpose was precisely demonstrating that these contradictions were essential or necessary to the logic of capital. This is exactly the strength of his critique of political economy. Yet Bhaskar himself demonstrates that ‘Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of

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identity permits a plurality of dialectical configurations, topologies, perspectives and inscapes which . . . [cannot] be captured by a single formula’.186 He goes on to show how Marx’s ‘concept of contradiction is deployed to denote inter alia: (a) logical inconsistencies or other . . . theoretical anomalies . . .; (b) . . . nondialectical oppositions . . .; (c) structural . . . dialectical contradictions . . . intrinsic to a particular social form; (d) geo-historically specific dialectical contradictions that bring into being a social form and/or crises in the course of its development which are then resolved in the process of transformation which they help to cause’.187 This suggests that Bhaskar’s critique of Marxism cannot apply to Marx himself. In fact, Bhaskar’s discussion of the various kinds of contradiction that exist in reality (logical, internal, external, dialectical), is a genuinely interesting and ingenious aspect of his dialectic (though there is a question mark over its originality – some of it recalls ‘Hegel’s discussion of the various attitudes of thought to objectivity at the beginning of the Encyclopaedia Logic’),188 and a real enrichment of Marx’s ‘materialist diffraction of dialectic’.189 Nonetheless he does not establish the veracity of his initial critique of materialist dialectic in classical Marxian theory more generally as over-simple. Dialectical materialism, as developed by Engels, Trotsky, Ilyenkov and more contemporary figures (such as the left Darwinians), is radically anti-reductionist, rejecting the fantastic notion of a universal dialectic, and denying the relevance of attempting to apply the ‘orthodox’ triadic dialectic outside the realm of human cognition. Not only in Marx, but also implicit in Engels, is the idea that internal structural contradictions do not exhaust reality and are not the only mechanisms of thoroughgoing change, though these are identified as necessary for organically generated self-development and transformation of systems, the key insight of Marxian dialectic. Engels’ Marxism, for instance, identifies logical contradictions (in the philosophy and politics of adversaries), and internal and external contradictions built into the structures of reality – i.e. between life and consciousness (external relations), between structure and superstructure and different elements of the superstructure (contingent or external-within-intrinsic relations), and between forces of production and relations of production and social classes (internal and transformative relations) – all of which have explanatory significance. The fact that these are implicit rather than explicit does not mean that they are absent. I would say that a ‘materialist diffraction of dialectic’ is to be found in the work of all the major thinkers of classical Marxism.190 Bhaskar is also ill-informed, to offer a second example, in his sweeping assertion that the fundamental errors of both socialist politics and Marxian philosophy are ultimately explainable (or perhaps deeply embedded) in the conceptual weaknesses of their manner of appropriation or critique of Hegelian dialectic. For Bhaskar, Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s concept of ‘preservative dialectical sublation, which incorporates the cancelled moments of the [historical] process within the final totality’, leads ‘to the failure . . . to come to terms with the material . . . presence of the past’191 in the present. This is said to

Critical realism and dialectic 57 provide a philosophical explanation of the misguided attempt by the Stalinists to build ‘socialism in one country’, this evidencing the ‘sinking back into a simple undifferentiated unity (reflecting the most primitive logic of Hegel’s Being)’.192 Thus, the pathologies of ‘state socialism’ can ‘be given Marxian credentials, however much Marx would have loathed the outcome’.193 For Bhaskar also, ‘cognitive triumphalism’, informed by the Hegelian notion of the closed totality, is the fundamental error of dialectical materialism: Reality is a potentially infinite totality, of which we know something but not how much. This is not the least of my differences with Hegel, who, although a more subtle exponent of cognitive triumphalism . . . nevertheless is a conduit directly connecting . . . to Lenin and thence diamat and the erstwhile command economies of the omniscient party states.194 Yet these assertions (and that is really all they are) are under-theorized and remarkably weak. Bhaskar may well be right in his claim that the New Left has been hampered by inadequate philosophy, but the idea that the politics of the statified ruling class of Stalinist Russia was even tenuously influenced by Hegelian dialectic or by the dialectical tradition of classical Marxism (for good or for ill) is frankly risible. First, it is clear that Marx does not simply reject Hegel’s ‘preservative dialectical sublation’, though he is rightly suspicious of the idea that all dialectical transitions of lower to higher social and intellectual forms must entail the preservation of elements of forms that have been transcended. In fact, Marx’s view, central to his theory of history and socialist politics, that socialism is feasible only given the high level of development of the forces of production engendered by capitalist development, is precisely a materialist restatement of this Hegelian idea. Far from representing continuity with Marxian ideas, Stalin’s programme of ‘socialism in one country’ involved rewriting both Marxism and Leninism.195 Internationalism was replaced with nationalism to bolster the power of the newly emergent bureaucratic elite. Thus Lenin and the Bolsheviks were unambiguous from the start that, if isolated in backward Russia, the revolution would degenerate and fail, precisely because the moment of the past in the present would prove ultimately decisive. Their political strategy for achieving socialism in Russia was predicated on the imminence of revolutions in the advanced capitalist societies, which their own actions would help ignite in the context of war- and recession-ravaged Europe, this allowing the massive transfer of material resources from West to East for purposes of socialist reconstruction. The failure of this strategy meant the revolution was subjected to relentless pressure by a combination of desperately unfavourable material circumstances. Chief among these was the devastation wreaked on the population and the forces of production by the fascistic counterrevolution and the foreign military interventions. This decimated the working class that made the revolution and which constituted the mainstay of soviet democracy, forced the regime to assume hyper-centralized command of society (‘war communism’) in order to defeat the counter-revolutionaries, and thus

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created the space for a new statified ruling class to assume the reins of political and economic power through its control over the organs of party and state.196 Second, Bhaskar’s view that Hegel’s ‘cognitive triumphalism’ has cast its baneful shadow over dialectical materialism, is called into doubt by the simple fact that there are different forms of dialectical materialism, reductionist and non-reductionist. The absolutist, economic-determinist Stalinized versions of it stemmed not from philosophical errors, as Bhaskar seems to imply, but from the vested political interests of the elites that controlled the bureaucratized western communist parties and the former ‘communist’ states of Eastern Europe. Engels’ dialectical conception of the ‘interconnectedness of things’, in contrast to fatalist or determinist versions, sees totality not as an absolute, but as a necessarily provisional or partial picture of nature, because reality is in constant movement and change, which also functions as a necessary aspiration of scientific understanding or endeavour, even if never a fully attainable one.197 This insight of Engels has proven an extremely fertile one in providing guidance to certain forms of scientific analysis. For example, it has become central to the theoretical work of the so-called ‘left Darwinians’ in the modern biological and ecological sciences.198 Rose et al., for instance, show how an account of human society is richer and more complete, or aspires to a greater universality or more inclusive totality, if it strives to integrate the knowledge derived from a broad spectrum of the relevant sciences (social psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, etc.), than if it remains solely on the terrain of one or other of these sciences. It is hard to dissent from Callinicos’s view that Bhaskar is led into this unfortunate tendency of ‘reading-off’ complex social, political and economic outcomes from the ‘original sin’ of philosophical error as a consequence of the inflated status he would attribute to abstract philosophical reasoning of a transcendental nature in analysing and explaining the world. In his earlier work, Bhaskar attributed to philosophy the more modest role of ‘under-labourer’ and ‘midwife’ of science.199 Here philosophy, even though it gave guidance to science, was nonetheless open to revision and interrogation by the methods of thinking and practical resultants of the sciences, to the provisional knowledges these established about the world. By contrast, Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom marks the beginnings of the undermining of this more modest (and sensible) role assigned to philosophy. The role and status of transcendental philosophical claims has been greatly expanded in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom, allowing the ‘logical’ grounding of sociological and political arguments, which really need to be established on their own terrain. Philosophy, in its dialectical critical realist form, has become for Bhaskar ‘foundational’ to science. This explains, as Callinicos notes, ‘the proliferation of quick-kill arguments from a priori premises to conclusions embodying substantive and controversial generalizations about the world that is such a distressing feature of Dialectic’. But, as Callinicos rightly says, ‘there are grounds for thinking that a more consistent naturalism, which stressed more strongly than Bhaskar does the continuity between philosophy and the sciences and the former’s dependence on the

Critical realism and dialectic 59 latter, could protect him from the extravagant claims for philosophy into which he is sometimes tempted, and provide a more secure basis for the many valid insights and fertile ideas this challenging and original philosopher has to offer’.200 This would draw Bhaskar’s philosophy much closer to Engels’ dialectical materialism, which is as much about philosophical generalization from the methods and theories of the sciences as it is about providing methodological and theoretical guidance to practical scientific research. Now, aside from Bhaskar’s flawed understanding of the relationship between Hegel and the classical Marxist tradition, there are major problems with his substantive treatment of Marxian social theory. Bhaskar identifies a number of defects of Marx’s socio-historical materialism,201 which his own dialectical critical realist system is said to have resolved. None of these are especially original or interesting. The first is (as I have already pointed out) that Marx treats class divisions as the primary mode of stratification in social systems. The second is that Marx endorses a linear ‘stages’ theory of socio-historical development. The third is that Marx sometimes tends to postulate ‘endism’ or ‘teleologism’, presenting communism as the necessary or logical terminus of the dialectic of history. The fourth is that Marx tends towards a kind of technological functionalism, stressing only the emancipatory role of the development of the forces of production, and ignoring the downside of technology under capitalism. The fifth is that (apparently) Marx regarded nature anthropocentrically as simply the raw material of transformative social labour, and thus as something to be controlled or mastered by human beings, rather than as something upon which humans are dependent for their physical and mental well-being.202 The sixth is that Marx endorsed an (economic?) evolutionism, under the influence of Darwinian materialism. This presumably ties in with Marx’s ‘endism’, technological functionalism and ‘stageism’. The seventh appears to be that Marx is guilty of downplaying the multiplicity of oppressions or antagonisms (modes of stratification) which have existed in most historical societies (I cannot be certain about this interpretation of his meaning given Bhaskar’s opaque terminology). This weakness is presumably a function of Marx’s prioritization of class relations in social analysis. At a later point in the book, Bhaskar revisits his critique of Marxism, where he suggests that Marx’s account of transformative social change was pulled in opposite directions, between asserting a tendential determinism of historical outcomes by modes of production, and asserting the possibility of historical mutations, as determined by a plurality of non-economic processes.203 This seems a rather more qualified and cautious criticism of Marx and Marxism than the earlier ones of economism, endism and stageism. Nonetheless Bhaskar still attributes to Marx, on the strength of a single quote, a ‘unilinear view of geohistory’, from ‘which spread the functionalist and evolutionary . . . models characteristic of Marxism for most of this century’.204 This Marx is said to be contradicted by the other Marx, who denied a unilinear directional logic to history, and who ridiculed attempts to portray socio-historical materialism as postulating just such a unilinear historical pattern.

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I will not dwell long on the defects of this ‘shopping list’ of Marxian errors, not least because I make many relevant disconfirming arguments elsewhere,205 including in the present undertaking.206 Amazingly, Bhaskar’s initial critique is compressed into just seven lines of text, and is so heavily jargonized it is difficult to be certain my above interpretation is a reasonable approximation of his argument. Assuming that it is, Marx deserves better treatment than this, particularly from a philosopher of the left. Obviously, it is very disappointing to see Bhaskar regurgitating what is to all intents and purposes the standard Cold War critique of socio-historical materialism (which is simply impoverished), especially since most of this has been decisively undermined by a succession of left critics over the past 30 years. Bhaskar himself concedes that ‘corresponding to each charge, one can find contrary evidence in his [Marx’s] oeuvre’.207 Quite so. But this qualification does not go nearly far enough. There is in fact precious little textual evidence in Marx’s voluminous writings that support the interpretations (of teleologism, economism, stageism, endism, anthropocentrism, etc.) that Bhaskar would foist on the author. I will argue later (Chapter 3) that much of this (already sparse) textual evidence is of ambiguous meaning or significance and that the overall theoretical logic of Marx’s work (immature and mature) cuts overwhelmingly against the orthodox critique.208 All of this reveals the dangers of taking a handful of isolated passages out of context. Bhaskar’s charge of teleologism, which he aims at Marx, is in any case a bit rich, given that he himself hints at a form of historical teleology that seems stronger than the one suggested by Marx even in his youthful Manuscripts: The desire to overcome constraints (including especially constraints2) on the satisfaction of desires, wants (causally efficacious beliefs) and needs (what is necessary to an agent’s survival and flourishing) implies a conatus or tendency2 to knowledge of all four planes of the social tetrapolity at the hub of which I placed the social cube. And this, mediated by the political skills and practical wisdom shown in collective totalising agency, will [my emphasis] take humanity to the eudaimonistic life for all.209 Yet Bhaskar is on to something where he takes Marx to task for asserting the primacy of class. Here Marx is indeed guilty as charged. Far from being a weakness of socio-historical materialism, though, I will argue (Chapter 3) that Marx’s insistence that class antagonisms and conflicts – as these are over-determined by modes of production – have explanatory primacy in explaining the constitution and dynamics of social systems, is precisely its enduring strength.210 It certainly cannot be dismissed without reasoned argument by simply invoking the bogeyman of ‘class/power2 one-dimensionality’.211 Here Bhaskar needs to do better. I have now said enough about the weaknesses of Bhaskar’s substantive critique of Marxism. I now wish to conclude by considering the question of the adequacy of some of Bhaskar’s core dialectical concepts. Bhaskar is mistaken to argue, against Hegel, that dialectic is defensible only if the concept of ‘unity’ is

Critical realism and dialectic 61 subordinated to the concept of ‘difference’.212 Bhaskar’s argument in favour of this position is that Hegel’s stress on unity eventually dissolves contradiction in the harmonious realm of the Absolute. On this interpretation, Hegel’s ‘real’ contradictions are eventually cancelled, because they are expressive of conceptual contradictions in consciousness, which are repaired through the dialectic of englobing knowledge that restores the unity of ‘world spirit’ (humanity and the material world) and ‘absolute spirit’ (God). But if Hegel is indeed guilty as charged, this error would seem more likely to follow from his teleological idealism than from his failure to explicitly prioritize difference over unity in an explanatory or ontological sense. After all, subordinating unity to difference could easily destroy totality (qua postmodern social theory), just as the reverse strategy dissolves conflict and contradiction (qua sociological functionalism). Since the two sides of being, difference and unity, are dialectically interpenetrated, it makes no sense to treat either as more or less significant than the other. There are also problems with Bhaskar’s fundamental definition of dialectic as ‘absenting absence’.213 Bhaskar makes his case as follows: [I]t is easy to see that in any world in which human agency is to be possible, the human agent must be able to bring about a state of affairs which would not otherwise have prevailed (unless it was over-determined). Sophia acts, and so absents. . . . Why, it might be enquired, do I want to talk of non-being in referring to such prosaic facts as Jemma not keeping her date with Jacques? To say that Jemma or Pierre or the rain or food or self-esteem or the aether is not (is lacking) in some determinate context of discourse is to designate a real absence at some level, perspective, aspect, context and/or region of space-time. ‘Is’ and ‘real’ discharge the burden of ontology; ‘not’ and ‘absent’ denote negativity. To admit that real absence exists and real absentings occur is tantamount to conceding that non-beings, i.e. de-onts, are, happen, etc. We thus have the theorem: ontology  ontics  de-onts. . . . There are intervals, voids and pauses, desire, lack and need within being; and such absences and their tendential and actual absenting are . . . transcendentally and dialectically necessary for any intelligible being at all.214 There are two problems with Bhaskar’s basic designation of dialectic as ‘absenting absence’. For one thing, in Bhaskar’s hands, this potentially could lead to the over-use and over-extension of dialectical causality, so much so it is in danger of being trivialized. Here such distinctive properties of the social world as ‘pauses’ and ‘intervals’ (e.g. in a conversation or activity), the failure of agents to keep their appointments with other agents and the constraining ills imposed on agents by oppressive and exploitative social relations, are lumped together under a ‘theorem’. Bhaskar is doubtless correct to say that without the concept of absence, agency is unintelligible, but nonetheless this insight is hardly the ‘linchpin’ of dialectics. Bhaskar’s dialectic is simply far too elastic, this diminishing its explanatory power and theoretical interest, rather like the fate of the concept of power in Foucault’s later work. Virtually every event or

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action or state of affairs involves an absenting in some sense (e.g. unconsciousness absents consciousness, work absents leisure, drink absents thirst, food absents hunger, knowledge absents ignorance, standing up absents sitting down, spring absents winter, etc.). Therefore, it seems that a genuinely dialectical appropriation of the concept of absence is better reserved for a particular class of absences, namely real determinate negations, i.e. those concepts that denote specific situations or states of existential absence or lack without corresponding presence or positivity (e.g. illness as the absence of health, death as the absence of life, chaos as the absence of order, slavery as the absence of freedom, etc.). Nonetheless, despite my critique, this is not a defect that damages the fundamental power of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist system on the terrain of his dialectical critical naturalism. This is because Bhaskar elaborates and develops this basic model of dialectic as ‘absenting absence’ on the ground of fourplanar-social-being as ‘absenting constraints on absenting absences or ills’.215 This refinement of the basic model is genuinely useful as an account of the logic of geo-historical, conceptual and moral development, not least because it supports a conception of internal dialectical developmental processes that have a certain progressive directional logic to them. Thus, for example, the absenting of poverty in Britain (a first-order absenting) requires absenting a further (secondorder) constraint on achieving this absenting (the replacement of capitalism with socialism in Britain), which in turn will require the absenting of a deeper (thirdorder) constraint on achieving this objective (the replacement of capitalism with socialism on a global scale). The ‘logic of absence’ is, in this sense, the pulse of freedom, because it has an in-built logic of deepening or more inclusive freedoms from constraining ills or absences. Nonetheless, the simpler ‘absenting of absence’ formula, which underpins this more concrete specification of socio-cultural dialectics, does otherwise encourage a proliferation of trivialities, particularly since Bhaskar does not consistently locate the dialectical process in the internal contradictory relationality of systems-in-development. Furthermore, the efficacy of the broader formulaic ‘absenting of constraining ills’ mechanism outside the domain of human social being is uncertain. I will return briefly to this issue shortly. Moreover, Bhaskar’s ontological prioritizing of absence over presence seems problematic. There are two difficulties here. First, Bhaskar does not demonstrate satisfactorily that non-being should be prioritized over being. Bhaskar claims that ‘if there was a unique beginning to everything it could only be from nothing by an act of radical autogenesis’.216 This does not advance his case at all, however, since speculative ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ do not add up to an argument, and ‘something out of nothing’ is obviously a violation of the law of non-contradiction.217 Precisely because absence (in our world at least) can only be defined in relation to presence, and of course vice versa, and precisely because it is impossible to attribute any rational meaning to ‘something out of nothing’, this is insufficient to establish Bhaskar’s view that non-being is foundational to being. The problem here is that Bhaskar’s generally good arguments in defence of the idea that negativity or absence is ontologically real,218 and thus his argu-

Critical realism and dialectic 63 ments against the doctrine of ontological monovalence, are often treated as adequate to the job of demonstrating his stronger claim that negativity (determinate non-being) is ontologically basic or prior to positivity (determinate being). Bhaskar is probably correct to claim that ‘the identification of a positive existent is a human act’, thus involving ‘the absenting of a pre-existing state of affairs’, this constituting ‘transcendental deduction of the category of absence’.219 He is also onto something where he argues that only ‘in a state of eternal all-pervasive monism would the category of absence not be necessary for the deduction of coherent concepts of space and time’. But all of this seems inconclusive on the deeper issue of whether either being or non-being (or neither one nor the other) should be regarded as ontologically basic. Bhaskar asserts that positive presence is but the surface ripple on an ocean of negativity. But how can this be ontologically justified? Bhaskar argues that ‘a world without voids (absences)’, that is, ‘a . . . material object world . . . of condensely compacting particles . . . would be a world in which nothing could move or occur, as it presupposes an impossible conjunction of atomicity, rigidity and immediacy’.220 This takes him to what he believes is a decisive fourth argument in defence of his position. ‘If a totally positive material object world – a packed world without absences – is impossible, there is no a priori reason to exclude the opposite – namely a total void, literally nothing’.221 So absence is ontologically prior to presence, for Bhaskar, because a material universe without voids is logically inconceivable, whereas a universe of determinate non-being or negativity is at least possible. Here Bhaskar is onto something. But this is still indecisive. For sure, negativity or non-being is conceivable without being or positive presence, and not vice versa, but this has no bearing on the issue of whether in reality the first is prior or foundational to the second or whether the two have co-existed through eternity as interdependent realities. To assume as much is precisely to make the error of logicizing being and non-being, of which Bhaskar accuses Hegel. But, since the only reality our science and philosophy can speak meaningfully about is our universe, in which presence and absence are on a par with one another and necessarily interdependent, this seems a good enough reason to treat Bhaskar’s transcendental deduction of the ontological primacy of negativity with suspicion. But, in fact, it is possible to draw a more radical conclusion against Bhaskar, though perhaps not a decisive one. For a tentative argument, this one based not on transcendental methods but rather on the knowledge provided by the contemporary physical sciences, can be made in support of the thesis that being is ontologically basic to non-being. Certainly, despite Bhaskar’s claim that there must be empty space between materialities to allow the possibility of matter-inmotion, and so development, emergence, etc., it has to be admitted that this by no means follows, not if we grasp materiality as possessing physical and nonphysical attributes or dimensions, and the inherent capacity to transform itself from one to the other. Modern physics does appear to provide some kind of warranty for this view:

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Critical realism and dialectic Even the notion of the vacuum, empty space, has now been shown to be mistaken on closer investigation. Rather the vacuum seems to be a bubbling sea in which particles, packets of matter and energy, continually froth in and out of existence. . . . Moreover, all the known ‘particles’ and ‘forces’ of matter are simply different and transient manifestations of the same underlying essence (which most scientists would today call energy). . . . This is not just speculation. This process plays a key role, for example, in the spontaneous emission of light by some atoms. The general picture emerging from modern physics is that change, continual process, interaction and transformation are a fundamental property of matter, and of the space that can no longer be seen as separate from it.222

This seems to suggest that absolute determinate absence, in the ontological sense, is questionable. At the ‘rock bottom’ physical level of our universe, instead of reality consisting of being and non-being, it is rather comprised of the continual transformation or transmission of the various ‘forces’ and ‘particles’ of material being into each other.223 One virtue of this reversal of Bhaskar’s argument is that it overcomes the difficulty of squaring dialectical causality (i.e. dialectic as the logic of stratification and emergence) with the notion that ‘rockbottom’ reality is simply existential disorder, randomness, potentia, pure dispositionality, structurelessness, etc.224 Since non-being has no causal powers (these pertaining only to relations between things, i.e. structures), and since dialectical processes of absenting absence (and hence of evolutionary emergence) are energized by virtue of structures, it is difficult to see how a world of positive being could have emerged from a state of pure negativity or void. In short, the logic of dialectic itself does not seem consistent with Bhaskar’s ontological prioritization of absence over presence. Another problem with Bhaskar’s ontological prioritizing of absence has been identified by Callinicos. ‘If, as Bhaskar claims, “[n]on-being is a condition of possibility of being”, why is there a tendency to eliminate it? Whence the impulse to absent absence, if absence is ontologically prior to presence?’225 As Callinicos rightly observes, the only substantial answer Bhaskar gives to this question is specific to the human and social world. I have said that the ‘absenting of absence’ process is conceived by Bhaskar as ‘absenting most notably of constraints on desires, wants, needs and interests’.226 Thus, Bhaskar argues that absenting absence is energized by the ‘inner urge that flows universally from the logic of elemental desire (lack, need, want or desire). It manifests itself wherever power2 relations hold sway’.227 Yet, ‘[i]n general, Bhaskar seems to regard the dialectic as operative in nature as well as in society’.228 For Bhaskar ‘there is nothing anthropomorphic about the dialectic presented here’.229 On the contrary, says Bhaskar, ‘even if dialectical connections . . . are regarded as necessary for a configuration to be said to be “dialectical”, . . . there is no a prori reason why all dialectics should be social’.230 This being the case, the problem arises as to how and why the dialectical process unfolds outside the human-social world by virtue of the absenting of absence.

Critical realism and dialectic 65 Bhaskar provides no satisfactory answer to this question. Instead Bhaskar’s explanation of the pulse of dialectic outside the human and social worlds consists simply of asserting the uncontroversial fact that change and development precisely is the process of absenting or negating a stratum, object or state of affairs. To negate or absent something is by definition to act causally in the world and thus to bring about a transformative change in the world. Dialectic is thus the dynamic interplay of causal power and contradiction. But this seems to be a mere description of dialectical causality rather than an explanation of how or why it unfolds at different levels of the cosmos. The dialectic here has no genuinely causal status, because no explanation is given of why there exists this drive or imperative to absent absence in unreflective inorganic nature, or how this dialectical impulse of absenting absence is translated into mechanisms of transformative change at different strata of nature. Nor do I think that a satisfactory answer can be given. Certainly, the dialectic conceived in this way functions as an understanding of the dialectics of consciousness and life. In the former case, conceptual progress is indeed a function of the rational drive to overcome ‘gaps’ in understanding or knowledge, and this process is ultimately energized by the desire of human beings to maximize their freedoms. In the latter case, it is at least conceivable that the essence of dialectic consists in its parcelling out of constraints on freedom or autonomy (positivity as the converse of negativity). For it is plausible to see organisms as engaged in a struggle against their own absenting or to absent those forces or negations that restrict or constrain their life-chances. Thus, the ‘absenting of absenting ills’ appears here as a genuinely causal mechanism or logic of explanation. But this kind of explanatory logic or mode of causality allows little purchase on the unreflective dialectic of inorganic nature. This knows nothing of rationality, desire, freedom, need, and authors no struggle against lack. Indeed, as I will try to demonstrate in the next chapter, Engels’ ‘laws of the dialectic’, in particular his understanding of evolutionary processes as functions of determinate negations internally specific to particular strata and objects, offers far more grip on the dynamics of change in natural systems than this abstract universalizing formulation of Bhaskar’s.

Conclusion Rather than summarize the preceding, I will finish with a few substantive conclusions on the question of the contemporary significance and status of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. I will concentrate here on dialectical critical realism rather than critical realism, because this constitutes Bhaskar’s incorporation and overreach of his earlier philosophical system. First, despite its problems and errors, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism is unquestionably the most significant statement of dialectical realist philosophy to emerge outside classical Marxism. The scope and ambition of Bhaskar’s project is hugely impressive. Not only is dialectical critical realism the genuine enrichment and progressive radicalization of critical realism that Bhaskar claims for it, it is

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furthermore the most comprehensive critical review of classical dialectical philosophy (even if some of this misses the target). Dialectical critical realism is significant because it is a powerful challenge to opponents of dialectic both inside and outside the critical realism camp, and an important restatement of the relevance of Marxian dialectic and legitimate systematic specification of it (for reasons discussed in this chapter). The main strengths of dialectical critical realism can be summarized as follows: 1

2

3

4

5

Preservative sublation of critical realism. This includes the tripartite realist ontology (empirical, actual and structural), and the naturalistic epistemology of science. This also includes the attendant distinctions between the intransitive and transitive domains of knowledge and powerful critiques of idealism and empiricism. Bhaskar’s judgemental realism, which provides rational grounds for an understanding of social science as a critical and evaluative and prescriptive science, is also preserved and is conjoined to Bhaskar’s dialectic of human emancipation (ethical naturalism). The classical critical realist concepts of stratification and emergence are dialectically reworked and are supportive of the central category of Marxian dialectic – unity-in-difference or differentiated totality. Now the ghost of reductionism (whether of wholes to their parts or of parts to their wholes) has been decisively dispelled. Non-preservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic. Though starting off from Marx’s critique of Hegel, Bhaskar assembles the most systematic and comprehensive review of Hegel’s system. Though much of this is unoriginal, and some of the critique of Hegel is perhaps misplaced, Bhaskar still impressively synthesizes a wide range of critical commentaries on Hegelian dialectic with his critical realist and dialectical critical realist concepts, this supporting a materialist diffraction of dialectic broadly consistent with Marxian dialectic. Negativity and the logic of absence. This is the engine of Bhaskar’s dialectic, and the conceptual centrepiece of Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. Although there are problems with Bhaskar’s view that all change is a function of absenting absence, and with his claim that ‘negativity wins’ (in the sense of enjoying ontological priority over positive being), Bhaskar nonetheless demonstrates that negativity and absence are as ontologically real as positivity and presence. His argument is a brilliant demolition of ontological monovalence. Modes of negation and contradiction. A systematic specification of the nature of dialectic. Though much of Bhaskar’s argument recalls Hegel’s own insights, there is value in Bhaskar’s translation of these into his dialectical critical realist mode. This seems to me to have practical analytical use in social theory and research in unravelling the nature, limits and possibilities of systemic change. Eudaimonia and socio-historical human development. A most welcome development of Bhaskar’s social ontology (critical naturalism). Against the

Critical realism and dialectic 67 overwhelmingly dominant current in contemporary social theory, which regards socio-historical processes as simply indeterminate, dialectical critical naturalism postulates a tendential directionality or ‘directional impulse’ in socio-historical, conceptual and moral development towards human emancipation. Bhaskar’s designation of the dialectic as ‘absenting constraints on absenting absences’ is a useful theoretical specification of how this works. Despite Bhaskar’s critique of Marx’s ‘evolutionism’, this is undoubtedly a form of evolutionism (in the looser sense of the term), and broadly consistent (in this specific emancipatory sense) with socio-historical materialism. Second, despite its considerable merits, Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom cannot be seen as underwriting Marxian dialectic, or as a sublation or transcendence of Marxian dialectic, in the sense of providing socio-historical materialism with new dialectical concepts which simultaneously preserve yet supersede the old (and which are therefore indispensable to it), if indeed this is its intention. Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom leans rather too heavily on materialist dialectic (including Marx’s critique of Hegel) for this to be a plausible interpretation of its function. Moreover, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism undoubtedly suffers from areas of damaging weakness (aside from its constipated academicism and its lofty level of conceptual abstraction), which are simply not to be found in Marxian dialectic. Nor, indeed, can it legitimately function as an alternative to or supersession/transcendence of the dialectical materialism pioneered by Engels on the terrain of philosophy proper. For I will argue (Chapter 2) that this shares with the dialectical critical realist ontology at least some of its strengths (though by no means all) and fewer of its weaknesses. Indeed, dialectical critical realism would itself be considerably enriched by engaging seriously with Engels’ dialectical materialism,231 not least because dialectical materialism is in some important respects ontologically and methodologically consistent with dialectical critical realism, whilst suffering from none of its damaging abstractionism. This is not to say that Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism should be rejected in favour of Engels’ dialectical materialism, of course. Bhaskar’s dialectical philosophy is far more developed and systematic than Engels’ dialectical materialism, and it rests upon his pioneering critical realist concepts that are indispensable to any anti-reductive materialism. Indeed, I will argue that the critical realist ontology theoretically refines and substantiates Engels’ dialectical materialist ontology, which itself pioneered early approximations towards concepts of stratification and emergence.232 Nonetheless, whatever Bhaskar’s intentions, it is legitimate to observe that much of the real value of Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is not that it revolutionizes or transcends or outflanks the Marxian dialectic, or that it develops a radically new critique of Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, much of Bhaskar’s critique of Hegel is unoriginal, even if one concludes that it is insightful, though treated with a critical realist gloss. Rather, the significance of Bhaskar’s Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is that it draws out,

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refines and systematizes the conceptual logic of Marxian dialectic (at least in certain respects), and that it synthesizes a formidable range of critical perspectives on Hegel, including Marx’s, which are then organized and interpreted through the framework of Bhaskar’s new and distinctive conceptual vocabulary. Undoubtedly, too, Bhaskar’s dialectic provides a number of important insights on the nature of dialectic which are genuinely novel, and which are of practical utility to Marxian social science (especially the basic understanding of the dialectic of human emancipation as the ‘absenting of constraints on absenting ills’). Yet there is some doubt over the adequacy of aspects of Bhaskar’s critique of Hegel (in part because it is based on Marx), which unfortunately I cannot go into here. Nonetheless dialectical critical realism is a decisive advance on critical realism, notwithstanding my critical comments, since a serious engagement with Hegelian and Marxian dialectic has considerably broadened and sharpened Bhaskar’s critique in ways already described. But this should not distract us from recognizing that the conceptual and analytical foundation of Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is the groundbreaking Marxian critique of Hegel. Nor should it deflect us from interpreting its role (rather more modestly than Bhaskar and some of his more radical intellectual allies would) as an attempt to extend and refine this critique, and to systematically explore its philosophical implications. Marxian dialectic is foundational to dialectical critical realism, not vice versa. Thus, it is legitimate to see dialectical critical realism as ‘overreaching’ dialectical materialism (even if it cannot be seen as either ‘sublating’ or ‘transforming’ it), just as it is legitimate to regard dialectical materialism as ‘overreaching’ dialectical critical realism in certain crucial respects, as well as founding it.233 This being the case, a productive way forward for dialectical philosophy and social theory is the path set out in this book. That is, attempting a synthesis of the best elements of critical realism/dialectical critical realism and materialist dialectics: from Bhaskar, the dialectically reworked concepts of depth realism (especially stratification and emergence); from Marxism the basic materialist and dialectical philosophical framework within which these ontological concepts and Bhaskar’s insights into dialectic can be incorporated. Finally, and I would say inevitably for a work of this scope and ambition, Bhaskar’s fledgling dialectical critical realist system introduced here is not without ambiguities, difficulties and (a handful of) more substantial defects. The more substantial problems I have identified will require fundamental conceptual revision to overcome. These include: (1) Bhaskar’s thesis that non-being is basic to being; (2) his attempt to grasp dialectic generally (i.e. outside the domains of the organic and human-social worlds) as the impulse or drive to absent constraints on constraining ills (in fact, the application of Bhaskar’s dialectic is specific to society, life and consciousness, and extends no further); (3) the abstract utopianism which Bhaskar superimposes on his moral realism of critical realism (which weakens his theory of explanatory critiques, cuts against his ethical naturalism and opens the door to the transcendental idealism of transcendental dialectical critical realism); (4) his substantive critique of Marxian socio-

Critical realism and dialectic 69 historical materialism and aspects of materialist dialectic; and (5) his tendency to locate sub-optimal substantive societal and historical outcomes (e.g. Stalinism) simply in the ‘original sin’ of philosophical error. Unfortunately, it now seems unlikely that these problems will ever be resolved, given Bhaskar’s recent ‘spiritual turn’ of transcendental dialectical critical realism, which marks the abandonment of materialist dialectics (and the critical realist philosophy of science) in favour of idealism and/or godism.234 This is a great pity, because excising these weaknesses will not subvert the substance of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy, which is on balance an impressive accomplishment, but will strengthen it. These sorts of conceptual revision would substantiate dialectical critical realism as a self-conscious refinement, clarification and further development of materialist dialectics (as well as a powerful vindication of their explanatory and analytical power). This would also situate dialectical critical realism as an intervention inside rather than outside the framework of Marxian philosophy (dialectical materialism). The task of the next chapter is to vindicate the necessity of conceiving of realist dialectics as materialist dialectics. This will be accomplished by demonstrating the indispensability of the materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition on the terrain of philosophical ontology (including critical realism and dialectical critical realism) and at the levels of the natural and social sciences.

2

Materialist dialectics

Introduction In the previous chapter I sought to demonstrate how critical realism is capable of accomplishing a number of fundamental tasks in philosophy and social theory. These include: (1) transcending the false dilemmas posed by empiricism and positivism (determinism) and conventionalism (perspectivism) in the philosophy of social science; and (2) of reductionism in social science methodology – whether of systems to their parts (e.g. atomism), or of parts to their systems (e.g. holism); and (3) resolving the fact–value dualism that has bedevilled the philosophy of social science. In the previous chapter I have also sought to explain how Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist system is on the whole a preservative sublation of critical realism. But here I have also demonstrated that Bhaskar’s realist dialectics do ‘overreach’ Marxian materialist dialectics, in the sense of complementing, refining and substantiating them. However, I have argued that dialectical critical realism does not succeed as a preservative sublation of the usable elements of these materialist dialectics, as Bhaskar suggests. Dialectical critical realism undoubtedly overreaches Marxian dialectics, but cannot be said to either found or sublate them. Conversely, I have suggested, it is legitimate to regard materialist dialectics as overreaching Bhaskar’s realist dialectics in the deeper ontological sense of founding them. It is this latter notion (materialist dialectics as foundational to dialectical critical realism) which I especially wish to affirm in this chapter. I have already outlined some of the ways in which materialist dialectics can be said to possess greater efficacy than dialectical critical realist concepts. But my deeper argument here is that the insights of critical realism and dialectical critical realism have to be preservatively sublated or synthesized within dialectical materialism, rather than vice versa. There are, I suggest, a number of reasons for this. First, materialist dialectics possesses the conceptual and analytical tools to strengthen the anti-reductionist credentials of critical realism. Second, materialist dialectics, unlike critical realist dialectic, offers a more viable (because less equivocal or ambiguous) alternative to the abstract polarities of idealism, mechanical materialism and dualism (realist agnosticism) in philosophy and social science theory. Third, materialist dialectics offers the prospect of a rather better historicization

Materialist dialectics 71 of emergence (on the terrain of natural being) than does critical realism or dialectical critical realism. This is in the sense of offering a more defensible (because less anthropocentric and less convoluted) conception of natural evolution as transformative negation. Materialist dialectics, I want to say, simply has better answers to the crucial question of how internally generated transformative change occurs in physical systems. Finally, materialist dialectics is not simply a meta-philosophy of being under-labouring for the sciences, and affirming the possibility of human emancipation (as is and does Bhaskar’s critical realism and dialectical critical realism), but a fully developed research programme in the social sciences, which offers precise theoretical and analytical purchase on the constitution and dynamics of real empirical social systems in development. Marxian dialectic, in other words, does its work at the interface between philosophy and social science. The purpose of this chapter is to argue these points. My defence here is of an ontological and methodological approach I have dubbed emergentist Marxism. My argument will be developed as follows. First, I will explore the materialist dialectical method of Marx and Engels, analysing its core concepts.1 Here I will briefly address the vexed question of the relationship between Hegelian and Marxian methodological dialectics, showing how Marx ‘inverts’ Hegel, and why this ‘inversion’ is necessary. Second, I will argue that Marxian analytical dialectics, when applied concretely to socio-historical research, are uniquely well equipped to investigate the dynamics of macroscopic development and transformative change. This is because Marxian dialectic is precisely a method of socio-historical analysis which avoids the traditional pitfalls of sociological theory (reductionism, determinism, voluntarism, historicism and teleologism). In later chapters (4 and 5) I will substantiate this argument by demonstrating how Marxian methodological dialectics sustains an understanding of sociohistorical change as an evolutionary process of development, as embodying a determinate directionality, without collapsing into these sorts of errors. But here I will lay down the bare bones of the argument by demonstrating the weaknesses of the orthodox critique of Marx’s social science as neglecting agency and contingency in historical processes. Finally, I will demonstrate how Engels’ dialectical materialism constitutes the indispensable analytical starting point and ontological ground of any critical philosophy concerned with grappling with the big issues – i.e. the dialectical interface between necessity and contingency, between structure and process, and between subjective and objective dialectics, the historicity of material emergence, and so on. Here I want to draw out the meaning of materialist dialectics as meta-philosophical ontology. Dialectical materialism, I contend, is the foundation of Marxian methodological dialectics (Marx’s ‘inversion’ of Hegel, the analytical approach of socio-historical materialism, and the theoretical logic of Marx’s critique of capitalism). Consequently, I will argue, critical realism/dialectical critical realism would be enormously enriched by engaging with Engels’ ‘dialectics of nature’, and with those of the so-called ‘left Darwinians’. For the latter are inspired by Engels’ philosophical ontology, and are undoubtedly a rich theoretical development and application of

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Engels’ approach on the terrain of the philosophy of science and the life sciences.

Methodological dialectics in Hegel and Marxism What is the relationship between Hegel’s dialectic and the dialectic as understood within classical Marxism? The first point to make is that Marx himself is unambiguous that the dialectic is the Marxist method, because it ‘is in its very essence critical and revolutionary’: In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything.2 The second point to make is also a commonplace. This is that Marx himself never found the time ‘to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printers sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism’.3 Instead we are left with his suggestive assertion that Hegel’s dialectic requires ‘inverting’ to rescue its ‘rational kernel’ from its ‘mystical shell’:4 My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.5 Much controversy surrounds the issue of the Marxian ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s dialectic. Traditionally, ‘humanist’ Marxists and ‘structural’ Marxists have in different ways denied the reality or relevance of the inversion, despite Marx’s clear statements to the contrary. The former have tended to stress the unity of the Marxian and Hegelian approaches. The latter have stressed the radical break of the ‘mature Marx’ from his youthful flirtation with the Hegelian dialectic, and associated philosophical errors of idealism and humanism. So, before considering the question of the conceptual structure and analytical function of Marxian dialectic, it is necessary (in however brief and inadequate way) to establish the fundamental characteristics of Hegel’s dialectic. For only by doing so can we establish the points of contact and departure between the Hegelian and Marxian approaches.6

Materialist dialectics 73 Hegel’s dialectical method Hegel’s Philosophy of History contains the clearest exposition of the dialectical method of all his writings. Here Hegel spells out clearly the basic principles of a dialectical analysis. His first step is to argue for an understanding of the interconnectedness of things, for the concept of totality, as informing philosophical endeavour. This, for him, is the most general principle of the dialectic and its necessary starting point. Hegel does this by pointing out the limitations of alternative historical methodologies, which neglect or decry the holistic method of analysis.7 Against historical accounts of human development, which limit themselves to the citation of a succession of events or deeds, described disparagingly by Hegel as ‘anecdotal, narrow and trivial’,8 Hegel argues that these leave the events and deeds unexplained, by divesting them of their social and historical contexts and roots. Against historical accounts couched in terms of linear cause and effect, Hegel shows that these are, again, guilty of confusing historical description with historical explanation, and for the same reason, because the chain of cause and effect relationships ultimately lead outside society and history, and therefore to something external to the system (totality) of which they are a part. For Hegel, nor does the method of pluralism or dualistic interactionism overcome the problems of empiricism, because this fails to grasp that the interplay between parts of the historical totality is not between external forces or ‘things in themselves’, but between aspects or moments of a unitary organic process. Totality, for Hegel, means grasping the parts as mediated and transformed by their interplay with the whole, and equally of the whole as mediated and transformed by its interplay with the parts. In dialectical terminology, the parts and the whole are not externally related, but are ‘interpenetrated’. So, according to Hegel, the parts assume novel properties by being part of the whole, just as the whole assumes novel properties, which are more than the summation or aggregation of its individual parts.9 For example, as Paul McGarr points out, when a few billion water molecules ‘are put together they collectively acquire a new property that none of them possess alone, liquidity. Nothing in the underlying laws governing the behaviour of the individual atoms tells you about this new property’.10 Indeed, neither does the interaction of water molecules below a particular level of complexity reveal knowledge of the new property. The liquidity is a function of the whole, not of the parts, although one which modifies the behaviour of the parts, and one which has now become a property of the parts, granting these new powers they did not have in isolation (e.g. the capacity to become a solid through cooling or a vapour through heating). Critical realist theorists today would describe liquidity as an ‘emergent property’ of the interaction of water molecules, which in turn gives rise to emergent forms of interaction between liquidity and other properties or mechanisms of the natural world. Hegel would say that the ‘emergence’ of liquidity is a function of the transmission of quantity into quality, of which he gives numerous examples. But, more fundamentally, emergence, for Hegel,

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would be another way of making the point that, as Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin put it, the ‘whole . . . is not simply the object of interaction of the parts but is the subject of interaction on the parts’.11 Hegel’s next step is to argue that totality is by itself inadequate to the task of historical understanding, even if it is a necessary starting point. Hegel’s concept of totality is fundamental, because this concept allows the analyst to avoid reductionism, not simply of a system to its components, but of the components to the system.12 Hegel’s concept of totality is thus much superior to that of contemporary philosophers who argue either that systems are simply aggregations of their parts and possess no powers or properties other than those of their parts (atomism), or that the nature or function of parts is given wholly by the system of which they are part (holism). Clearly, there is a point of contact here between Hegel’s and Bhaskar’s critiques of reductionism. For Hegel is arguing that since both the parts and the collective of which they are constituents assume properties by virtue of interaction, neither can be collapsed into the other. Nonetheless, two other general principles are indispensable for a dialectical analysis, other than totality and mediation, as Hegel rightly says. The first of these is the concept of internally generated transformative change. This is implicit in Hegel’s understanding of totality as the process of development of the whole,13 whereby no specific stage of history or consciousness or logic, not even the final stage, is the bearer of historical or philosophical truth, because this truth resides in the total process or movement of dialectical evolution from the simplest to the most developed stages. Against static conceptions of totality, such as that articulated by religious cosmologies, and more recently by functionalist sociologists (who wish to fetishize ‘equilibrium’ as the natural state of social systems), Hegel wishes to affirm that developmental change is intrinsic to intellectual and social systems, in the absence of which they would simply cease to be. A system devoid of movement is a mere collection of fragments, a non-system. As Engels puts it, ‘as soon as contradiction ceases, life, too, comes to an end, and death steps in’.14 This means that in order to understand the nature of concrete objects, one cannot simply examine the whole, nor its separate parts, but must instead study the process of development ‘through which the parts come to constitute the whole and, in doing so, become different than they were in their pre-existing form’.15 Therefore, the task of philosophy and science is to examine the historical development of the whole (i.e. human knowledge or society), its origins and present trajectories, its inner logic of change, and so its likely or potential futures or outcomes. For, just as focusing on one moment or phase of an individual life (e.g. childhood, youth, adulthood, old age) will yield only a partial one-sided truth about the individual, so focusing on a single passage of historical events or frozen snapshot of institutional arrangements will yield only a partial one-sided truth about humanity or society. The fourth and final general principle of a dialectical understanding, as understood by Hegel, is that of ‘contradiction’. This provides the linchpin connecting totality and change in Hegel’s philosophy. As Hegel himself puts it:

Materialist dialectics 75 ‘Contradiction . . . both in actuality and in thinking reflection, is considered an accident, a kind of abnormality or paroxysm of sickness, which will soon pass away . . . [whereas in fact] contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only in so far as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity’.16 Hegel’s point is simply that if we are to apprehend how total systems undergo internally generated transformative change and development, it is necessary to grasp them as inherently unstable by virtue of the incompatible or diverse elements of which they are comprised. Now this seems to me to be an entirely defensible position, because if reality were not dialectical, there could be no impulse towards change in either nature or society. That is to say, without contradictions, as well as compatibilities, built into the structures of reality, there could only be cyclical processes of simple reproduction or repetition at work in the world, not processes of molecular development interspersed by novel transformations (such as the emergence of one mode of production from another, or the emergence of consciousness from mindless organic matter). By contrast, Hegel says, a non-dialectical world-view and method of cognition reduces the world to a dead and timeless collection of facts, devoid of movement, the basis of empiricist and theological views of unchanging ‘things-inthemselves’ as constitutive of the universe. Hegel famously illustrates this argument by invoking the example of the life of a plant.17 The bud is as much the truth of the plant as is the blossom and the fruit, but the blossom contradicts or negates the bud, since the becoming of the blossom is the cancelling of the bud. In the same way, as part of the same organic process, the fruit negates or contradicts the flower, since the emergence of the fruit is the parcelling out of the flower. Hegel’s point is that the life of the plant is precisely a totality, by virtue of being a unitary developmental process, but that it is also in essence a contradictory totality, since the life of the plant consists precisely in the necessity of self-negation as dynamic process. But, of course, Hegel sees contradictions as everywhere the motor of change, not simply in the dialectic of organic matter. By way of illustration of his argument, let us consider the following broad examples: societal development and natural evolution. (1) Societal development. Few sociologists would doubt that processes of social change do not normally take the form of Parsons’ ‘moving equilibrium’, in which changes in institutional arrangements are engendered by extraneous ‘disturbances’ in their otherwise orderly functioning, in order to better adapt society to its external environment.18 Instead, since social change is more often than not energized by convulsive social struggles internal to society between rival social groupings, mediated by institutional incompatibilities in the social structure, this is tantamount to acknowledging that social systems tend to be dialectically structured. In this case, institutional incompatibilities feed into social malintegration, generating pressures for a thoroughgoing reform or even transformation of social relations.19 (2) Natural evolution. If we wish to understand how natural evolution gives rise to a range of different strata, with novel properties and powers, we have to recognize that matter is inherently transformative, because simultaneously self-affirming and self-cancelling. This is by

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virtue of its incapacity to sustain or contain a stable system of interactions beyond a certain level of complexity, these interactions then negating the limits or boundary conditions of the system from which they have emerged, forming newer structures from the old with radically different forms of motion or behaviour. These fundamental principles – totality, mediation, transformative change and contradiction – are the general form of Hegel’s dialectic. But, as John Rees rightly points out, it is important to be clear that none of these principles on their own constitute a dialectical analysis or process.20 Rather, it is their combination or integration within an explanatory system which constitutes the essence of dialectic. Taken together, these concepts add up to a powerful critique of reductionism, since this is implicit in Hegel’s grasp of systems as contradictory in themselves, a move which obviously precludes the analytical conflation of parts and wholes. These concepts also underpin and provide theoretical orientation or guidance to the concrete application of Hegel’s method, including what Engels described as Hegel’s ‘three laws of the dialectic’.21 As is well enough known, the ‘three laws’ are: the ‘identity of opposites’, the ‘transformation of quantity into quality’ and the ‘negation of the negation’. These concepts map onto and are a further specification of Hegel’s famous triadic explanatory structure (commonly understood as the movement through three ascending stages – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – though Hegel does not himself use these terms), by which he accounts for the historical development of consciousness (in The Phenomenology of Spirit), of scientific knowledge (in The Science of Logic) and of political institutions (in The Philosophy of History).22 Hegel’s utilization of this tripartite model of dialectical analysis is really his way of moving from the chaotic form of appearances of the historical totality to its rational inner structure. Hegel does this by showing how the apparently random and isolated aspects of reality are really bound together as part of a meaningful organic whole: ‘We look on [concepts] . . . as separated from each other by an infinite chasm, so that opposite categories can never get at each other. The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything’.23 Alex Callinicos provides an excellent account of how this works.24 The first stage of this process (thesis) introduces a simple concept or category, which is then shown to be abstract or one-sided and unreflective, because it stands in isolation from the relational totality of categories of which it is a part, and does not comprehend its own content. This is demonstrated by confronting the first-order concept with ‘negative reason’ (antithesis), ‘the negation of a definite something’, which is a ‘higher richer concept than that which preceded it’, because it has ‘been enriched by the . . . opposite of the preceding concept . . . and thus contains it’.25 So, for example, Hegel argues that the concept of the ‘family’ is an abstract one-sided concept, because the internal content of this concept (interpersonal relations based on love) can be drawn out only by contrasting it with its negation of ‘civil society’ (whose inner content is impersonal relations based on individuated self-interest in the marketplace). The third stage of this dialectic reinte-

Materialist dialectics 77 grates the thesis and antithesis in a higher totality, which is higher in the sense of being more englobing, because based on the recognition and simultaneous cancellation and preservation of the contradictory poles (community as unreflective love versus individuality as blind egoistic competition). Thus, for Hegel, the concepts of family and civil society, prised apart, exist as conflicting forms of society, which are ignorant of their own fundamental content and essential unity-in-difference. But when reintegrated in a new totality, which is selfconscious of the contradictory content of both elements, a new concept is generated which sublates the old. For Hegel, of course, this concept is the state. The state is the ‘negation of the negation’ or ‘triple negation’, because it preserves the progressive elements of the preceding concepts of ‘family’ (the idea of community as based on mutual aid and support) and ‘civil society’ (the idea of individual self-autonomy and self-empowerment) within itself in a universalizing or society-wide form. For Hegel, this is the promise of modernity. Hegel argues that there exists an identity between consciousness and being, ‘the identity of identity and non-identity’,26 by virtue of the fact that human thought and material reality share a common rational structure. ‘Reason or Spirit [is] at work in both the dumb rationality of . . . objective reality and the subjective reason of men’.27 But, since human beings inevitably objectify their labour, when they work to produce the social world and transform the world of things, they become alienated from the products and materials of their labour. Object is perceived as a force standing apart from subject, the contrary or antithesis of Reason or Spirit (which, Hegel says, is a form of alienation preserved at the heart of western philosophy, and one exemplified by Kant’s and Descartes’ rigid separation of the world of things from the world of consciousness). History, for Hegel, is the process by which humanity overcomes its estrangement from the world and from itself, by becoming ‘conscious of itself as its own world . . . and of the world as itself’.28 That is to say, for Hegel, history is the process by which consciousness or spirit becomes self-conscious of the fact that both subject and object are basically identical, or rather share a deeper identity or ‘self-restoring sameness’,29 as aspects or manifestations of Absolute Reason or Absolute Spirit or the Absolute Idea. The final stage of this historical dialectical transition – the moment of ultimate synthesis or negation of the negation – ‘is the point at which Spirit looks back at the entire proceeding process and comprehends it as nothing other than its own self-development, the movement which allowed it to attain its present pinnacle from which the structure of reality is transparent to reason’.30 This is the moment when Spirit (human consciousness) apprehends Absolute Spirit (God), because now consciousness has developed up to the point that it recognizes its identity with God (conceived as the objective rational principle that governs existence in all its forms). In other words, the triple negation is the terminus of history, where the objective rationality of Absolute Spirit becomes self-conscious, that is, the point where subjective and objective reason become one. Hegel spells out this process in all his major works. But the clearest exposition is contained in his Philosophy of History. Here Hegel shows how

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historical development is motored by contradictions within the ‘spirit of the age’, as this is manifested differently in human cultures and institutions and systems of thought. As Rees shows, this dialectic of history is, for Hegel, a fundamentally idealist one, insofar as the contradictions which move it are between opposing forms or levels of consciousness, in effect between Absolute Reason, towards which consciousness is moving, and the finite rationality of a particular historical stage of its journey.31 As Hegel puts it, ‘although we set out to merely trace the path of mind as it comes to know reality, at the end of the road we find that we have been watching mind as it constructs reality’.32 For Hegel, all forms of social and cultural relations ‘embody a certain stage in the development of reason’,33 which Hegel describes as ‘the spirit of the age’ or Geist. At each stage of societal or cultural or intellectual development, the ‘spirit of the age’, which at first promoted rationality up to a point, eventually runs into its limits, is shown to be abstract and one-sided, and becomes a fetter on further progress, road-blocking Reason or Absolute Spirit on its journey to self-consciousness. The thesis is then confronted with its contrary, as ‘spirit’ or Geist struggles to apprehend and transcend the ossified social and/or intellectual structures that are holding it back. Spirit then utilizes the tool of rational disputation, and the more mundane means of non-intellectual political and military struggles (the ‘ruse of reason’), to bring the ‘spirit of the age’ into realignment with its ‘cutting edge’, thus generalizing the best ideas of the epoch.34 Hegel thus sees all forms of social and material conflicts as being energized by this objective reason that pulses throughout reality. As Hegel puts it: ‘It is what we may call the cunning of reason that it sets the passions to work in its service, so that the agents by which it gives itself existence must pay the penalty and suffer the loss’.35 Thus, Hegel’s philosophy of history is, as Callinicos rightly says, unambiguously teleological.36 This is teleological, not in the sense that a conscious supermind (God) has preordained the course of world (natural and social) history, but in the sense that the objective rationality of Absolute Spirit (God as the totality of things) unfolds in history ‘as a circle which returns upon itself’.37 This is because the ‘complex unity’ of the terminus of the process is germane in the ‘simple unity’ of its starting point, by virtue of the organic necessity of its selfdevelopment from lower to higher structures. Yet, nonetheless, human history does not, for Hegel, occur mechanically or straightforwardly, in terms of simple linear chains of cause and effect, but only after an accumulation of quantitative changes to culture and knowledge and institutions result in a qualitatively different situation, a transformed social and intellectual reality. In this case, piecemeal challenges to the old order eventually develop so far they cannot be contained within its structures, and thoroughgoing change results. This ‘transformation of quantity into quality’ is also the moment of synthesis in Hegel’s dialectic, since the new mode of rationality takes from the old its more progressive elements, preserving them in a higher form. The culmination of this process, the harmonious reconciliation of subject and object, as human beings eventually comprehend their real relationship to the world, and hammer

Materialist dialectics 79 the spirit of the age into correspondence with its Ideal, is the ‘negation of the negation’, precisely because this is the moment when human alienation is overcome. Yet this dis-alienation is essentially a process that occurs in consciousness, since humans come to reconcile themselves to the objectification of the products of their labour (whether material objects or cultural ideas), by reconstituting this as conscious rather than mute or uncomprehending objectification. This is the self-cancellation of Hegel’s dialectic of history, as the common rational structure of society and nature, of mind and matter, of knowing and being, is finally recognized in thought, and as the external world is ‘annulled in the . . . self-mirroring activity of consciousness’.38 The dialectical method of classical Marxism Now, for the classical Marxists, the ‘rational core’ of Hegel’s dialectic (which needs rescuing from the mystical shell of his absolute idealism) is precisely those fundamental principles of ‘totality’, ‘mediation’, ‘transformative change’ and ‘contradiction’ (identified above), which constitute the theoretical foundations of the Hegelian system.39 Certainly, these can be seen at work in the methodological framework that informs all of Marx and Engels’ theoretical positions and specific explanatory hypotheses. Moreover, these same fundamental principles inform both Lenin’s and Trotsky’s philosophical commentaries on the nature of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic, and the manner they apply materialist dialectics to the study of specific problems of Marxian theory and socialist politics. By way of illustration of these points, I will consider three examples: (1) Marx’s theoretical method of analysing capitalism; (2) Lenin’s philosophical commentary on Hegelian and Marxian dialectic (resulting in his ‘epistemological materialism’); and (3) the political pay-off of Lenin’s materialist dialectics. 1 Marx’s ‘logic’ of capital In Marx’s Capital, explanatory theory and method share the basic structure of Hegelian dialectic. First, capitalist society is grasped as a unitary system, a ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’.40 The structural unity-indifference of capitalism is given by a specific configuration of forces of production and relations of production. Second, Marx wishes to understand capitalism as a system in constant development and change, as following ‘laws of motion’, which are integral to its functioning as a particular mode of production, by virtue of the specific way the unity of particular forces of production and relations of production is accomplished. Thus, Marx takes the classical economists to task for universalizing bourgeois society, for treating the economic categories of capitalism as applicable to all previous societies, where these are regarded as undeveloped, and to all possible futures. For Marx, by contrast, ‘[e]conomic categories are only the abstractions of the social relations of production . . . the theoretical expression of historical relations of production’,41 those of a historically specific and transitory form of society.

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Finally, Marx grasps the relationship between totality and change in capitalist society as mediated by the concept of ‘contradiction’. Contradictions are grasped as a structural aspect of capitalism, that is, as internal and necessary to the functioning (or dysfunctioning) of the system. These express themselves in the form of convulsive crises (of overproduction and cyclical fluctuations in the marketplace), and in the form of environmental degradation, and often take the form of dialectical inversions (e.g. alienation, commodity fetishism, the subordination of living labour to dead labour masked by the illusions of the wage-form). Capitalism is theorized as a ‘unity of opposites’, whose ‘law of motion’ is a function of the conflictual relationship between forces of production and relations of production (i.e. the competition of ‘many capitals’ in the marketplace, the value relation which is energized by this in the context of generalized commodity production and the tendency of the relations of production to fetter the development of the forces of production beyond a certain point), and between opposed social classes (i.e. between the propertied bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat) over control of authoritative and allocative resources and the production process. The unity of capitalism exists because production and consumption, forces of production and relations of production, capital and labour, presuppose one another. There cannot be consumption without production, social labour without appropriate tools and technology, capital without wage-labour, or vice versa. The contradictions of capitalism are derived from the manner in which the unity of economic elements – forces of production and relations of production, production and consumption, etc. – is accomplished in this specific mode of production. Capital and wage-labour, for example, constitute an opposition as well as a unity. This is because, although neither can exist in the absence of the other (capital is simply objectified labour; wage-labour is simply the means of capital accumulation), neither can they co-exist harmoniously. In part, this is due to the fact that the relationship between them is asymmetrical (wage-labour exists only to service capital; and capital is structurally parasitic on wage-labour). But, in equal measure, this is due to the fact that labour power as a commodity ‘is not detachable from the body/person of the wage labourer, so attempts by capital to use the “commodity” it has bought will inevitably bring it into conflict with the person to whom this “commodity” remains attached’.42 2 Lenin and epistemological materialism The method informing Lenin’s ‘dialectical turn’, of which his Philosophical Notebooks are the highest expression, is relatively unknown, even among Marxists. So I will go into greater detail with this example. Now Lenin concludes from his study of Hegel that ‘intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism’,43 precisely because Hegel’s dialectical approach had far more to offer epistemological materialism than those reductionist materialisms that regard concepts as simply passively mirroring external reality. Again, the basic Hegelian dialectical structure of analysis that informs Marx’s

Materialist dialectics 81 dialectic of capital and wage-labour is to be found here. Dialectical method is defined cogently as the ‘splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts’.44 Lenin argues that totality, the systemic interconnectedness of human beings and nature, of subject and object, of thought and material reality, has to be grasped as mediated by contradictions, ‘the contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself) . . . the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomena’.45 Failing this, Lenin argues, there can be no understanding of the ‘interruption of gradualness’, of ‘the “self-movement” of everything existing’, of ‘leaps’, of ‘the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new’.46 For Lenin, in other words, unless totality and change are mediated by an understanding of totality as ‘the “struggle” of opposites’, reality becomes ‘lifeless, pale and dry’,47 and change is reduced to no more than a moving equilibrium, reacting only to those external disturbances which occasionally deflect physical and social systems from their orderly repetitive functioning. Without dialectic, Lenin observes, there can be no internally generated transformative change, no self-development, and so the source of change would have to be introduced from outside the systems of nature, which would lead ultimately to mysticism and godism. Lenin’s ‘dialectical turn’ allowed him to transcend the mechanical ‘reflection theory’ of knowledge outlined in his earlier Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Previously, his conception of thought and reality as simple oppositions precisely necessitated the collapse of one pole into the other (in this case of ‘consciousness’ into ‘conditions’ – knowledge-acquisition being a straightforward function of our observations of how the external empirical or phenomenal world operates). Now Lenin recognizes that knowledge is a human construction, the product of ongoing processes of abstraction and theory-construction and testing, which has to be won via painstaking conceptual work in active interchange with the objects of knowledge: Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man [sic]. But this is not a simple, not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc., and these concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science  ‘the logical Idea’) embrace conditionally, approximate, the universal law-governed character of eternally moving and developing nature. Here there are actually, objectively, three members: (1) nature; (2) human cognition  the human brain (as the highest product of this same nature); and (3) the form of reflection of nature in human cognition, and this form consists precisely of concepts, laws, categories, etc. Man [sic] cannot comprehend  reflect  mirror nature as a whole, in its completeness, its ‘immediate totality’, he can only eternally come closer to this, creating abstractions, concepts, laws, a scientific picture of the world. . . . Cognition is the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object. The reflection of nature in men’s [sic] thought must be understood not ‘lifelessly’, not ‘abstractly’, not devoid of movement, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.48

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This new account of knowledge production is informed by Lenin’s recognition that his earlier idea that concepts are straightforward copies of the objective world is over-simple. Such a conception disregards the non-identity of phenomena (our experience of the world) and essence (the laws and structures that determine the phenomenal world of experience), and fails to appreciate how the historicity of nature by necessity renders all our knowledge claims approximate and inexact. Lenin also begins to see that abstract concepts are estranged from the world only by virtue of their lack of connection with the kind of social practices which would force them into contact with their objects. Thus he begins to glimpse a dialectical solution to the abstract dualism of thought and reality represented by the poles of mechanical materialism and voluntarist idealism (or empirical realism and rationalism). A ‘mirror theory’, which is blind to the crucial role of practically mediated conceptual labour in mediating subjective and objective reality, is no longer adequate or necessary. This is because Lenin now identifies a mechanism (conscious constitutive collaborative labour and systematic reflection upon the resultants, methods, concepts and activities of conscious practical labour), which mediates the contradictory unity of consciousness and materiality as developmental process: Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract . . . does not get away from truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice, – such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.49 Lenin’s point is that concepts remain sterile abstractions unless and until they are tested in conscious practice conceived as transformative problemsolving in the everyday world. In the dialectic of knowledge-acquisition, the first moves are the ones identified by Marx in his logic of Capital. This is the movement from the concrete (the chaotic conception of a totality as phenomenal forms) to the abstract (the working out of thinner or more precise theoretical concepts that explain the phenomenal forms by relating these to underlying laws or mechanisms), and then the retracing of this process from the abstract to the concrete, which is reassembled not as ‘immediate totality’, but as a ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’.50 Lenin’s argument is that it is the ‘reverse shift’ from the abstract to the concrete that brings the objective and subjective into correspondence. This is because the analyst can rationally suppose that the new ‘concrete totality’, which has been won via the process of theoretical model-building (the conceptual effort to integrate phenomena and essence), does ‘correspond’ to the reality being studied, only by putting it to work in the phenomenal world, by transforming it into a tool of human labour for modifying or transforming the phenomenal world. As Rees puts it: ‘In conscious activity, human beings overcome the abstractness of thought, integrating it with concrete, immediate reality in all its complexity – this is the

Materialist dialectics 83 moment when we see whether thought really does assume an objective form, whether it really can create the world, or whether it has mistaken the nature of reality and therefore is unable to enter the historical chain as an objective force’.51 In a nutshell, then, the process of the ‘approximation’ of thought to reality, which in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks replaces the earlier formula of thought copying or photographing the objects of cognition, is now grasped as a ‘dialectic between concept and fact’.52 This does not unfold abstractly, but is mediated by conceptual and practical social labour on the objects of cognition, and by the practical application of theories to the task of transforming aspects of the world in the service of human interests. This allows for a historical, not totalizing, conception of knowledge, ‘in the sense that [the] methods and concepts [of science], as well as its theories, develop over time in dynamic interaction with one another and with the material world, allowing more accurate descriptions of reality to emerge’.53 This conception also replaces an empiricist philosophy of knowledge with a realist one, and one which is furthermore an implicit endorsement of a kind of ‘depth’ realism. As noted earlier, this is because Lenin recognizes, against Hegel, that the phenomenal forms of reality (on Bhaskar’s gloss the realm of the ‘actual’) are not identical to their underlying properties or essences. Yet, for Lenin, phenomenal and essential levels of reality are not absolutely estranged, though they may appear to be contradictory, and so Lenin also wishes to take issue with the Kantian thesis that ‘things-in-themselves’ are unknowable, because organized into coherent entities only by and through our reflections on and interpretations of sense data. Lenin’s point is twofold. (1) Subject–object relations are a unity of opposites (not simple identity or opposition), this being revealed by the distinction and connection between phenomena and essence. (2) This unity of thought and matter is revealed only through the processes of scientific work and the cumulative knowledge (validated in practice by its capacity to enhance human control over the object world) this produces into distinct zones of being. Lenin now understands the interconnectedness of phenomena and essence, that ‘surface’ is a real manifestation of ‘essence’ (which does not simply distort or block a deeper understanding of reality, but which also provides clues and manifests symptoms of the nature of the deeper reality), just as the foam on a wave is expressive of currents below,54 or unemployed or impoverished workers at the labour exchange or statistics on the unequal distribution of wealth and income are real manifestations of the underlying logic of capitalist social relations. This allows the possibility of discovering or uncovering the deeper structure of things, by tracing and relating their phenomenal effects to root or source, a process which involves the varied techniques and methods and theories of scientific practice, without which objective knowledge would not be possible. This, in other words, allows the possibility of thought being able to approximate to the objects of knowledge. For a progressive ‘correspondence’ theory of some aspect of reality (in this specific sense of processual approximation of concept to

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object) is one that is better able than a mechanical ‘reflection’ theory to relate its phenomenal forms to its underlying structure, which also includes better explaining how the phenomenal forms appear differently and often appear to contradict the underlying structure. As Lenin himself puts it: ‘Human concepts are subjective in their abstractness, separateness, but objective as a whole, in the process, in the sum total, in the tendency, in the source’.55 3 Lenin and politics But, of course, Lenin’s ‘return to Hegel’ had repercussions well beyond his philosophy. On the contrary, Lenin’s dialectical reworking of the Marxian method had a dramatic pay-off in the world of socialist politics, and it is this which demonstrates the power of the materialist dialectic in practice. This is unsurprising, because Lenin’s philosophical investigations were always stimulated by problems of socio-historical materialism and socialist politics, and the need to develop modes of thinking and strategies and tactics of political organization and agency that were flexible enough to overcome them. Like Marx and Engels before him, Lenin was well aware that ‘philosophy lives on politics’.56 This was true, for example, of his Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which was written to combat the political subjectivism and voluntarism implicit in the ‘idealist turn’ of certain leading Bolsheviks (spearheaded by Bogdanov), under the influence of particular philosophical appropriations of the meaning of the ‘revolution in physics’ at the turn of the last century. Lenin’s ‘dialectical turn’, by contrast, was motivated by the necessity to make political sense of the abrupt and unexpected climb-down of the Second International socialist parties from an anti-imperialist stance. Despite formally advancing the position that the forthcoming World War I would be a war of national aggression, energized by the intensifying contradictions and tensions of the international state system, and fought between equally culpable great powers to re-divide the resources of the globe, the communist parties ended up capitulating to nationalism, pledging their support for their ‘own’ national states in the interests of ‘self-defence’. Moreover, Lenin’s ‘return to Hegel’ was also motivated more generally by the need (as he saw it) to overcome the problem of grasping how the socialist revolution was to be practically accomplished and sustained in backward Russia, where the ‘objective’ circumstances (developed capitalist forces of production and relations of production and a majority proletariat) were lacking, but where the ‘subjective’ conditions (a militant revolutionary class-conscious proletariat) were in the process of developing in response to the oppression and privations of the Tsarist regime. It is not difficult to see how Lenin’s theoretical labours and conclusions of his Philosophical Notebooks equipped him with the conceptual tools to apprehend and resolve these problems. These enabled him to understand the performative contradiction between the theoretical anti-imperialism of Second International Marxism and its practical endorsement of the idea of ‘wars of national defence’, since the latter position followed from the logic of undialectical reformism and

Materialist dialectics 85 evolutionism and gradualism, which meant that the primary concern was to maintain party organizations as national unities at all costs. Moreover, Lenin’s appropriation of Hegel’s insight that quantitative change gives rise at certain points to ‘decisive leaps’, to the ‘interruption of gradualness’, certainly allowed him to break with the rigid ‘stages theory’ of Kautsky’s orthodox Marxism, according to which capitalism must be fully developed in Russia before the socialist revolution could be put on the historical agenda. The same was true of his recovery of Marx’s insight (now counterposed to his undialectical claim of Materialism and Empirio-criticism that concepts simply follow straightforwardly from facts) that consciousness could become an objective force (for transformative social change), once it had moved from the abstract to the concrete. Or, in other words, that they could do so once the subjective had become objective in the historical process by virtue of gripping the hearts and minds of the masses. Now Lenin could see how materially conditioned ‘consciousness’ could be the decisive intermediate link in the chain of historical causality which, once translated into practical activity, could remake the conditions that had previously chained it to the dead weight of tradition of the previous generations. Lenin had long recognized the problem of the economistic ‘historical stages’ formula of orthodox Marxism when applied to Russian conditions: the Russian bourgeoisie enjoyed too many privileges (under the tsarist regime) and were too politically conservative to play their ‘historical role’ of replacing feudalism with capitalism.57 For this reason Lenin initially believed that only a coalition of the workers and peasants could seize state power on behalf of the ‘democratic revolution’, establishing in Lenin’s words a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship’,58 which would then develop a bourgeois democracy and unfettered capitalism. But this raised the problem identified by Trotsky: only the working class was capable of leading the revolution (for strategic and political reasons). And, if this was so, the workers would simply not be prepared to hand over the reigns of economic power to the bourgeoisie, subordinating their own class interests to the requirements of capitalism and bourgeois democracy, least of all because Kautsky and Plekhanov had deemed a period of social domination by the bourgeoisie as ‘historically necessary’.59 For a long time Lenin could see no way out of this impasse. But, under the auspices of his study of dialectics, Lenin was better able to appreciate the force of Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development, whereby the subjective and objective elements necessary for socialist transformation in Russia on the eve of the 1917 revolutions could be reconciled. Lenin bases his analysis on his earlier writings on imperialism, which grasped global capitalism as a contradictory totality of economically interlinked but mutually antagonistic great powers, locked into a structure of geo-political imperial rivalries, of which tsarist Russia was the ‘weakest link’.60 But now he could see that a successful socialist revolution in Russia would break the imperialist chain, plunging the whole system into crisis, and igniting the touch-paper of insurrection in the more advanced heartlands of the system. This in turn would allow the possibility that successful revolutions in the western countries would free up the fraternal aid

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necessary to allow socialist reconstruction in Russia and the consolidation of soviet democracy.61 In the Russian context, this was a genuinely dialectical solution to the relationship between agency and structure, freedom and necessity, politics and economics, consciousness and circumstances, grasped as voluntarism-withinconstraint. That the strategy did not ultimately succeed, given that the western revolutions were defeated and the Russian revolution left isolated (and subject to internal and external pressures that extinguished soviet democracy and brought about the bureaucratic degeneration of the regime), in no way invalidates the power of the dialectical analysis that informed it. After all, there is no historical guarantee of the success of any revolution, and Lenin was surely correct in his judgement that the strategy had a good chance of success, given the alignment of subjective and objective processes his dialectical analysis identified. Marxian and Hegelian dialectic compared I have said that Marxism takes from Hegel a number of basic interrelated dialectical concepts (totality, mediation, transformative change and contradiction – or ‘motion through oppositions’). These constitute the analytical cornerstone of materialist dialectics. But Engels also made the point that ‘three laws’ of dialectic – ‘unity and interpenetration of opposites’, ‘transformation of quantity into quality’ and ‘negation of the negation’ – can usefully be distilled from Hegel’s work.62 These, for him, add a new dimension of analytical precision to the more abstract concepts in applied philosophical work. For Hegel, these ‘laws’ are ways of specifying how dialectical processes unfold, though these concepts are not the only acceptable way of doing so, because not every dialectical process will fit the pattern they outline. Now, although the classical Marxists adopt these basic analytical tools of Hegel’s dialectic, they do not assume these capture or exhaust every dialectical process at work in the world.63 Moreover, it is important to understand that they draw on these ‘laws’ (analytical logics), not as a mechanical or deterministic formula adopted prior to research, into which real world processes have to be fitted, but rather as elements of an explanatory framework, based on the findings or knowledge of empirical science, which is also of practical efficacy in interpreting and organizing research data. As Engels puts it, ‘there is no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature . . . in every field of science, in natural as well as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts . . . the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered from them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment’.64 This brings us on to the question of what constitutes the points of departure of Marxian from Hegelian dialectic. For Marx, this is one sense in which the materialist dialectic can be legitimately said to invert the Hegelian – philosophical ideas must be regulated and disciplined by the methods and theories of the empirical sciences, and thus by the nature of the material world, rather than the empirical sciences and their objects of study being tailored to fit in with a pre-

Materialist dialectics 87 conceived dialectical schema. On Marx’s interpretation, Hegel’s dialectic is basically a conceptually driven dialectic, in which contradictions either arise from the limitations of human consciousness as it struggles to apprehend the world, or from the drive of ‘world spirit’ to force itself past the constraints of ‘objective spirit’ (society and culture). In this process contradictions are eventually dissolved as thought finally appropriates the world as its own mirror, as identical to Spirit, or energizes the practical struggles which hammer the objective world into correspondence with Reason or Spirit. This ensures that Hegel’s dialectical concepts are cast adrift from the disciplines of empirical testing and the possibility of refutation by scientific knowledge, since the starting point of Hegelian analysis is always the Idea, rather than the material world from which ideas are ultimately derived. Thus, although Hegel did illustrate dialectical processes with the latest scientific findings, these tended to be fairly ad hoc.65 Instead, Hegel’s dialectic unfolds at the height of philosophical abstraction, presenting properties or objects of the material world as more or less developed forms of the general abstract concepts that are applied to them.66 For Hegel, the only real knowledge is abstract conceptual knowledge, and this develops ‘internally’ through the logical progression of theoretical categories, not in active interchange with the material world.67 Thus, argues Marx, Hegel’s dialectic does reveal the contradictions that exist in categories and conceptual thought, for example the ‘unequal and opposed . . . shapes of consciousness’68 of rulers and ruled. But the metaphysical identity of thought and being here ensure that change is understood in terms of a dynamic of social consciousness rather than in terms of a dynamic of social relations. This can be illustrated by briefly examining Hegel’s master–slave dialectic.69 At the beginning of the process, the lord is the dominant power, ‘the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself’. The servant is compelled, under fear of death, to labour in the service of the lord. So the servant ‘is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is to live . . . for another’.70 The servant is mired in ‘servile thinking’, living in fear of the lord, which is necessary for subsequent historical progress from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. But the slave’s labour on the object mediates the relationship between oppressor and oppressed and transforms his/her consciousness. By working on the material world, in providing the lord with subsistence, the servant comes to realize his/her own independence from the world of objects (as producer of the things appropriated by another). Roles come to be grasped differently by the servant. The lord is actually dependent on the servant and falsely believes that (s)he is the independent power. ‘Through his rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’.71 For Marx, then, Hegel elides contradictions in social consciousness and contradictions in material social structure (contradictions in thought and wider social and material reality are seen as identical). This undermines the distinction between subjective and objective dialectics in Hegel’s philosophy and leads him into idealism. The point is well made by John Rees:

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Materialist dialectics [T]he dialectic of lordship and bondage confirms the idealist nature of Hegel’s analysis. Only the bondsman’s consciousness has been transformed, not his real relation to the lord. There has been a revolution in thought but no revolution in social relations. The Hegelian dialectic begins with the dominant consciousness of the lord and the subservient consciousness of the bondsman and ends with the transformed consciousness of the bondsman. The ‘real world of existence’ and work is necessary, but only features as the mediating middle term.72

So Hegel’s dialectic can be represented thus: consciousness (servile thinking) → labour on the material world → transformed consciousness (independent thinking). Each dialectical sequence begins and ends with consciousness. In practice, Hegel’s treatment of social consciousness and social relations as identical means that each phase of his dialectic implies a reconciliation of thought and objective reality, rather than a transformed social and material reality. Hegel himself did not understand this. This is because he did not see that material social structures always bound and limit forms of social consciousness, and that practical social struggles transform social consciousness only by virtue of transforming the social and material worlds. On the contrary, for Hegel, social consciousness is transformed not by virtue of a transformation of social conditions: the servant achieves ‘independent thinking’ in the absence of the process of struggle that challenges and overthrows the social relations of slavery. This is arguably the sense in which Hegel’s dialectic is driven by ideas: once a higher stage of Reason is attained, this ultimately ‘rules’ the practical struggles in the material world that bring about the reshaping of social institutions and objective culture to fit the dialectical movement of Reason. For Hegel, ascending states of consciousness, as these are translated into deeds, remodel the world, culminating in the emergence of free wage-labour under capitalism, this constituting the terminus of his dialectic of history. In contrast to this idealist method (as they see it), Marx and Engels insist that their ‘point of departure’ is the material world, the object and instrument of human labour, from which all forms of consciousness are derived.73 Concepts are the product of real conditions, yet are distinct from these conditions, shaped by existential contradictions. They then have to be abstracted from their objects, and subjected to rational procedures of scientific testing, then reapplied to their objects in the form of more sophisticated concepts, if they are to apprehend the nature of real world processes or structures. Further, because contradictions exist outside consciousness, are independent of consciousness, and indeed often account for the contradictions in consciousness, existing in their own right in the structures of society and nature, it follows that objective reality and subjective reality cannot be elided. There is a unity between subjective and objective dialectics, not a simple identity.74 For Marx and Engels, processes in nature unfold independently of thought and culture via real structured dialectical connections and oppositions, whereas contradictions in social consciousness are ‘bounded’ by and expressive of con-

Materialist dialectics 89 tradictions of material social relations. This situation can be contrasted with Hegel, for whom contradictions of social consciousness express and bound contradictions of real life. For Marx and Engels, the material struggles of social agents, as these are over-determined by structural social relations, bring about social transformations. Again, this can be contrasted with Hegel, for whom practical struggles in the material world act as the tool of Reason or Spirit to bring about social transformations.75 For classical Marxism, then, consciousness is not the first and last term of the dialectic of human history, as it arguably was in Hegel, but is its mediating middle term. And this middle term is understood not as abstract Reason, but as conscious collaborative labour in the sensuous world, in the service of human needs and wants.76 Thus, Marx’s dialectic can be represented as follows: material reality (social relations and physical conditions) → social consciousness → transformative social agency (constitutive labour and class struggle), leading to transformed social relations and social consciousness. This understanding allows us to grasp the manner in which the classical Marxists apply Hegel’s ‘three laws’ of the dialectic. In Hegel, on the common interpretation of his work, these unfold as a simple concept begets a more refined concept, which contains and transcends the simpler one, and so on, until the Idea is evolved into self-consciousness of the Absolute (the common rational structure of thought and the material world which Hegel understands as Absolute Spirit or Reason). In Hegel, furthermore, the historical process by which Spirit discovers or even constructs the world as its own creation is essentially teleological (or so it is argued by the critics), since the self-reconciliation of Spirit at the final stage of the dialectic is immanent in its beginning, the goal to which history gravitates, this unfolding by virtue of logical necessity, as would a sequence of self-generating concepts. For classical Marxism, in contrast with this interpretation of Hegel’s logic, neither the transformation of quantity into quality, nor the negation of the negation, can be interpreted as teleological laws of absolute necessity, whether in social or natural systems. This interpretation of Marxian dialectic as radically anti-fatalistic and nonteleological follows from its ‘inversion’, its transformation from an idealist to a materialist dialectic. For transformative change is now grasped as the internally structured collision of social or physical oppositions, without the certainty that a specific resultant or fixed end-state must follow from initial causes or conditions, in advance of the developmental process itself, as would the conclusion of a problem in logic from its initial premises. As Trotsky put it: ‘Human society has not developed in accordance with a prearranged plan, but empirically, in the course of a long, complicated and contradictory struggle’.77 This is equally true of physical and social systems. In both cases, the process of the transformation of quantity into quality, i.e. the development of structural forms by means of internal and external contradictions and dialectical connections, does not necessarily resolve itself in the negation of the negation (the successive transcendence of lower by higher systems which nonetheless preserve in a modified form elements or properties of the lower).

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In society, on the one hand, thoroughgoing change occurs only when subordinate social classes decisively defeat entrenched elites in open class warfare and remodel social relations in their own image. Social crises are inevitable, because structural and social malintegration is inevitable, given the dialectical nature of class societies, but not the outcome of the class struggle itself, not least because subjective factors (leadership, ideology, consciousness, organization) are as indispensable to change as objective factors, even if the weight of these objective factors (recurring organic social crises, etc.) renders radical change a probable outcome in the longer run. For these reasons Engels argues against using the negation of the negation concept as ‘a mere proof producing statement’, as substitute for empirical study, and hence as a statement of the inevitability of capitalist collapse and socialist reconstruction: [B]y characterising the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law.78 In nature, on the other hand, although the evolutionary development of matter is a law-governed process, even here the laws are not mechanical, and nor is the determinism absolute. Again, Engels argues against this kind of absolutist and teleological determinism in natural or physical systems, and he is right to do so.79 In recent years, of course, important developments in the ‘sciences of complexity’ (quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and chaos theory) have struck a blow against determinism. For these have revealed the existence of probalistic, not deterministic, laws of nature (at the sub-atomic level), and of random or unpredictable behaviour in physical systems under certain circumstances (within determinate limits) at certain scales of nature. These have also revealed the coexistence of and continuous transmission between orderly, deterministic behaviour and chaotic or probalistic behaviour at different strata of reality.80 Overall, it now seems that a determinate range of outcomes and pathways and behaviours are often possible for a given physical system from the same initial boundary conditions, even if some pathways and outcomes are radically more probable or necessary than others. This does not, of course, prevent natural evolutionary mechanisms being grasped analytically as algorithmic processes, which must for a specific system generate necessary results (in the sense of the results being ‘bounded’ in terms of the outcomes that are possible by initial conditions and internal-and-necessary relations), and which yields probable results within a determinate structure of different outcomes. But it does mean that no specific resultant or outcome is certain to have prevailed historically. So, for example, although it was probably necessary that the algorithmic ratchet of natural selection would give rise to life at some point in time and space, given specific physical and chemical con-

Materialist dialectics 91 stituents as boundary conditions, it does not follow that life was the goal of this process. Nor was it necessary that life would evolve into sentient life (though this was a likely evolutionary ‘good trick’ given the selection benefits conferred on organisms by their possession of consciousness), or that sentient life take the form of modern Homo sapiens, or that it emerge on the timescale that it did.81 At different scales of nature, there are different levels of contingency-within-necessity, of relative determinism, depending on the complexity of antecedent causes and conditions required to support and sustain the entities of each stratum of reality. Marxian socio-historical dialectics: orthodox objections My analysis (above) supports the notion that Marxian dialectics are neither teleological nor reductive nor deterministic. This conclusion would be considered by many critical realists and dialectical critical realists (in common with virtually every other kind of social scientist) as flying in the face of established academic knowledge. As we have seen (Chapter 1), Bhaskar’s own critique of Marx’s socio-historical dialectics is fairly orthodox in this respect. Yet those who assert that there is a strong strain of determinism and fatalism in Marx’s socio-historical dialectics often fail to distinguish the classical Marxist current, which links together the analytical practice of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Luxemburg and a handful of more contemporary authors located in the labour movement (which is opposed to fatalism and positivism), from the broader tradition of so-called ‘orthodox’ Marxism, which includes the whole of Second International and Stalinized Marxism, irrespective of its (often determinist) conceptual and methodological content.82 Moreover, it is a lamentable fact that this kind of understanding is grossly misinformed, shaped as it has been by the exigencies of Cold War politics, and now by the spectre of a repentant socialism in a world reputed to be ‘beyond left and right’.83 The knock-on effects of this in academia are fairly complex. But these include a general failure by intellectuals and sociologists to approach central Marxian texts in the spirit of immanent critique, and sometimes (in the case of some of the most influential critics) even a lack of serious engagement with primary sources. But it is worth pointing out that, by and large, the textual evidence in Marx and Engels’ oeuvre supporting the ‘orthodox view’ is concentrated in the ‘early works’, prior to Marx and Engel’s first statement of socio-historical materialism in The German Ideology, before their break with Hegel’s idealist and circular (as they saw it) philosophy of history. Now it seems a little foolish to criticize Marx for his philosophical failings before he had a chance to formulate the distinctive conceptual and methodological tools of Marxism. What Engels had to say about his own earliest writings should, on any reasonable reading, equally apply to those of the ‘Young Marx’: Modern international socialism . . . did not exist in 1844. My book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human

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Materialist dialectics embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern socialism from one of its ancestors, German philosophy.84

In their later works, of course, Marx and Engels state their methodological opposition to teleologism and historicism (historical fatalism) in no uncertain terms. Engels, who tends to be held responsible for most of the alleged errors of Marxism, is characteristically clear on these issues. Against teleologism, on the one hand, Engels argues that our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined in detail before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political, civillaw, aesthetic, philosophic, religious etc., corresponding to them.85 This seems a fairly clear statement of the need for the social analyst to endorse a method that entails considering each form of society in its own terms, as following its own ‘laws’, and not to consider history as conforming to the dictates of an overarching speculative philosophical schema, in effect to avoid abstract system building. Against historicism, on the other hand, Engels made it known that he was increasingly exasperated with the ‘younger Marxists . . . who write as if, according to Marx, history makes itself quite automatically, without the co-operation of human beings (who after all are making it!), as if these human beings were simply played like mere chessmen by the economic conditions (which are the work of men themselves!)’.86 For Engels, by contrast: History does nothing, it ‘possesses’ no ‘immense wealth’, it ‘wages’ no ‘battles’. It is man [sic], real, living man [sic] who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man [sic] means to achieve its own ends; history is nothing but the activity of man [sic] pursuing his aims.87 However, it is important to point out, that even in the ‘earlier works’, the textual basis of the orthodox critique is still rather insecure. For even here there is rather more in the way of textual data which points towards contrary conclusions. For example, in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which is often singled out as especially prone to teleology by the critics (and not without some justification), Marx insists that communism should not be considered as preordained by historical laws. ‘Communism as such is not the goal of human development’, but is rather ‘the “actual” phase necessary for the next stage in the process of human emancipation’, i.e. the necessary stage of history if alienation is to be overcome.88 If this is not enough, Marx and Engels’ first coherent statement of socio-historical materialism in The German Ideology (which, inci-

Materialist dialectics 93 dentally, was explicitly written for purposes of self-clarification of the basic ideas of Marxism) offers a root-and-branch dismissal of the ‘speculative distortions’ (as they saw it) of the Hegelian-inspired philosophy of history: History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other hand, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history. . . . Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes ‘a person ranking with other persons’ . . . while what is designated with the words ‘destiny’, ‘goal’, ‘germ’, or ‘idea’ of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history.89 The fundamental problem with the view that Marxian dialectic is essentially teleological and ‘historicist’ (in Karl Popper’s sense of the latter term) is that it is compelled to disregard disconfirming passages such as the above (of which there are plenty), and to grossly exaggerate the significance of supporting textual evidence in Marx and Engels’ post-1845 writings to make any kind of case at all. Since passages which can be interpreted in an overly ‘deterministic’ and ‘fatalistic’ manner have such a marginal presence in Marx and Engels’ mature works, amounting to no more than a few passages in a voluminous output spanning thousands of pages of text, it becomes necessary for uncharitable critics to over-inflate their conceptual weight and explanatory significance to the point of absurdity. It is also important to note that often the most ‘deterministic’ passages (of those which can be labelled as deterministic) are to be found in the ‘propagandist’ (overtly political) rather than mature ‘scientific’ (sociological and theoretical) texts. Yet it should be obvious for contingent political reasons (i.e. ‘rallying the troops’) that these are more prone to speak of the ‘historical inevitability’ of capitalist downfall and proletarian revolution. The obvious example of this, of course, is the famous ‘gravediggers’ comment in The Communist Manifesto.90 But, even the marginal ‘positivistic’ aspects of Marx and Engels’ mature output can often be interpreted legitimately in a more charitable light (once placed in their textual context), since these tend to function simply as rhetorical embellishments to the unfolding of theoretical concepts, cutting against the grain of the analytical problematic in which they are situated. An oft-quoted example of this is Marx’s brief sketch of the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ in the third volume of Capital.91 This can be interpreted in a deterministic light, of course. Thus, one could argue, as Roger Gottlieb does, that the mere presence of this kind of statement in Marx’s mature writings provides sure evidence that he ‘retained a Hegelian perspective . . . [in which] Progress will lead inevitably to secular Enlightenment’.92 However, this statement can equally (and better) be read innocently as simply a statement of the necessary conjuncture of objective economic circumstances required to

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allow the replacement of capitalism with socialism. Alternatively, the passage might just as plausibly be interpreted as simply another example of Marx’s talent for poetic licence and rhetorical bombast getting the better of him, or as nothing more than an attempt by the author to ‘spice up’ a particularly dense part of the analysis. It should go without saying, of course, that to take such passages at face value (as Gottlieb does) is to resort to a kind of shallow descriptive empiricism. To offer a more obvious example, even Marx’s famous claim that ‘the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society’93 should not necessarily be interpreted as a rigid stages theory of social evolution. Rather, it can legitimately be understood as a broad historical sketch of successive economic modes that have presided over a cumulative development of humanity’s forces of production. This latter interpretation is supported by Marx’s own critique of vulgar Marxists, who are taken to task for subsuming history ‘under one great natural law’, and thus interpreting ‘my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in western Europe as [an] . . . historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself’.94 But, whatever one chooses to make of passages of the kind I have been discussing, what cannot be doubted is that their status or function in Marx’s mature social theory is simply too uncertain to bear the weight of the orthodox critique of socio-historical materialism. And yet, despite this, much of the orthodox interpretation and critique of socio-historical materialism insists on drawing certain conclusions from ambiguous data. Nonetheless, irrespective of the value of engaging in a more critical analysis of those Marxian passages that are superficially read as supporting the orthodox critique, it is far more important to stress the point that set against this flimsy and ambiguous evidence of Marxian ‘teleologism’ (the attribution of goals or purposes to history upon which it ‘acts’) and ‘historicism’ (the positing of historical laws leading to necessary results) is a mountain of textual data and dense conceptual analysis supporting the opposite conclusions. Thus, antiMarxist critique has long been characterized by the tedious and dishonest practice of scouring Marxian texts for evidence of ‘original sin’, yanking these ‘sins’ out of context, and disregarding practically everything substantial that Marx and Engels ever wrote. I conclude that it is just plain silly to attribute any determinate meaning to Marx and Engels’ writings as a whole on the basis of isolated passages from a wide range of texts, for good or for ill. Instead I concur with the opinion that these should always be analysed in terms of the conceptualmethodological structure of which they are a part, and considered in terms of their internal consistency with this structure. But, this having been done, the orthodox critique collapses.95 Yet it is worthwhile taking the time to refute the specific charges of historicism (or fatalism) and teleologism that are routinely aimed at Marxian sociohistorical dialectics, by demonstrating how these are inconsistent with the conceptual-methodological structure of socio-historical materialism. Before con-

Materialist dialectics 95 sidering the strength of the indictments, however, it is necessary to consider the orthodox interpretation of the Marx–Hegel connection (as philosophies of history), because it is this which substantiates the negative evaluation of sociohistorical materialism. The liberal philosopher Bryan Magee articulates this ‘orthodox view’ of the Marx–Hegel relationship with characteristic clarity: All but one of Hegel’s basic ideas . . . [were] taken over by Marx and made central to Marxism: first, the idea that reality is a historical process; second, the idea that the way this process changes is dialectical; third, the idea that this dialectical process of change has a specific goal; fourth, the idea that this goal is a conflict-free society; fifth, the idea that until this goal is reached we are condemned to live in one form or another of alienation. The great point of difference is that whereas Hegel saw this process as happening to something mental or spiritual, Marx saw it as happening to something material. With that one difference, however, the whole pattern of ideas remains the same. It is as if Marx took over a long sequence of equations from Hegel and substituted a different value for x but kept the equations themselves all the same.96 This orthodox interpretation of the Marx–Hegel connection gives rise to a definite understanding of the analytic logic of Marx’s dialectic of history: The view associated with Marx, still tied to its Hegelian origins, is said to conceive of history as a step-like progression, a dialectical movement through stages that are ultimately continuous, cumulative, and subject to real and necessary laws of evolutionary progress. A theory of history from this perspective is, in effect, always a ‘stage theory’ in which opposition, cancellation, repetition, and emergence form the essential images of the laws of motion.97 This understanding of Marxian dialectic as rooted firmly in Hegelian logic sustains much of the orthodox critique of socio-historical materialism. Such an essentially historicist conception of society and history, so the argument runs, leads to one of the most elementary of philosophical errors – the treatment of anonymous historical processes and patterns of social structure as if they were intentional systems with needs, interests and goals apart from the human agents which animate them. History and society become, in the jargon of structuralism and post-structuralism, a ‘process without a subject’. This necessitates the investment of the properties of human agency in the ‘dead traditions’ of previously materialized social conduct in order to account for social change. This reification of society and history, it is said, is thus synonymous with the ‘chronic under-representation of the capacity of human actors to make a difference even in regular social practices amongst the structure of social institutions . . . [so that] the actions of human beings appear to be merely reactions to the pattern of history and social structure, rather than contributions to the making of them’.98

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According to the critics, it is these reified and deterministic assumptions that lead directly to fatalism and teleologism. And from here to a corresponding sanctioning of political authoritarianism and ideological dogmatism. Therefore, in socio-historical materialism, our supposedly ‘scientific’ analysis of the mode of production gives us generalisations that are like those of natural science. We think of them as embodying universal laws of human development rather than as what they in fact are: temporarily stable patterns of human action in particular social, technical and cultural contexts. We see these laws defining the past and guaranteeing the future like the laws governing planetary motion. This flawed view asserts that since the law-governed economy determines social structure and historical change, ‘we may know the entire future on the basis of an analysis of the present’. . . . Experience, consciousness, and desire – in short people – are products of something essentially inhuman. . . . The development of the mode of production [thereby comes] . . . to express a Necessary Force of History, with Marxism as the key to understanding this force. Human life is seen as a compulsive teleological growth towards the fulfilment of the human species, inevitably leading to a golden future in which all alienation and oppression are eliminated. As servants of the ultimate purpose of human existence, Marxists know that their politics are correct because they serve the God of History, as described by the one true prophet: Marx.99 Is Marxism deterministic? So there are two dimensions to the charge that Marxian socio-historical dialectics equals (or more charitably flirts with) historicism (or historical fatalism). The first is the contention that socio-historical materialism postulates the existence and salience of transcendental naturalistic economic laws of history, which shape in an external way specific societies or cultures, and which regulate societal development independently of the conceptions and activities of agents. The thought here seems to be that society undergoes an evolutionary dialectic of development, like the mechanisms of biological adaptation and selection in nature, whereby better-adapted modes proliferate and less adaptive ones are marginalized and die. The second, and closely related, contention is that sociohistorical materialism applies this general theory to capitalist society, positing the specific form in which these natural laws of economic adaptation and selection manifest themselves in this particular mode of society, and the manner in which these laws propel capitalism towards inevitable breakdown and ensuing socialist revolution. The following discussion will deal with both these aspects of the orthodox critique in turn. The indictment of historicism, in the more general sense of the term, is in fact relatively easy to dispose of. For, aside from Marx’s (and Engels’) clear rhetorical repudiation of supervening laws that function outside real history and con-

Materialist dialectics 97 crete forms of society, it is a straightforward task to demonstrate that such a conception is antithetical to the corpus of theoretical concepts of socio-historical materialism in two kinds of ways. First, Marx argues that the fundamental methodological task of social theory is to specify ‘the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live’.100 Marx’s account of society, and the theory of species-being in which it is anchored, animates a conception of history as a process between humankind and nature, mediated by social production.101 Such a guiding conception (or ‘first premise’, as Marx puts it) is obviously antithetical to any notion of social development as a process independent of human activity, as determined by anonymous a-historical processes. Marx’s understanding of human agency stresses the role of conscious social labour in modifying or even revolutionizing historical circumstances, albeit within a framework of material constraints and enablements furnished by nature, human biology and the prior development of economic production. Human social consciousness and activity cannot therefore be grasped as the straightforward ‘effect’ or ‘reflection’ of material conditions or economic laws, but are instead ‘reciprocally changing elements of an intertwined relationship’.102 According to Marx, every historical epoch in the development of human society is constituted on the basis of an inherited structure of social relations, which ‘on the one hand is modified by the new generation, but on the other hand also prescribe its conditions of life, giving it a definite development and a special character’. Thus, for Marx, ‘circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’.103 Second, ‘if Marx had formulated laws of history he would have committed the same errors of which he accused Feuerbach. According to Marx, Feuerbach was wrong when he spoke of “man” rather than referring to “actual historical individuals in all their variability”. Marx would have had to abstract from history, state a natural law, and thereby depart from his own approach, which argues that the nature of man is his history, which cannot be grasped in the form of laws’.104 Marx’s own dialectical historical method thus precluded him from portraying society as governed by a-historical or naturalistic laws. In Marx’s words: ‘Neither objective nature nor subjective nature is immediately present – adequately – in human nature. And so everything natural must come into being, likewise man also has his act of creation, history. . . . History is the true natural history of man’.105 For Marx, both nature (i.e. natural laws external to society, to which human beings have to relate, and which they must seek to appropriate in historically specific ways, if they are to prosper) and society profoundly condition the degree to which human agents can modify their historical circumstances. This allows us to speak legitimately of ‘social laws’ in a certain sense, i.e. as generative mechanisms of a specific kind apart from the immediate interactions of human agents. Nonetheless it remains the case that ‘history-making’ is nothing other than the modification or transformation of existing social conditions (themselves brought into being by previously materialized interaction) by the practical social activity of contemporary human agents.

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No doubt a major source of the confusion and misunderstanding of Marx’s socio-historical dialectics on this point by Marxists and non-Marxists alike is traceable to Marx’s occasional references to ‘natural law’ when characterizing the developmental dynamics of capitalist society. Thus, Marx does speak of the natural laws of capitalist production which, for him, ‘act with firm necessity and which have the tendency to prevail’.106 But, it is also clear enough that Marx’s ‘laws’ appear to be governed by the dialectical interface between structure and agency, not by the anonymous mechanisms of structure. Far from portraying these laws of capitalist society as rigid causal determinants of human thought and conduct, Marx makes it perfectly clear that these should be understood as socially fabricated probalistic laws, laws of tendency (as Marx himself actually says). But, since social relations exert a definite causal influence upon the social consciousness and activity of the human agents subject to them, it follows that they should be regarded as shaping the historical movement and dynamic of society in definite (and empirically specifiable) ways. These ‘societal laws’ are not, of course, analogous to those operative in nature, and their reality, if they are understood in this way, is easily demonstrated. Indeed, even ‘situational individualists’, such as Karl Popper, appear to subscribe to their existence. One of Popper’s own examples – ‘[y]ou cannot have full employment without inflation’107 – is a case in point. This law is not, in fact, a general law of society, as Popper appears to believe. One cannot speak of inflation outside the social relations of commodity production. Nor is this a law that always operates in capitalism. Where the system is going through a period of long-term growth (as it did during the long post-war boom), full employment can be maintained through non-inflationary expansion. But inflation, as a necessary consequence of full employment, is a tendential law of capitalism in the context of a society that attempts to maintain full employment during a period of economic stagnancy, low growth, or long-term decline (increasingly the norm in contemporary capitalism). The reasons for this are explainable only at the systemic level of capitalist society. ‘You cannot have full employment without inflation’ is a law of tendency of the capitalist system, in the above circumstances, precisely because the structure of capitalist relations of production – i.e. the structurally determined conflict of interest between exploiting and exploited classes – renders such an outcome the most likely one imaginable given the (reasonable) assumption that human agents are rational and, to some degree at least, recognize (at least partially) their objective interests, and act in accordance with them. For example, it is rational for members of the working class, given their structural positioning in capitalist production relations, to respond to a situation of full employment by seeking to reduce the rate of exploitation, and to seek a more even distribution of the social product in their own hands (which is, after all, their own product). Not to seize this opportunity would be irrational, from the point of view of their objective class interests. For not only would this failure ensure that the only beneficiaries of economic growth are members of the exploiting class, hence a widening gap of inequality between the classes, but it

Materialist dialectics 99 would also mean a reduction in the capacity of the workers to protect their existing living standards when the boom turned to slump (workers know that capitalists rarely surrender higher wages voluntarily in the upturn, let alone in the downturn, given the competitive structure of the marketplace). Such a strategy of the workers would, in other words, result in zero improvement, or even a long-term decline, in their living standards, an outcome clearly antithetical to their objective interests. The same analysis applies equally to members of the capitalist class. Given the objective (i.e. structurally determined) conflict of interest between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the suppression of the purely competitive market in the conditions of ‘transnational monopoly capitalism’, the exploiting class will generally tend to respond to wage-inflation by raising the price of goods and services to compensate for dwindling profit margins. Again, not to do so would be irrational from the point of view of its members’ objective class situation, as determined by their relationship to the means of production and other classes. For this would obviously entail uncompetitiveness and the risk of takeover or bankruptcy. Although critics of the concept of ‘societal laws’108 are quite right to point out that human agents, as intentional systems, can always choose to respond in different ways to any social situation which they might confront (capitalists can choose not to recover profits lost to higher wages; workers can choose not to press for wage increases which are within their reach), they are utterly mistaken to believe that this insight counts against anything other than deterministic laws of causation of the type found in (macroscopic domains) of unreflective nature. Such arguments are totally abstract, anchoring human rationality and intentionality apart from any structural or systemic referent. Those who endorse such views fail to address the rational options open to social interactants given their real location within stratified social relations, and the objective interests they derive from their ‘situational logics’ within social relations. ‘Societal tendencies’ or ‘structural dynamics’ exist by virtue of the fact that the involuntary positioning of agents in emergent social structures or ‘action-environments’, to which determinate vested interests and life-chances are attached, ensure that most find ‘good reasons’ (the avoidance of sanctions and the securing of rewards) for acting in ways which are systemically specified or prescribed,109 and which therefore impart to societal motion a determinate, if contingent, directional logic. Appeals to the reflexive character of human nature do nothing to refute the existence of societal laws of probability or tendency of the kind elaborated above, for it is precisely the fact that human beings are reflexive agents which ensures that such ‘societal laws’ and attendant systemic regularities exist. The specification of societal laws of this type is indispensable to practical social analysis. Such laws, it is important to reiterate, are not universals (i.e. the universal laws of motion of an abstract social system). They do not operate at all times and in all places where human societies are to be found. Rather, they are the specific developmental tendential impulses characteristic of particular modes of society. The nature and form of such ‘laws’ are determined by the manner in which human social conduct is mediated by the structural relations of a given

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social system. To offer a simple example: an identification of the salient structural configuration of the capitalist mode of production (separation of economic units, commodity production, the formal separation of the direct producers from the means of production and subsistence, and the transformation of labourpower into a commodity) enables us to grasp the system’s likely or probable range of developmental possibilities. Such an analysis allows us to comprehend the difference in the economic ‘logic’ of capitalism vis-à-vis feudal or ‘Asiatic’ (tributary) modes of society. By following this analytical procedure, the analyst can explain the enormous difference in the economic dynamism and rate of material development between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production, and the crucial differences in the form which economic crises take in each of these societal types (i.e. the difference between underproduction of use-values and overproduction of exchange-values). Now, it is precisely because Marx followed this procedure that he was able to predict capitalism’s economic ‘law of motion’ with remarkable accuracy. Thus, on the basis of his analysis of the dynamics of inter-class and intra-class competition, predicated in turn on his analysis of the structural configuration of capitalist relations of production, Marx was able to foresee a number of important historical developments. These include: (1) the concentration-centralization of capital, (2) the growing utilization of technology at the workplace, (3) the expansion of the working class relative to other classes (both internationally and in the advanced societies), (4) the emergence of the managerial middle class, and (5) the separation of ownership and control in the modern business enterprise, and the onset of increasingly destructive and protracted global economic crises of overproduction.110 This success of socio-historical materialism in resisting dis-confirmation by historical events and predicting novel facts about social reality places it in a different league to its major nineteenth and twentieth century rivals. The reasons for this superiority are conceptual as well as methodological. Sociological approaches that collapse structures into abstract individuals (e.g. rational choice and social exchange theory) fail to theorize the constraints and enablements that structures (and systems of structures) impose on agents. They cannot even begin the task of historical explanation, since history making must logically be radically indeterminate, a ‘just-so’ story of what people decide they are going to do at a particular historical juncture. The same critique applies in reverse to those sociological approaches (e.g. structuralism and functionalism) that collapse individuals into structures. Here, history as societal elaboration and transformation cannot be grasped, or even easily imagined. For persons are always the bearers or agents of the structural relations they inhabit, and their interactions must therefore always be ultimately reducible to the logic of the underlying structure. History becomes repetition (i.e. system reproduction), as the radical indeterminacy that logically should issue from methodological individualism (resolved only by crassly reducing human motivation to the logic of egoistic utilityoptimization) is replaced by the total determinism of sociological holism. In contrast to these influential sociological paradigms, it was precisely

Materialist dialectics 101 Marx’s intuitive (though not adequately conceptualized) grasp of the need to analyse system dynamics in terms of the dialectical interplay between structure and agency that has allowed socio-historical materialism to obtain some kind of purchase on real geo-historical processes in the years since Marx wrote. Such a predictively powerful theory (socio-historical materialism) would have been quite impossible to formulate if Marx had possessed no understanding of the manner in which the structural properties of societies interact with the aggregate patterns of human interaction which energize them, exerting conditional pressures upon historical agents to conform to a definite range or spectrum of social activities and practices, whilst discouraging or even ruling out entirely other modes of social conduct. I conclude that there is no good reason why these systemic or structural pressures or conditioning influences, insofar as they operate to shape social interaction in definite ways, should not be seen as contributing to the formation and operation of societal laws in the weaker sense of the term elaborated above. But, quite apart from this specific meaning of ‘natural law’ that can be distilled from Marx’s writings, there are two additional dimensions to the concept that Marx would endorse. First, Marx (and Engels) used the term to refer critically to specific kinds of social relations and forms of social consciousness, namely those associated with class society in general and capitalist class society in particular. Engels, for instance, in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, describes how class relationships prevent human beings from exercising conscious collective control over their social world, making it appear that society is a reified power apart from social interaction, thus rendering social ‘laws’ as analogous to those operating ‘in the realm of unconscious nature’.111 Similarly, in the third volume of Capital, Marx sought to show how ‘the cohesion of the aggregate [capitalist] production imposes itself as a blind law [the law of value] upon the agents of production, and not as a law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind, brings the production process under their joint control’.112 From this point of view, societal processes operate according to ‘natural laws’ (i.e. laws which operate independently of conscious human control) ‘as long as men have not yet become subjects who can determine or comprehend their own conditions of existence’.113 The concept of natural law, in this context, is, therefore, a metaphor for fetishized or alienated social relations, referring to social mechanisms which have the appearance of natural laws, because human beings are not in conscious control of them. ‘By referring these natural laws to a particular historical situation from which they originated and within which they operate, Marx tried to show that the notion of “natural [i.e. transcendental] law” was itself historically relative and changeable’.114 Marx regarded liberal political economic theory as a classic example of the intellectual fetishism he was against. This was because it treated the abstract pre-social utilitarian individual as the basis of capitalist society, instead of vice versa, and treated bourgeois private property as a material ‘thing’, a use-value or ‘factor of production’ derived from nature, instead of a social relation between exploiting and

102 Materialist dialectics exploited classes, involving a particular distribution of means of production, and corresponding mode of social control over labour-power and the social product. This being the case, to regard Marx as subscribing to a view of society as governed by natural laws is to mistake his critique of fetishized social theory and social relations for an endorsement of them. Second, Marx uses the term natural law to refer to both the common characteristics, which all historical societies have in common, and ‘the everpresent conditions of existence and eternal necessity of nature, independent of all societal forms’.115 In the former usage, the concept of natural law seems to function simply as a kind of descriptive shorthand for the basic or elementary forms of human activity, which are indispensable to humanity’s social and productive modes of existence. ‘Insofar as the labour-process is only a simple process between man [sic] and nature, then its simple elements remain common to all forms of societal development’.116 Since human beings are by nature social producers, it follows that all human societies must involve some kind of labourprocess and some form of division of labour amongst their productive enterprises. These are, in this sense, natural societal laws, which take on specific forms in different socio-cultural and historical contexts (for example: exchangevalue as a particular form of the division of labour in capitalist society). In the latter usage, the concept of natural law denotes Marx’s break with his early utopian and (vaguely) teleological view that the purpose of history is the dis-alienation of humanity as ‘the complete unification of man and nature’117 in favour of the more sober and materialistic understanding that nature can never become fully appropriated or comprehended by human consciousness in its entirety. Now Marx recognizes that, far from natural laws being potentially subservient to humanizing designs, instead natural laws must always provide an overall frame within which societal laws are forced to operate. In Marx’s words: ‘Natural laws cannot be superseded. . . . What can be changed is only the “form” in which the laws prevail in historically different circumstances’.118 The task of the social sciences is not to analyse these formal natural laws (this is the task of the physical sciences), but to examine the social forms in which these natural laws become manifest, that is, the manner in which human societies relate to, react upon, interact with and manipulate these natural laws. Laws of capital? But, if Marx did not postulate the existence of transcendental laws of history, it is obvious enough that he can hardly be accused of regarding these same laws as applicable to the functioning and analysis of capitalist society. Furthermore, if Marx cannot be seen as regarding societal laws as mono-causal determinants of social and historical outcomes, it would be remarkable indeed if he promptly applied such mechanical equations in his own theory of capitalist development. It is, therefore, entirely unsurprising to discover that Marx specifically relates his mature economic theory to the dynamics and contradictions of the capitalist system alone. The purpose of the three volumes of Capital, in his words, is to

Materialist dialectics 103 reveal ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’, ‘the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production . . . corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production’.119 Marx is thus clear that there can be no question of abstracting economic categories or ‘laws’ from historically specific relations of production. For him each mode of production (and social formation) is characterized by its own internal developmental dynamics, as determined by its characteristic relation of production, which are entirely specific to it. Moreover, it is only on the basis of an understanding of the way in which Marx relativizes the ‘laws of motion’ of historically specific social systems that we can understand his analysis of the ‘logic of capital’. Whereas ‘the [bourgeois] economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural – . . . natural laws independent of the influence of time’,120 Marx argued the opposite, seeking to explain the peculiar dynamic of capitalism (‘accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production’) as a fully social and historical product. Instead of seeing the acquisitive economic behaviour of the capitalist entrepreneur as expressing certain unchanging facts of human nature (i.e. eternal human greed, Adam Smith’s natural drive ‘to truck, to barter, to exchange one thing for another’), Marx regarded these human characteristics as the by-product of the historically specific social relations of commodity production and exchange. Thus, for Marx, the social mechanism of market competition between rival producer units ‘has the effect precisely that [capitalists] must conduct themselves as capital’. Only by translating ‘the greatest portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital’, only by investing ceaselessly in improved methods of production, only by producing more cheaply than previously, can individual capitalists avoid bankruptcy or takeover.121 The coercive pressure of the total system of commodity production and exchange, by forcing individual units of capital to compete for markets and profits, thereby gives rise to a rapid pace of economic development, a societal law entirely specific to the capitalist mode of production. Nor is it surprising to discover that Marx does not violate his own methodological principles by insisting upon seeing capitalist development as leading to necessary or inevitable results. Consider, for example, Marx’s discussion of capitalist crisis in the third volume of Capital. Here, far from the economic ‘law of motion’ of bourgeois society specifying its own terminus in advance of the historical process, Marx’s account contains a lengthy and detailed analysis of the role of economic crisis itself in restoring the conditions of capitalist profitability. According to him, the depreciation or devaluation of capital, facilitated by the falling rate of profit and resultant economic crisis, is precisely a powerful countervailing factor which acts to ‘cross and annul the effect of the general law [i.e. the falling rate of profit], and which gives it merely the characteristic of a tendency . . . a law whose absolute action is checked, retarded and weakened’,122 this enabling henceforth a lowering of the organic composition of capital, and a fresh round of accumulation to proceed. So, Marx insists that capitalist economic crises ‘are always momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions’,123 adding that ‘permanent crisis

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do not exist’.124 In his view, the depth and severity of capitalist crisis, and its capability to encourage a radical challenge to capitalism, hinges crucially upon whether or not the working class is prepared to pay the cost (in terms of sackings, lockouts, speedup, longer working hours, lower real wages, etc.) of capitalist restoration, which in turn depends on political and ideological circumstances (in particular class consciousness, leadership and organization). The objective economic ‘law’ of capitalism and the ‘subjective’ manner in which the workers respond to it (which is never determinate) are both crucial factors that determine whether or not capitalism enters into terminal crisis and is replaced by socialism. Or to put it another way, in sociological terms, Marx implicitly argues that structural malintegration is no guarantor of social malintegration, or at least not of the kind of social malintegration necessary to replace capitalism with socialism. Let us now consider a second example – Max Weber’s attribution to Marx of the belief that the process of capitalist development engenders three ‘iron laws’ of social malintegration.125 What are Weber’s ‘laws’? First, there is the law of inexorable working class immiseration or pauperization, brought about by the absolute decline of the wage fund.126 Second, there is the law of the inevitable growth of the ‘reserve army of labour’, which is said to explain deepening working class deprivation. Third, there is the law of inevitable capitalist demise (or at least revolutionary crisis of capitalism), facilitated by unemployment and poverty. I have already dealt with the substance of the third of Weber’s ‘laws’. The second is also easy to dispose of. Aside from two or three propagandist passages, which can be (although not straightforwardly so) interpreted in this manner, this is a law of capitalist development which cannot be found anywhere else in Marx’s theoretical writings. Marx himself stressed the role of the industrial reserve army in offsetting (not facilitating) capitalist collapse, pointing out how it functioned to prevent wages rising sufficiently high to endanger profits.127 Nowhere in Marx’s economic writings does he suggest that the reserve army of the unemployed must continually expand in proportion to the growth of the capitalist economy. On the contrary, Marx is quite clear that growing structural unemployment and poverty is a trend (not a law) of capitalist decline (not growth). On the one hand, where a buoyant capitalist economy can soak up the surplus of labour-power generated by technological innovation, unemployment can be marginalized. On the other hand, where the economy is sluggish or stagnant, technological innovation (and, of course, the generalized movement towards retrenchment) can only lead to a long-term trend towards expanding unemployment. The performance of the global capitalist economy over the past 30 years (long-term slowdown interspersed with protracted periods of crisis) has done nothing to disconfirm Marx’s analysis. Marx is also completely dismissive of Weber’s first ‘law’, the ‘miraculous’ (as he called it) iron law of wages, popular amongst many socialists of his own day, noting how ‘crises are always prepared by . . . a period in which wages rise generally and the working class actually gets a larger share of that part of the

Materialist dialectics 105 annual product which is intended for consumption’.128 But, not content with acknowledging the impact of the trade cycle in periodically forcing wage levels upwards, Marx also utilized the labour theory of value to refute the idea of absolute working class pauperization. Thus, in his discussion of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in volume three of Theories of Surplus Value, Marx argues that ‘it does not follow from this [the rising organic composition of capital] that the fund from which the workers draw their revenue is diminished absolutely, only that it is diminished relatively, in proportion to their total output’. Here Marx also goes to some lengths to prove that workers can increase their consumption beyond the bare minimum, showing how the rise in labour productivity and relative surplus-value enabled by capitalist development allow also the cheapening of the consumer goods with which the workers meet their subsistence needs.129 Elsewhere, in his pamphlet Wages, Price and Profit, Marx attempts to demonstrate that whereas subsistence constitutes an ‘ultimate limit’ below which workers’ living standards cannot drop without compromising the reproduction of labour-power and hence capital, ‘the value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life’ or, as Marx elaborates, ‘the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up’.130 Is Marxism teleological? So the charge that the methodological logic of socio-historical materialism sponsors a historical determinism and fatalism by virtue of its flirtation with historicism simply fails. But what of the related claim that Marx is guilty of postulating a teleological philosophy of history? Is it the case that Marx treats human historical processes as ‘instances of realization of a metaphysical concept’131 – the goal of human emancipation? Now, my analysis of the relationship between Marxism and historicism more or less destroys the rational basis of this charge. As I have noted earlier, the decisive refutation of this argument is to be found on the terrain of Marx’s substantive social theorizing. For here, in place of teleological formulas, Marx furnishes us with a dialectic of objective structural conditions (the economic ‘law of motion’ of modern society, as determined by the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and rival classes) and subjective consciousness and activity (the manner in which the workers respond to these objective circumstances and contradictions). I have sketched out this dialectic in the context of my discussion of Marx’s theoretical and methodological rejection of historicism. I will now add a little more flesh to the bare bones. For Marx, although the structural realities of capitalist exploitation and alienated labour pressurize the workers to engage in ‘now hidden, now open’ class struggle in defence of their wages and conditions of employment, and although the strategic position of the working class within capitalist relations of production grant it the rich potential to overthrow capitalism, the realization of this potential is not at all a foregone conclusion. This is

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because the workers still need to discover for themselves (primarily through the process of a broadening and deepening class struggle) a fuller and more universalizing subjective grasp of their objective interests, a process fraught with difficulties and setbacks, as Marx was fully aware. For Marx, then, the socialist revolution is seen as both a genuine tendential objective possibility of capitalist development – given the structural contradictions and dynamic of the system – and as a necessary task which the workers must undertake if they are to emancipate themselves. One cannot stress this second point strongly enough. For a major source of the intellectual poverty of the orthodox critique of sociohistorical materialism is the mistaken belief that Marx’s postulation of the moral historical necessity of socialism is the same thing as the belief in its historical inevitability. But, as Rudolf Hilferding once famously remarked, ‘it is one thing to recognize a historical necessity, but quite another to place oneself at the service of that necessity’.132

From critical realism to dialectical materialism So far I have considered the nature of materialist dialectics as analytical method, deployed examples of how these have been utilized by classical Marxists, and drawn out the points of unity and difference between Marxian and Hegelian dialectic. As argued in the previous section, when applied concretely in sociological work, these dialectics have enormous practical analytical utility, since they offer the researcher the conceptual and analytical tools to transcend the traditional antinomies of social science theory (determinism, reductionism, teleologism, voluntarism, etc.). But methodological dialectics (whether applied on the terrain of natural or social being) are necessarily grounded in ontological dialectics, for the simple reason that dialectical analysis is possible and advantageous only if the objects of study are themselves dialectically structured or interrelated. This is the basic perspective animating Engels’ dialectical materialism. I have asserted that dialectical critical realism is not the preservative sublation of materialist dialectics that is often claimed for it, but is better viewed as a restatement, elaboration and (in certain respects) development of these dialectics. As such, the usable elements of dialectical critical realism should be preservatively sublated within dialectical materialism, rather than vice versa. This means that materialist dialectics are ontologically (and therefore analytically) foundational to Bhaskar’s realist dialectics. To be clear, I am not saying that Marx and Engels (and others who have developed their research programme) are alone in possession of the ‘master key’ to unlock the secrets of existence. My purpose is not to rehabilitate Stalinist dogmatics. Nor am I arguing that Marxism has nothing to learn from other philosophical traditions, including and especially Bhaskar’s critical realist system. This should be clear enough from what I have argued here in this book and elsewhere. I have said that the core concepts of Bhaskar’s critical realism (i.e. stratification, rootedness and emergence) are indispensable to an anti-reductive materialist ontology of being. Moreover, I

Materialist dialectics 107 have said that the core concept of dialectical critical realism (‘absenting absence’) is a powerful vindication of the dialectic of freedom on the terrain of social being. For these reasons, dialectical materialism cannot supplant or disregard critical realism/dialectical critical realism. But equally critical realism/dialectical critical realism must under-labour for specifically materialist dialectics (i.e. be concerned with developing dialectical materialism as ontology) and draw on the analytical concepts deployed by the best exponents of dialectical materialism (Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, the left Darwinians). It is now time to substantiate this argument. This synthesis is necessary because, despite its strengths, critical realism/ dialectical critical realism is by itself insufficient to ‘under-labour’ the human sciences. This is for the simple reason that ‘realism’ as such is non-committal in relation to the fundamental question of which strata of reality are basic to or emergent from which, and this applies as much to the stratification of nature as to that of society. Instead this becomes a matter for individuals to decide on other grounds, specifically on the basis of whether they are materialists or idealists, or have conceived some kind of uneasy or unstable compromise between these unmixables, such as that articulated by dualism. After all, it can scarcely be doubted that many philosophers, social theorists and even natural scientists who would endorse a strong realist view of the world (as enmattered, independent of human consciousness, differentiated, even stratified), might as easily insist that the universe is the product of a spiritual ‘first cause’, rather than simply cause and consequence of the movement of matter through ascending levels of complexity. Indeed, it is far from uncommon for working scientists to accept that, say, physical structures explain chemical structures, or that biological structures explain psychological structures, or whatever, yet still make their appeal to some kind of cosmic super-subject (i.e. God) to furnish the ‘basic constituents’ of nature and the laws governing their interaction. In this case, of course, the theorist or analyst remains a materialist in his or her science but an idealist in his or her philosophy. This is a case of what Engels once described as ‘shamefaced materialism’.133 For it is the practical undermining of idealism during the history of scientific advance and investigation, in the sense that God has been shown to be superfluous to a rational and empirically testable knowledge of natural laws, which has forced its allegiants to make their appeal to a ‘final instance’ of undetermined causation beyond current knowledge, and therefore outside the reach of rational criticism. Now one should always be suspicious of ‘final instances’, which base their authority not on empirically validated scientific knowledge (albeit provisional), but on its uncertainty or even absence. The possibility that physical scientists may never develop a satisfactory theory of the ‘origins’ of the universe should not be allowed to give comfort to those idealists whose own belief in a spiritualist ‘first cause’ of nature is entirely speculative and intuitive. But it is important to be clear that the realist emphasis on stratification and emergence, and the externality of the world to the knowing subject, provides no redoubt against this kind of manoeuvre. For it is ‘equally possible’ that materialist or

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idealist philosophy be either emergentist or conflationist in terms of ontology, either reductive or anti-reductive in terms of methodology. This being the case, the belief of some realists that realism is preferable to materialism in ontological matters is doubtless based on their assumption that scientific knowledge and a scientifically informed philosophy is unable to provide strong rational grounds for disputing the reality of God,134 or for disputing the possibility that such an ‘ultimatum’ is responsible for the ‘micro constituents’ of the material universe, and the laws of their interaction, from which a hierarchy of material strata and their immaterial emergents have developed historically. In this case, the theorist claims to be open-minded on the materialism versus idealism debate, ruling out neither standpoint as impossible. From this perspective, ontological realism is more appropriate than ontological materialism, because all we can say for certain is that both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are real and efficacious, that human consciousness exists only in association with a particular organization of organic matter, and that nature is stratified. Philosophers and scientists can then plumb either for idealism or materialism, on the ‘ultimate question’, secure in the knowledge that a scientifically informed ontology can never provisionally settle the matter. If such a view is implicit in the ‘agnostic attitude’ of many realist scientists and philosophers, it is an especially impoverished one. For realist agnosticism is no more reasonable than idealist speculative appeals to a ‘first cause’ or ‘ultimate structure’ of nature. Like idealism, this too is based on the necessarily provisional nature of scientific knowledge, meaning that its warranty (like idealism) is also a negative, ignorance, rather than a positive, the knowledge empirical science has given us about the universe. To claim the contrary is precisely to provide legitimation for the characteristic attitude of religionists, that in order to explain something which is not understood very well (the ‘origin’ of the universe), it is necessary to attribute its causation or essence to something else (God), which is not understood at all.135 But ignorance is no more an argument for open-mindedness, on the question of the ‘ultimate constituents’ of nature, than it is for the existence of God or some equivalent – i.e. Bhaskar’s ‘cosmic envelope’.136 Further, the ‘agnostic attitude’, implicit in any preference for the term realism vis-à-vis materialism in philosophy, because it does not challenge the idea of God, fails also to confront the barrier erected by ontological idealism to the acquisition of rational knowledge about the universe, since logically if ‘we explain what is at the moment unknown by reference to God, we are blocking the way to new discoveries’.137 This means that the fundamental problem with realism as ontology is that it is over-plastic or over-permissive. This renders it attractive to all comers (excepting those idealists who insist that the materiality of the world is an illusion of cognition or simply formless until structure is foisted on it by human consciousness). Indeed, this compatibility of realism with agnosticism (or ‘shamefaced idealism’) doubtless explains why for some it is preferable to the term materialism, or is somehow seen to transcend the terms of the old idealism–materialism debate in the philosophy of science. But, although realist agnosticism appears to

Materialist dialectics 109 be a model of liberal open-mindedness, in reality it merely fudges the real issue. For under the guise of the unavoidable imperfection of science, it arbitrarily withholds ontological significance from those findings of the sciences that unambiguously show that the highest strata of nature – mind, rationality, selfconsciousness, etc. – are historically emergent from the lower-order structures of materiality. Yet if, to the best of our scientific knowledge, material strata are basic to ideational strata, there is no sense in denying this knowledge ontological signification. Failing this, ontology becomes an imposition on the facts, rather than a generalization from the (provisional, fallible) facts. This means that the failure of philosophical realism to identify itself as ‘emergentist materialism’ is an unnecessary concession to ontological idealism. But perhaps another important reason which explains this preference for the term realism over materialism in the contemporary philosophy of science is that the latter has traditionally been associated with reductive-mechanical outlooks in both the physical and human social sciences, and obviously critical realists do not wish to be found guilty of the same errors by terminological association. Yet an ‘emergentist’ materialism, such as that endorsed in practice by certain realists, is not in the least bit vulnerable to a micro-regress of higher-order strata and attendant sciences to lower-order ones. Indeed, identifying critical realism as emergentist materialism has the positive advantage of undermining the rational basis of both vulgar materialism (the view that the objects of the human and social sciences are translatable into the objects of the biological and physicochemical sciences) and ‘shamefaced’ idealism (the postulation of a spiritualist ‘cause’ or ‘ultimata’ in accounting for the universe). This is one of the great virtues of dialectical materialism. From its inception in the work of Engels, this has been an ontological approach which has explicitly acknowledged the falsity of these abstract dualisms. Thus, dialectical materialism is important, because it is precisely a form of anti-reductive materialism, and as such suffers from none of the ambiguities associated with philosophical realism. But perhaps those allegiants of philosophical realism who accept that their approach is indeed ‘materialistic’ might object to my critique on other grounds. One obvious candidate springs to mind. This is that dialectical materialism is not an emergentist ontology at all, or at least not a successful one, hamstrung as it is by concepts which are vague, misleading or plain wrong. From this point of view, critical realism/dialectical critical realism has no need of any kind of dialogue or encounter with dialectical materialism, only of a change of title to something less neutral and more appropriate. Now my response to this (hypothetical) argument is to suggest that certain of the basic concepts of dialectical Marxist philosophy are neither misleading nor false, though some of them are difficult by necessity because they are designed to capture a reality which is ambiguous because dialectical and fluid rather than functional and static. On the contrary, these concepts remain valid and necessary, for three basic reasons. First, dialectical concepts are in fact real descriptions of the reality of stratification and emergence, though expressed in a different philosophical vocabulary to that of contemporary critical realist writers. As Ted Benton rightly points out:

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‘Engels proposes a hierarchy of “forms of motion” with transitions one to the other. . . . The different domains of the universe are constituted by levels in the hierarchy of complexity of laws of motion’.138 This stratification of the world ensures that the sciences must also be arranged hierarchically and treated as mutually irreducible. This is for the simple reason that at each level of organization or interaction of matter, those laws operative at lower levels are ‘subsumed’ or ‘pushed into the background by other, higher laws’, which themselves constitute ‘a leap, a decisive change’. As Engels puts it: ‘If I term physics the mechanics of molecules, chemistry the physics of atoms, and furthermore biology the chemistry of albumens, I wish thereby to express the passing of any of these sciences into one of the others, hence both the connection, the continuity, and the distinction, the discrete separation’.139 But it was Engels’ utilization of dialectical-materialist concepts that allowed him to obtain this insight nearly one hundred years ahead of his time. Second, and more importantly, such concepts are as reasonable a way as any of capturing in the most general terms the reality of the world as a ‘differentiated unity’:140 What is involved here is a kind of natural scientific ontology of nature as a unified, though internally structured and differentiated whole, which Engels regards as preferable to the ontology implicit in mechanical reductionism. . . . Engels’ ontology is the product of philosophical reflection on what is presupposed by the recent development of the sciences. The convergence, the realignment of whole fields of theory which had previously developed separately (organic/inorganic chemistry, mechanics/theory of heat, etc.) is unintelligible, as is the replacement of one theory by another within the same specialism, unless these different fields of theoretical discourse are apprehended as so many attempts at knowledge of a unitary, though internally differentiated, natural universe. This unity of nature is an essential precondition for convergence of the sciences, for the repeated discovery of ‘interconnections’, whilst the differentiation of nature is implied by the discreteness and uneven historical development of the different sciences.141 Benton thus notes the ‘points of contact’ between Engels’ ontology of nature and Bhaskar’s critical realism. But he makes the further point that the former legitimately transcends the latter in one important respect: Bhaskar’s transcendental realism argues for the philosophical legitimacy of arguments from the character of rational procedures in science (for example experimentation) to conclusions of a very general kind about the nature of the world as presupposed in the rationality of those procedures. . . . Engels’ scientific metaphysics includes arguments and conclusions of this general type, but it goes beyond this to represent in a unified and more-or-less coherent form a detailed ontology based on current substantive knowledge

Materialist dialectics 111 in the different sciences. Engels is here doing no more than generalising from procedures employed by scientists themselves in bringing to bear discoveries in one discipline upon controversies in an adjacent one, but this generalisation of the procedure results in a quite distinct type of theoretical structure (a ‘world-view’) and discourse.142 Finally, and most importantly of all, Engels’ dialectical concepts are successful in historicizing stratification and emergence. That is to say, they allow us to grasp the dynamics or processes through which higher-order levels of the material world develop out of lower-order levels, not as ‘radical contingencies’, but as integral aspects of a continually evolving totality of interrelated systems: The great basic thought is that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable . . . go through an uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away. . . . For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory nature of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. . . . The motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic tension, chemical combination and dissociation, life, and finally, consciousness.143 This philosophical conception of nature as a hierarchically structured ‘system of systems’ in constant evolutionary development, in which neither parts (lowerorder strata) nor wholes (higher-order strata) are reducible to each other, was not unique to Engels in the classical Marxist tradition. Nor, indeed, was Engels’ insight that a dialectical materialist ontology of being was a legitimate inference from the data and theories provided by a wide range of sciences into their respective zones of natural necessity. In fact, these insights were preserved and developed by Leon Trotsky in his Philosophical Notebooks, and in his earlier 1925 speech/essay ‘Dialectical Materialism and Science’. Here Trotsky is concerned with combating the ‘unholy trinity’ of objective idealism, reductive materialism and dualism. His starting point is the basic category or first-order abstraction of materialist dialectics: the Marxian proposition that the solution to these abstract polarities can be found only by grasping being in the most general or abstract way as ‘differentiated unity’. The hierarchical ordering of the sciences, and the failure of the lower sciences to render redundant the concepts of the higher sciences, argues Trotsky, provides the proof of this most abstract concept of dialectical materialism. According to Trotsky, lower-order or micro structures or processes of being generate higher-order or macro structures or processes of being, with the higher being based ‘in the final instance’ on the lower, yet nonetheless without being reducible to them. For this reason, argues Trotsky, all the sciences necessarily possess their own ‘special approach, special research technique, special hypotheses and methods’.144

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So, for example, although it is certain, says Trotsky, that ‘human society is surrounded on all sides by chemical processes’, it is nonetheless true that ‘public life is neither a chemical nor a psychological process, but a social process which is shaped by its own laws’.145 Trotsky’s concept of nature as ‘differentiated unity’ constitutes the most penetrating analysis of the ‘dialectic of nature’ since Engels’ own philosophical writings. Two features of this are particularly worthy of note. First, Trotsky’s account enables him to grasp the dynamic connection yet separation of subjective and objective dialectics. Indeed, Trotsky is even clearer than Engels in his insistence that thought and reality, though unified, are nonetheless distinct properties of nature, following their own logics of development. His fundamental purpose is to circumnavigate the dualism of subject–object relations without collapsing into the Hegelian thesis of the identity of thought and reality. Thus, Trotsky argues that human logic and theoretical abstractions express neither the laws of ‘the external world [n]or the law of consciousness’, but rather the ‘laws . . . of consciousness in its active relationship to the external world’, a relationship he conceives as ‘a relationship of the part (particular, specialized) to the whole’:146 Dialectical cognition is not identical with the dialectic of nature. Consciousness is a quite original part of nature, possessing peculiarities and regularities that are completely absent in the remaining part of nature. Subjective dialectics must by virtue of this be a distinctive part of objective dialectics – with its own special forms and regularities. . . . The dialectic of consciousness (cognition) is not . . . a reflection of the dialectic of nature, but is a result of the lively interaction between consciousness and nature and – in addition – a method of cognition, issuing from this interaction.147 Second, and again following Engels’ example, Trotsky’s ontological dialectics are precisely concerned to historicize natural development, to affirm Engels’ thesis of the continuity-in-evolution of the objects, structures and processes of being. For Trotsky, as for Engels before him, the essential unity of being (in difference) ensures that natural necessity has a determinate evolutionary dynamic leading from simpler to progressively more complex strata or systems: Dialectics is the logic of development. It examines the world – completely and without exception – not as the result of creation, of a sudden beginning, the realisation of a plan, but as a result of motion, of transformation. Everything that is became the way it is as a result of lawlike development. . . . [T]he organic world emerged from the inorganic, consciousness is a capacity of living organisms depending upon organs that originated through evolution. In other words, ‘the soul’ of evolution (of dialectics) leads in the last analysis to matter. The evolutionary point of view carried to a logical conclusion leaves no room for either idealism or dualism, or for the other species of eclecticism.148

Materialist dialectics 113 For many philosophers, of course, this ‘historicization’ of natural necessity (proposed by Engels and endorsed by Trotsky) is the most controversial aspect of dialectical materialism. Engels is particularly singled out for criticism on this issue (though probably only because few social analysts have noticed Trotsky’s contribution to Marxist philosophy). For, just as Marx is accused of endorsing a historical teleology of social forms, Engels is often taxed with endorsing an evolutionary teleology of nature, according to which lower forms inevitably give rise to higher forms in a linear fashion, governed by a universal ‘dialectical law’, uniformly operative at all levels of reality. But such an interpretation fails on a number of counts. First, there is no evidence that Engels does hold that development in nature and society share a simple identity, following a uniform evolutionary process, governed by a universal dialectical law, or that this development is inevitably linear, and has generated absolutely certain results. Second, the fact that Engels does endorse a certain ‘directionality’ from the simple to the complex in structural forms is manifestly non-teleological (by any reasonable definition of the term).149 Finally, this kind of evolutionism is far from being indefensible. Such a pattern of development is certainly discernable at the biological level (the ‘ratchet’ of natural selection generating cumulative organismic specialization and enhanced survival-value). But it is also discernable at the societal level (the cumulative development of the forces of production, under the stimulus of meeting and developing human needs). So too at the physico-chemical level. For the view of many physical scientists today is one of ‘the inevitability and probable universality of life’, on the grounds that ‘life is a logical consequence of known chemical principles operating on the atomic composition of the universe’.150 That this latter argument is overstated (given the existence of chaotic or random behaviour and of probabilistic laws of tendency rather than absolute necessity in certain physical systems) is beside the point. At certain levels or scales of physical reality, more deterministic behaviour certainly prevails (as is the case for the objects of macro physics, for example), even if this is not the universal pattern. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that the evolution of organic life is an ‘algorithmic process’,151 and so too the emergence of consciousness (which is not the same as saying they are teleologically determined), even if this is not true of the emergence of other strata (for example, different forms of human social relations). Nonetheless Engels is right to suggest that the differentiated elements of nature (physico-chemical, biological, human-social, etc.) have a common historicity in a certain sense. For all are ‘phases’ in the development of matter through ascending levels of complexity. Moreover, all are composed of those ‘basic’ elements that ontologically and historically presuppose their existence. And, finally, it is always the evolution of the lower which generate their own preservative negation in the higher. Yet it is important to stress the point that there is nothing in this conception that implies that this ‘common historicity’ of nature is an undifferentiated one, postulating the identity rather than unity of the structures of matter, or that the evolutionary emergence of higher from lower domains of nature was always

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absolutely necessary. This is clear enough if we consider what Engels has to say about his own application of the dialectical method to the different domains of society and nature. For a start, I have pointed out that Engels insists that dialectics is no ready-made formula into which the real world has to be fitted, but must instead be discovered by means of empirico-scientific investigation into the different facets of the world. Of equal importance, Engels also recognizes that dialectical processes function differently for each distinct stratum of reality. ‘Every kind of thing . . . has a peculiar way of being negated in such a way that it gives rise to development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea’.152 This manifestly contradicts the notion that Engels sees an identity of subjective and objective dialectics. Engels is grappling here with the idea that ‘the structure of the dialectic in society is different to that in nature – the former must take account of the development of consciousness in a way that the latter need not’:153 In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature. In nature – insofar as we ignore man’s reaction on nature – there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting on one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation. . . . On the other hand, in the history of society the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without conscious purpose, without intended aim.154

Dialectical materialism and the natural sciences I have suggested that dialectical materialism analysis (and thus dialectical materialism philosophy) is appropriate and indispensable to the analysis of nature, for the simple reason that natural evolution is governed by dialectical interaction. It is now time to add some flesh to the bare bones of this strong claim. My contention is twofold. First, that the basic explanatory structure of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic (‘contradictory totality’ – i.e. the unity of the interrelated concepts of totality, mediation, transformative change and contradiction) provides the most abstract philosophical framework for interpreting mechanisms of evolutionary emergence in physical and biological systems. Second, that Engels’ materialistic appropriation of Hegel’s concepts of the unity and interpenetration of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation, provide the analyst with useful conceptual tools for explaining the dialectical pattern of material emergence at work at various levels of being in nature. For these reasons alone, dialectical materialism as ontology is indispensable to the critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems. Is this claim a species of grand speculative metaphysics, which I have simply imposed on the natural sciences? Not if Engels’ dialectical materialist conception of nature is both consistent with the theories and methods of the various natural sciences, and is also the best conceptual means of generalizing from the

Materialist dialectics 115 practices and resultants of the various natural sciences. Not if practising scientists of whatever political persuasion, researching into different zones of being, have found themselves drawn to dialectical materialism (or to methods of thought and conclusions consistent with dialectical materialism) in order to make sense of their objects of knowledge. In such circumstances, it is entirely appropriate to conclude that, to the best of our current knowledge, nature is materially and dialectically structured, and that this structuring is brilliantly illuminated by Engels’ philosophical ideas. In fact, as I intend to demonstrate, the practices and theories of the various non-human sciences do indeed support these conclusions. But, before elaborating this argument, it is necessary to take the time to consider the meaning and specific application of Engels’ appropriation of the ‘three laws’ of Hegelian dialectic. I will briefly consider each one. (1) Unity and interpenetration of opposites. The basic idea here is that objects or structures are unitary wholes composed of heterogeneous parts, which are set in motion or which undergo transformative change, either by virtue of the interactions of these internally diverse elements, or by being acted upon by conflicting forces or pressures from without. (2) Negation of the negation. This concept is closely related to the unity and interpenetration of opposites, and is perhaps best seen as a more concrete specification of how it works in special circumstances. For whereas Engels’ stress on the unity-in-difference of specific systems or totalities is designed to show how ‘things maintain their . . . identity in the face of external impulses, effects and pressures to change’,155 the primary function of the negation of the negation concept is to distinguish between those structures or objects which have the capacity to resist their own negation by negating forces or pressures and those which do not. Thus, the negation of the negation denotes systems whose identity and dynamics are simultaneously dependent on self-negating mechanisms or states internal to themselves, and/or which can negate external negating pressures by converting these into impulses for internally-generated change or development (e.g. organisms, ecosystems and societies). (3) Transformation of quantity into quality. By this Engels has in mind the theorem that ‘in nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or quantitative subtraction of matter in motion (so-called energy)’: Thus the temperature of water is, in the first place, a point of no consequence in respect to its liquidity; still with the increase or diminution of the temperature of liquid water, there comes a state where this state of cohesion alters and the water is converted into steam or ice. Similarly, a definite minimum current strength is required to cause the platinum wire of an electric incandescent lamp to glow; and every metal has its temperature of incandescence and fusion, every liquid has a definite freezing and boiling point at a given pressure . . . also every gas has its critical point at which it can be liquefied by pressure and cooling . . . The sphere, however, in which

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Now there is a considerable and growing body of research evidence, derived from the findings of the various sciences, which reveal the dialectical pattern at work at each stratum of reality. This is obviously true, for example, of the objects of psychology (as Freud has demonstrated)157 and sociology (as the classical Marxists have demonstrated). But it is no less true of those of the physical and biological and ecological sciences. Engels himself cogently drew out the dialectical pattern at work at the level of macro physics, basing his argument on the best scientific knowledge of the day, arguing that the life process of solar systems, and of large scale terrestrial bodies on our planet within our solar system, consisted precisely in the ‘interplay of attraction and repulsion’,158 generated, respectively, by the rotational contraction of the gaseous mass from which the solar system was formed, and by the dual nature of gravitation in terrestrial conditions (in permitting and counteracting motion). This, for him, was a pattern of causality which appeared to be a classic demonstration of Hegel’s grasp of contradictory totality as the unity and interpenetration of opposites. The picture of nature revealed by the ‘new physics’ also fits well with Engels’ ontological dialectics.159 This is perhaps clearest of all in the case of Einstein’s relativity theory. At the risk of gross oversimplification, Einstein’s breakthrough was twofold: first, to demonstrate that Newton’s laws were not universal but applicable only at particular scales or velocities of physical reality; second, to grasp matter and energy not as different in kind (mass as lifeless and static until energized), but as mutually convertible aspects of the motion of matter (E  mc2). In fact, the whole revolutionary thrust of relativity theory is a precise illustration of Engels’ argument that concepts and theories which explain aspects of physical nature at particular levels or scales or velocities are no longer appropriate at different levels or scales or velocities, therefore requiring a different set of concepts and theories and methods to make sense of what is going on. Such a radical understanding of the behaviours and properties of mute physical matter in motion would certainly be a source of considerable discomfort and confusion for those contemporaries of Engels, who regarded the whole of nature as governed by invariant and timeless mechanical laws of the Newtonian type. By contrast, Engels’ view that nature is composed of irreducible structures or levels of matter-in-motion, with different patterns and mechanisms of causality operative at different levels, would have allowed him to treat Einstein’s physics as a confirmation of his dialectical philosophy. But, more concretely, Einstein’s

Materialist dialectics 117 understanding of matter as ‘not something separate from motion and energy’, and of motion and energy as inherent attributes of matter, each being ‘capable of being transformed into the other in a definite law-governed manner’, is precisely ‘the kind of process Engels pointed to as a unity of opposites’.160 Moreover, Engels’ fundamental insight that ‘motion is the mode of existence of matter’161 is entirely consistent with Einstein’s view that energy and mass are definitive and intrinsic attributes of matter. What is true of relativity theory is also true of more recent developments in the physical sciences: quantum physics and chaos theory. Quantum physics can certainly be legitimately interpreted as a striking vindication of Engels’ dialectical materialism. There are three basic elements to quantum physics: Firstly, it argues that all objects can behave both as waves, like radio waves, and bullet-like particles. So light, usually thought of as a radio wave, can behave as a particle, while an electron, a particle, can also behave like a wave. What had previously, and still now to common sense, seemed two mutually exclusive and opposed notions were revealed to be intimately connected, to be two sides of the same coin. Secondly, quantum mechanics also says there is an intrinsic uncertainty in nature. For instance, an electron can have a well-defined and precise position or velocity, but not both at the same time. Thirdly, the theory says some phenomena in nature are inherently probalistic. . . . So it is impossible to predict in advance, say, which of the various possible energies an electron around an atom will be in or exactly when a radioactive particle will emit radiation. It is not even in principle possible to predict exactly what energy is possessed by an electron around an atom, but is rather only possible to predict the probability of it having each of the range of possible energies.162 It is necessary to briefly emphasize three aspects of this new physics. First, as McGarr points out, the element of contingency in the behaviour of subatomic particles it identifies is an objective property of the world, not simply a gap in our understanding of natural necessity.163 ‘The decay of radioactive nuclei is truly causeless and random in the sense that here is no difference in state between a nucleus that will or will not decay up until the actual instant of radioactive emission’.164 Second, this contingency in nature does not necessarily mean that the microstructures responsible for it are not themselves the product of as yet undiscovered underlying generative mechanisms that operate in a thoroughly deterministic way. Finally, quantum physics does not simply ditch determinism in favour of chance even at the level of micro-particles. On the contrary, quantum physics makes sense of the distinction between randomness and absence of causality. For example, the emission of radioactive nuclei occurs not because it somehow chooses to decay, but because entropy is the fate of all material things, even if the moment of emission is genuinely random. Moreover, quantum physics specifies a ‘world of subtle interplay between chance and necessity’, and

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is concerned with ‘predicting the probability of events, such as an electron around an atom having a particular energy, and how these probabilities evolve in time in a strictly deterministic manner’.165 In other words, quantum physics draws out the point that necessity (the idea that objects are law-governed) and probability (the unpredictable way some objects behave in response to laws) are not mutually incompatible. Rather, they are a bounded unity of opposites. And, of equal significance here, a fundamental aim of quantum physics is to show how the probalistic laws of the micro-level give rise to the orderly deterministic laws that govern the behaviour of the objects of macrophysics. Indeed, a triumph of quantum physics has been to substantiate how randomness gives rise to determinism in everyday behaviour. So, for example, ‘the most exquisitely accurate clocks, precise to a millionth of a second, are those that use the number of random radioactive emissions per second as their counters’.166 This rich world revealed by quantum physics seems a very long way from the peculiar idea, popular among certain philosophers, academics and natural scientists, that ‘rock bottom’ reality is simply ‘seas of potentia’167 or ‘pure dispositionality’.168 Chaos theory, too, can be legitimately interpreted as providing evidence in support of a dialectical materialist understanding of natural causality. The fundamental breakthrough of chaos theory (as an explanatory framework that bridges developments in a number of sciences) in a way complements quantum physics. This is to demonstrate how certain physical systems behave ‘chaotically’, despite being law-governed. The classic example normally cited to illustrate this point is, of course, the so-called ‘butterfly effect’, whereby the fluttering of the butterfly’s wings at one space-time locale in a complex system can set in motion a complex accumulation of knock-on effects which ultimately results in a major natural event (such as a flood or a hurricane) at a distanciated time-space locale in the same system or in a contingently related system. Now chaos theory has shown that even the simplest of physical systems can behave chaotically in certain circumstances. As McGarr notes: ‘Three bodies orbiting each other under the influence of gravity, or a simple pendulum swinging over a magnet, are two examples’.169 These systems are unpredictable, not because they are magically freed from necessity or determinations, but because their behaviours are incredibly sensitive to the most microscopic fluctuations in their initial boundary conditions, or the tiniest changes in their micro-constituents, or the most minute disturbances caused by their interactions with other systems.170 Chaos theorists have shown, with experimental models and under laboratory conditions, that the smallest quantitative changes in a physical system can abruptly tip it into a completely novel or transformed pattern of interactions (i.e. emergent behaviours), which cannot be predicted on the basis of an understanding of the underlying laws or mechanisms. Moreover, chaos theorists have also demonstrated that the often relatively unstable behaviours of simple chemical systems of interacting molecules can spontaneously generate highly organized or structured forms of motion under specific circumstances (such as the quantitative addition of heat to a liquid). As McGarr notes, the development of the sciences of complexity have

Materialist dialectics 119 demonstrated their power and objectivity in practice, proving particularly useful, for example, in understanding thermodynamics and the problem of ‘fluid turbulence’ in the human body.171 There are a number of reasons why the new physics of quantum mechanics and chaos should be seen as broadly supportive of Engels’ dialectics of nature. First, and most obviously, these scientific developments exemplify Engels’ dialectical insight that matter is radically creative, not simply consisting of stable equilibrium and uniform motion or gradual additive evolution, but moving in qualitative leaps and bounds, and assuming new properties and dispositions and behaviours, in response to the interface of mechanisms at lower levels, from which the new patterns of behaviour at higher levels cannot be traced or deduced or inferred. Thus, Engels would not have been at all discomfited by the knowledge ushered in by quantum mechanics that the behaviour of the microconstituents of physical reality are radically different to the behaviour of the macrostructures of which they are constituents, requiring an entirely new branch of scientific study to be opened up, with its own theories, concepts and methods. Nor, for the same reason, would Engels have been taken aback by the new knowledge provided by chaos theory of the behaviour of non-linear systems, for this indicates that such systems are emergent from linear systems (and vice versa), and thus spontaneously acquire properties and behaviours that are not simply different from their constituents, but are more radically negations of them (as, for example, the time-reversible laws of Newtonian macrophysics are fundamentally incompatible with the time-irreversible laws of thermodynamics). In other words, as McGarr points out, chaos theory not only ‘shows that at various points small quantitative changes produce large qualitative changes in behaviour’, but also explains ‘why this . . . is a fairly universal feature of the natural world’.172 This vindication of Engels’ ontological dialectics by contemporary physics has generally passed unnoticed by professional academics in philosophy and the social sciences. Not so, however, by some of those at the cutting edge of the ‘sciences of complexity’. Ilya Prigogine, a pioneer of the ‘new thermodynamics’, for example, has noticed that ‘there is an analogy’ between the sciences of complexity and dialectical materialism, inasmuch as the former supports the view of the latter that ‘nature might be called historical, that is, capable of development and innovation’.173 Second, Engels recommends, contra empiricism and reductionism, that scientists should be wary of ‘observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole . . . as constants, not as essentially variables’, because this method sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes ‘one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions’.174 Engels’ point is that the failure of scientists and philosophers to recognize that nature is a systemic ‘unity of opposites’ has meant that the reductive business of conducting scientific research into specific zones of being (which is necessary to yield scientific knowledge of some specific object, structure, process or relation at work in the world) is generalized into a reductionist worldview. In other words, as Rose points out, because the scientific method is

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necessarily reductive, and has yielded a fantastic accumulation of knowledge, which is proven in practice by its capacity to allow humans to manipulate natural laws and causally intervene in the object-world, this is taken as evidence of the ontological correctness of a reductionist philosophy of nature.175 This in turn feeds into the characteristic errors of science ‘beyond its limits’ – i.e. the misbegotten effort to reduce the objects of sociology to the objects of psychology, of the objects of psychology to the objects of neurobiology, of the objects of biology to the objects of chemistry, and so on. By contrast, Engels’ dialectical approach compels him to reject the view that ‘a thing either exists or it does not exist’, that a thing ‘cannot at the same time be itself and something else’, that ‘positive and negative absolutely exclude one another’ and that ‘cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other’.176 But this general philosophical ontology fits the new physics of quantum mechanics and chaos remarkably well. For these demonstrate the fact that contingency and necessity are not mutually exclusive poles (contingency-in-necessity and necessity-in-contingency), that absolute determinism can arise out of probabilistic or tendential laws (and vice versa), that random behaviour is not freed from determination, yet determination does not always lead to random behaviour, and that certain objects or systems can simultaneously behave as ‘this and that’, ‘either–or’, one thing and another (e.g. as particles and waves). Third, these contemporary developments in microphysics and the various sciences of complexity also ‘sit well with Engels’ arguments about all of nature having a history . . . and how the essence of nature is precisely its continual transformation and change’: [T]he development of the universe . . . is one in which matter has undergone repeated qualitative transformations when quantitative change has reached critical points. . . . Differentiated facets of the totality of matter, which have an underlying unity, have been progressively transformed as they mutually interact. We have an evolution from quarks, to protons and neutrons, to neutral atoms, to gas clouds, stars and galaxies, the formation of heavier elements like carbon, the formation of planets and through a series of further transformations to the emergence of organic life. At each stage qualitatively novel behaviour of matter emerges. So quarks, having existed freely were, when the temperature of the universe fell below a critical point, permanently confined inside particles like protons, and a qualitatively new physics emerges . . . Later, below another critical point, protons and neutrons could capture electrons, and the whole possibility of the rich new arena of atomic and molecular processes emerges for the first time. It needed the first such molecules to be further transformed in the very special conditions of stellar interiors, and then those stars themselves to explode in cataclysmic events called supernovae, before the elements crucial to the formation of planets like Earth were even possible. And a further long series of transformations of matter have, billions of years later, resulted in the qualitatively new phenomena of human beings, consciousness and society.177

Materialist dialectics 121 Finally, the development of the sciences of complexity in more recent years not only supports Engels’ view that transformation of quantity into quality is a universal property of natural evolution, but also shows how his negation of the negation concept can be relevant to the understanding of non-linear physical systems: A picture of nature is beginning to emerge in which at certain points physical systems not only can undergo a transition from regular ordered behaviour to chaotic unpredictable behaviour, but of how matter, once it reaches a certain level of complexity of organisation, can spontaneously generate new higher forms of ordered behaviour. Some physical systems can be pushed from a stable ordered state into a chaotic state by some pressure . . . or impulse (it is ‘negated’). But under certain conditions some of these systems can then develop in such a way as to give rise to new higher forms of ordered behaviour, often with novel properties (the ‘negation is negated’). . . . This kind of pattern seems to be typical of many complex systems in nature. . . . There is some evidence . . . that complex organisations of matter with genuinely novel and ‘creative’ properties are those ‘on the edge of chaos’, systems balanced in a dynamic tension between the tendency towards a dead, stable, repetitive order on the one hand and an unpredictable, disordered, chaotic state on the other.178 I have suggested that the dialectical character of natural processes and systems has also been revealed by contemporary work in the biological and ecological sciences. It is now time to justify this strong assertion. The work of Rose et al. (1984), Rose (1997) and Levins and Lewontin (1985), for example, is a brilliant (and in their case self-conscious) application and development of Engels’ dialectic of nature in these fields. As in the work of the classical Marxists, the dialectical concepts of totality, mediation, change and contradiction are utilized as conceptual tools, in this case to expose the shortcomings of reductionism, dualism and functionalist holism in biological and ecological systems theory, and to outline a dynamic alternative understanding.179 Levins summarizes the purpose of the new biology and ecology most concisely. This new understanding is necessary, he says, because only the dialectical approach ‘offers the necessary emphasis on complexity, context, historicity, the interpenetration of seemingly mutually exclusive categories, the relative autonomy and mutual determination of different “levels” of existence, and the contradictory, self-negating aspects of change’.180 The argument of these ‘left Darwinians’ is that an adequate evolutionary theory of the interface between gene, organism and eco-environment demands an understanding which is neither micro-reductive or atomistic nor pluralistic or multi-factoral nor macro-reductive or holistic. The micro-reductive and dualistic approaches are the dominant strands in biological and ecological evolutionary theory, which the left Darwinians are particularly concerned to combat. The reductionist tradition, which is certainly the most influential of the two, attempts

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to explain the physical architecture and behaviours of organisms (including where appropriate their psychological states) in terms of their micro-genetic structures (i.e. the DNA molecules or ‘code’ inside each cell of the body), which are seen as straightforward effects of natural selection, and so ‘adaptive’ or ‘functional’ with respect to the organism’s survival chances.181 At best, the ‘environment’ is seen simply as a kind of mute backdrop, which simply supplies ‘triggers’ for self-implementing gene action, posing ‘problems’ that genes have to solve.182 Translated into the socio-cultural sphere, this kind of reductionist understanding has given rise most recently to socio-biology, which claims that human social institutions and cultural forms are explainable in terms of the biologically based drives of individuals, coded in the genes, which are in principle (if not yet in practice) identifiable.183 The ‘interactionist’ tradition, on the other hand, has emerged as a corrective current to genetic reductionism in eco-biology. According to this approach, the physical characteristics and behavioural tendencies of any organism are the determinate effect not of genes in isolation, but of genes and ecosystem in interaction through evolutionary history.184 The basic idea here is that a plurality of discrete detachable causal ‘factors’ (genetic factors, physical environmental factors, where appropriate social and cultural factors) are actively responsible for organismic-species evolution and the specific characteristics of any phenotype within a species. For fairly obvious reasons, this ‘dualistic’ alternative to genetic reductionism has been more influential in zoology and related disciplines than in neurophysiology and microbiology. In order to demonstrate the novelty and power of the ‘materialist dialectics’ of the left Darwinians, I will briefly examine two different aspects of their critique of orthodox approaches in the life sciences, and the positive alternatives in each they propose. These are: (1) the critique of reductionism (both microreductionism and macro-reductionism) in the philosophy of science and the human sciences; and (2) the positive alternative account of the interface between genes, organism and environment, in opposition to the ‘beanbag genetics’ of genetic reductionism,185 and the ontological dualism of interactional models of the interface between genes, organism and ecosystem. At each of these levels of analysis and critique, it is possible to discern the fundamental structure of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic – totality, mediation, contradiction and internally transformative change (‘contradictory totality’), and the illumination of this basic theoretical model by means of the application of Engels’ materialistically grounded Hegelian concepts of the transformation of quantity into quality, unity and interpenetration of opposites and negation of the negation. Before carrying through these tasks, however, it is worth taking the time to consider the broader dialectical philosophical framework of the left Darwinians, which both informs and is informed by their scientific researches. The materialist dialectics of the left Darwinians The starting point and most abstract concept of the left Darwinians’ philosophy of science is a familiar one:

Materialist dialectics 123 Dialectical explanations attempt to provide a coherent, unitary, but nonreductionist account of the material universe. For dialectics the universe is unitary but always in change. . . . Wholes are composed of units whose properties may be described, but the interaction of these units in the construction of wholes generates complexities that result in products qualitatively different from those of their component parts. . . . [For example] . . . the relation between individual and society is a dialectical one. . . . Society is . . . hierarchically related to individuals. As a collection of individual lives, it possesses some structural properties, just as all collections have properties that are not properties of the individuals that make them up, while at the same time lacking certain properties of the individuals. Only an individual can think, but only a society can have a class structure. At the same time, what makes the relation between society and the individual dialectical is that individuals acquire from the society produced by them individual properties, like flying, that they did not possess in isolation. It is not just that wholes are more than the sum of their parts; it is that the parts become qualitatively new by being parts of the whole.186 But the left Darwinians are also clear that the concept of systemic whole or totality, which is the basic unit of philosophical reflection and scientific scrutiny into specific zones of being, is not and cannot be grasped as a homogeneous totality, or even as a natural harmony of opposing forces or tendencies. On the contrary, systems and objects tend to be composed of heterogeneous elements, which have no in-built tendency to harmonize, and it this which is the source of instability and hence dynamic change throughout nature: The first principle of a dialectical view . . . is that a whole is a relation of heterogeneous parts that have no prior independent existence as parts. . . . The dialectical emphasis on wholes is shared by other schools of thought that rebel against the fragmentation of life under capitalism, the reductionism of medical and agricultural theory. Holistic health movements stress the inseparability of psychological and physiological processes; the relevance to health of nutrition, exercise and emotions; and the complex interaction of different nutrients. The ecology movement emphasises the unity of nature, which includes us. . . . [But] . . . their organising principle is . . . balance, and ‘oneness’ with nature. . . . The Taoist tradition in China shares with dialectics the emphasis on wholeness, the whole being maintained by the balance of opposites . . . [but] . . . balance is seen as the natural, desirable state, and the goal of intervention is to restore balance. . . . In the dialectical approach the ‘wholes’ are not inherently balanced . . ., their identity is not fixed. They are the loci of internal opposing processes, and the outcome of these oppositions is balanced only temporarily.187 Thus, the concept of ontological heterogeneity here does not simply denote a rejection of the functionalist idea that systems are composed of parts which are

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miniatures or cogs of the wholes they make up, but the more profound idea that systems contain diverse elements that (at least at some point) will inevitably tip them into a state of disequilibria or disorder, hence propelling the parts of which they are made into a different pattern of interaction, thus freeing them up to reorganize as components of a different or novel system. As Levins and Lewontin put it: Heterogeneity is not merely diversity: the parts or processes confront each other as opposites, conditional on the whole of which they are parts. . . . The internal heterogeneity of a system may produce a dynamic instability that results in internal development. . . . For example, in the predator–prey system of lemmings and owls, the two species are opposite poles of the process, predation simultaneously determining the death rate of lemmings and the birth rate of owls. It is not that lemmings are the opposites of owls in some ontological sense, or that lemmings imply owls or couldn’t exist without owls. But within the context of this particular ecosystem, their interaction helps to drive the population dynamics, which shows a spectacular fluctuation of numbers.188 Moreover, physical systems are in constant interaction with other physical systems in the open system of nature, and the products of the interactions between them (the physical objects of the world that are laminates or composites of different strata of matter), as these are forged in the flux of a multiplicity of different forces and mechanisms, are hardly likely to spontaneously generate or sustain a longstanding natural stability or order to the overall scheme of things (this requiring some kind of mystical harmonizing power or ‘hidden hand’ – i.e. God – at work in the cosmos). On the contrary, far from making the unwarranted ontological assumption that ‘persistence and equilibrium are . . . the natural order of things’, dialectical philosophy and science recognizes that the ‘conditions under which the opposing forces balance and the system as a whole is stable are quite special’ and require particular explanation, as do the specific alignment of forces that are destabilizing a system in a specific set of circumstances.189 After all, it is quite uncontentious that the more complex a system is, the fewer pathways to stable equilibrium it possesses, and thus the least likely it is to achieve any lasting equilibrium, since it obviously has to integrate a larger number of heterogeneous elements than does a simpler system. The truth of this theorem has been demonstrated mathematically by chaos theorists. This, of course, is Engels’ concept of a systemic whole as a ‘unity-indifference’ (or Trotsky’s concept of a systemic whole as a ‘differentiated unity’). For, as in the case of the dialectical philosophy of the classical Marxists, this basic understanding of totalities as composed of heterogeneous elements, and of transformative change in systems as energized by the interface between the heterogeneous elements which comprise them, and the heterogeneous forces that act on them from without, is tantamount to a deeper grasp of natural dynamics as determined by structural contradictions sedimented throughout the various strata of being. As Levins and Lewontin put it:

Materialist dialectics 125 This appearance of opposing forces has given rise to the most debated, yet the most central, concept in dialectical thought, the principle of contradiction. For some, contradiction is an epistemic principle only. It describes how we come to understand the world by a history of antithetical theories that in contradiction to each other and in contradiction to observed phenomena, lead to a new view of nature. . . . For others, contradiction is not only epistemic but political as well, the contradiction between classes being the motive power of history. Thus contradiction becomes an ontological property at least of human social existence. For us, contradiction is not only epistemic and political, but ontological in the broadest sense. Contradictions between forces are everywhere in nature, not only in human social institutions. Things change because of the actions of opposing forces on them, and things are the way they are because of the temporary balance of opposing forces.190 One of the most valuable aspects of the left Darwinians’ philosophy is the close consideration they give to unravelling the concept of contradiction and applying it to explaining specific processes at work in the world. Objective contradictions are distinguished from logical contradictions, though objective contradictions often share with logical contradictions the distinguishing property of self-negation. Self-negation, as a property of systems, allows the possibility of transformative change, whether in society or nature. In a capitalist society, for example, the drive to maximize the exploitation of wage-labour to push up profits, generates a rising organic composition of capital, attendant declining rate of return on capital investment and eventually a crisis of overproduction. This can be ameliorated by negative feedback mechanisms, which reduce the burden of unprofitable investments (job cuts, wage freezes, depreciation of capital, etc.). Thus, a condition of existence and development of a capitalist economy is that it possesses self-negating pathways, i.e. feedback mechanisms that negate its own internally generated negations. But such feedback mechanisms may as often tip the system into an even more precarious state, as job losses and wage cuts undercut the consumer demand necessary to allow capital accumulation to be restored at a profitable level, and as the social crisis itself feeds into social polarization and class conflicts that threaten the dissolution of the system. In this case, a system-threatening breakdown occurs because the negative feedback processes (the ‘second negation’) are ineffective or counter-productive, and are in effect self-cancelling (the negation of the negation or ‘triple negation’). In nature, on the other hand, ‘the stability or persistence of a system depends on a particular balance of positive and negative feedbacks, on parameters governing the rates of processes falling within certain limits’.191 Levins and Lewontin provide the excellent example of chemical and metabolic processes at work in the human body to illustrate how this works. They point out that the ‘level of blood sugar [in a human organism] is regulated by the rate at which sugar is released into the blood by the digestion of carbohydrates’.192 If the blood sugar level rises, then more insulin is discharged from the pancreas; if the blood sugar

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level drops, more sugar is released into the blood. In this way, negative feedback mechanisms enable the possibility of the human organism functioning in a state of homeostasis. ‘But negative feedback is no guarantee of stability and under some circumstances can throw the system into oscillation. If there is a preponderance of positive feedback, or if the indirect negative feedbacks . . . are not strong enough, the system will be unstable’.193 Normally each feedback mechanism (positive and negative) constitutes a negation of the other, and this allows a kind of moving or fluctuating (within safe parameters) stability or equilibrium, albeit precarious, to occur. In effect, then, natural systems, like social systems, ‘are either self-negating’ (where their internal contradictory impulses lead to breakdown) ‘or depend for their persistence on self-negating processes’.194 But contradictions are not exhausted by self-negating processes or mechanisms. On the contrary, argue the left Darwinians, contradictions may involve ‘the interpenetration of seemingly mutually exclusive categories’, such as the abstract antithesis in dualistic thought between nature–nurture, environment– organism, individual–society, etc. Other examples include the interpenetration of deterministic and probalistic laws and predictable and random processes (with one giving rise to or passing into the other), and of equilibrium and non-equilibrium mechanisms in complex systems (with the system dependent on the dialectical interchange of both states). And contradiction ‘also means the coexistence of opposing principles (rather than processes) which, taken together, have very different implications or consequences than they would have if taken separately’.195 A classic example of the latter, and one articulated by Levins and Lewontin, is the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in a capitalist market economy. In the social relations of commodity production (i.e. where production is for profit not immediate consumption), the production of goods and services is regulated by price signals, which in turn are determined by the distribution of purchasing power in the marketplace. This ensures that inessential or secondary wants (the consumption choices of the bourgeoisie and other privileged classes) are met before primary human needs (i.e. those of low-income or non-income earners of the materially disadvantaged classes). Here exchange-value is parasitic on use-value, since goods need to have some kind of utility if they are to be exchanged. Taken on its own (in abstraction from use-value), exchange-value is senseless, existing only by virtue of social relations based upon the monetary quantification of labour power for purposes of rationalized exploitation. Usevalue, on the other hand, is the humanly and socially necessary basis of production in any rational society. But, exchange value, though parasitic on use-value, nonetheless contradicts or negates use-value, since commodity production leads to the systematic misallocation of resources, and thus inverts the whole rational purpose of economic life – providing a society’s members with a level of subsistence sufficient to ensure their human well-being.

Materialist dialectics 127 The critique of reductionism in philosophy and the human sciences In order to demonstrate the practical efficacy of these fundamental concepts of a dialectical understanding of biological and ecological systems, Rose et al. examine the unhappy fate of attempts by biological reductionists to collapse the properties and powers of organismic macrostructures into their microconstituents and vice versa (atomism versus holism on the terrain of the biological sciences). There are three elements to their critique. The first step is to show that any attempt to collapse the distinctiveness of the different structures of the natural world is doomed to failure: Conventional scientific languages are quite successful when they are confined to descriptions and theories entirely within levels. It is relatively easy to describe the properties of atoms in the language of physics, of molecules in the language of chemistry, of cells in the language of biology. What is not so easy is to provide the translation for moving from one level to another. This is because as one moves up a level the properties of a larger whole are given not merely by the units of which it is composed but of the organising relations between them. To state the molecular composition of a cell does not even begin to define or predict the properties of the cell unless the spatio-temporal distributions of these molecules, and the intra-molecular forces that are generated between them, can be specified. But these organising relationships mean that properties of matter relevant at one level are just inapplicable at other levels. Genes cannot be selfish or angry or spiteful or homosexual, as these are attributes of wholes much more complex than genes: human organisms. Similarly, of course, it makes no sense to talk of human organisms showing base pairing or Van der Waal’s forces, which are attributes of the molecules and atoms of which humans are composed. Yet this confusion over levels and the properties appropriate to them is one that determinism constantly gets in.196 The next step is to demonstrate that the various structures of reality, inasmuch as these are relevant to the constitution and behaviour of biological organisms, are not ontologically separate, in the sense of being only contingently related ‘things in themselves’, but are instead different elements of a unitary system, or system of systems. By way of illustration of this point, Rose and his co-writers cite a particular biological event, a jumping frog, which can be described under the concepts and theories of a number of different sciences, but which can be explained only by drawing on each and all of the concepts and theories of the relevant sciences: For reductionism, the muscle twitch [of the jumping frog] is caused by the proteins sliding between one another, and reductionism would seek to go on to explain the protein movements in terms of the properties of the molecular and atomic constituents of these proteins. . . . But this is not the only way of

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Materialist dialectics explaining the muscle twitch. One can consider the activity of the whole organism and then state that the muscle twitched because the frog was jumping to escape the predator. . . . But just as there are not successive phenomena – first the frog jumping, then the muscle twitch – there is not first the sliding of the protein molecules and then the twitch. The sliding molecules constitute the twitch, but at the biochemical rather than the physiological level of analysis. While within-level causal explanations describe a temporal sequence of events, reductionist and holist accounts alike are not causal in this sense at all; they are different descriptions of a unitary phenomenon. A full and coherent explanation of the phenomenon requires all three types of description, but without giving primacy to any one. . . . Actually, for completeness other types of description are also required. The properties of the muscle cannot be understood except in the context of the development of the individual frog from the egg to the adult, which defines the relationship of the parts of the frog as an organism. And the parts played by the twitching muscle in the survival of the frog and the propagation of its kind cannot be understood except in reference to the evolution of frogs in general.197

Rose’s point is that macro-reductionism (holism) and micro-reductionism (atomism) get in a conceptual and logical tangle where they attempt to explain even simple behaviours or events in the world (such as the jumping frog). This is because both offer up incommensurable ontological causes of events or behaviours in a complex multi-layered system – either running from the bottom up (the sliding of the muscle molecules) or from the top down (the goal of the frog to escape a predator). In interactional models, of course, it is allowed that the causes run up and down the system, but this is scarcely denied in reductionist models, though here it is assumed that either the causality of the parts or the causality of the whole somehow assume control of the overall pattern of behaviour. But the problem with this method of analysis, as Rose and his co-writers point out, is that no explanation can be given of how the opposed principles of causality generate the same outcome (the jumping frog).198 The answer is to see the different levels of the system as a unified totality, which simultaneously co-determines the behaviours of any specific thing that consists of these distinct elements. This means that the researcher requires complementary not opposing levels of analysis to get at the complex behaviours of any object, and has to see these as different descriptions of a unitary phenomenon, which together add up to an adequate explanation. As Hegel would have said (but far more eloquently than I), the truth resides neither in the whole nor parts of a thing, but in the relations between them in the historical development of the thing. This stratified systemic focus of the ‘dialectical biology’ is the launch pad of the left Darwinians’ attack on socio-biology and the various forms of sociological imperialism (cultural reductionism) which dominate the human sciences:

Materialist dialectics 129 Reductionist explanation attempts to derive the properties of wholes from intrinsic properties of parts, properties that exist apart from and before the parts are assembled into complex structures. . . . Dialectical explanations, on the contrary, do not abstract the properties and parts in isolation from their associations in wholes but see the properties of parts as arising out of their associations. That is, according to the dialectical view, the properties of parts and wholes codetermine each other. The properties of individual human beings do not exist in isolation but arise as a consequence of social life, yet the nature of that social life is a consequence of our being human and not, say, plants. It follows, then, that dialectical explanation contrasts with cultural or dualistic modes of explanation that separate the world into different types of phenomena – culture and biology, mind and body – which are to be explained in quite different and non-overlapping ways.199 From this perspective, human nature is not a mere function of mechanisms of enculturation or socialization, or of the immersion of human organisms in specific forms of social relations. On the other hand, nor are socio-cultural relationships simply human nature writ large on the historical canvas. Neither holism nor atomism will do. Certainly, the existence of a fully human society presupposes specific determinate properties and powers of our ‘species-being’ (e.g. consciousness, self-consciousness, sociality, rationality and transformative labour), and the possibility of social change presupposes human agents as the bearers of objective species needs and interests. Moreover, it is certain that human beings are not born tabula rasa, but carry with them a specific genetic inheritance, which is the evolutionary product of the long historical interface between human beings within social relations on the natural terrain, and which provides the basis for human organisms to constitute themselves as people, by means of their interactions with other individuals and the objectworld. But, at the same time, it can scarcely be doubted that our human nature or species-being is constituted by dispositions and capacities which are magnified and developed beyond recognition by virtue of the specific socio-cultural relations we enter into (this is true, for example, of our powers of reason, abstraction, self-identity, personality and sociality), and that other of our human capacities (e.g. language use and social identity) are simply a biologically-based potentiality until we acquire them through interaction with other people in social relations.200 This means that the actual or concrete characteristics of real historically and culturally situated individuals (our nature if you like) is a simultaneously historical socio-cultural and evolutionary construct. ‘Nature’ and ‘nurture’, ‘heredity’ and ‘environment’, are not mutually exclusive poles or abstract oppositions, but are indissoluble and co-determined elements of a historical totality. Not an undifferentiated totality, however, but a heterogeneous totality, a unity-of-thediverse, a totality in which apparently oppositional elements are really interpenetrated and pass into one another, taking on distinctive identities by virtue of their mutual interactions or relations in history. For, although individuals are the

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product of overlapping determinations, being forged as a kind of socio-culturalbiological compound, and one which will vary with changes in socio-cultural context, it is nonetheless still meaningful to speak of the distinct elements from which the compound is made. Now I take it that this kind of understanding of the interface between nature and nurture is reasonable and indispensable to social analysis. It is reasonable, I think, because this analytical strategy allows us to come to terms with the simple fact that even our most mundane biological activities (eating, sleeping, having sex, etc.) are profoundly culturally conditioned.201 And it is indispensable, I think, because this analytical strategy allows us to navigate a safe course between biological versus cultural reductionism, and dualistic compromises between the two, which simply preserve the dualism by making their appeal to discrete independent non-overlapping ‘factors’ of development. The dialectical interface between genes, organism and environment The final step of the left Darwinians’ argument is to show the relevance of this most general or abstract concept of dialectical thinking (‘differentiated totality’) to the scientific study of organisms as part of an interacting ecosystem, and to the interface of genes and organisms within an ecosystem. In his Lifelines, for example, Steven Rose challenges the orthodox (i.e. reductionist) scientific understanding of what constitutes the ‘fundamental properties’ of genetic microstructures. In particular, Rose is concerned with revealing the shortcomings of what he describes as ‘the central dogma’ of microbiology, namely that DNA, the substance from which genes are made, provides the ‘blueprint of life . . . magisterially issuing orders by which the rest of the cell is commanded’.202 Rose has little difficulty showing that this view must be false, because it is one-sided, unable to deal with key problems in biological theory, and is contrary to a growing weight of scientific evidence. His main point is that DNA is itself dependent for its existence and development upon what he describes as ‘the cellular environment’, which is for all intents and purposes a micro-genetic system of integrated interconnections between ‘enzymes, their substrates and products’, in which DNA is itself embedded.203 There is, says Rose, no straightforward transmission of DNA into RNA, followed by ‘translation’ of RNA into protein, as necessary stages in a linear chain of causality leading from DNA to the organismic whole. Rather, there is ‘a constant dynamic exchange’ between genes and their cellular environment, by virtue of which the DNA ‘code’ is expressed in organismic development.204 Recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering have demonstrated the truth and utility of Rose’s analysis: Dramatic proof of the reliance of gene expression on the cellular environment [has been] provided by the cloning of the sheep Dolly. Dolly’s genetic material all came from the udder shell of an adult sheep. In these cells there is a very restricted pattern of gene expression, just enough to cover the specialised components that such cells need. Yet under the influence of the egg

Materialist dialectics 131 into which the udder cell nucleus was transplanted, the restrictions were lifted and the DNA became capable of specifying a whole new sheep’s body.205 The theoretical conclusion of Rose’s analysis of organismic development is that, even at the level of microbiology, a systemic focus on the interplay between parts and whole, without seeing one or other ‘side’ as a shadow or expression of the other, is necessary. Neither reductionism (of macroscopic cellular structure to microscopic DNA ‘code’) nor dualism (the abstraction of the various parts of the cell from each other as discrete and separate ‘factors’ of development) will suffice. As John Parrington points out: ‘If gene expression is profoundly affected by the state of the cellular environment, it is also true that it is meaningless to talk about the “action” of genes as if they were separate, isolated elements’.206 But claiming the contrary is the decisive problem of socio-biologists such as Richard Dawkins, for whom ‘each gene [will] produce a single phenotypic characteristic of selective importance’, meaning that possession of a gene will be a decisive ‘causal factor for possessing the phenotype in question’.207 But, as Elliott Sober points out, this atomistic conception of gene action is falsified by two kinds of phenomena well documented in genetic research and theory. These are: pleiotropy, where variable phenotypical effects result from the same gene; and polygenesis, where a specific phenotypical outcome is the effect of complex interactions among a number of genes.208 On the basis of this kind of data and argument, it seems reasonable to conclude, as do the left Darwinians, that although ‘selection ultimately works through changes in the genes, this is not where selection acts’. On the contrary, selection mechanisms are ‘action at a distance . . . at the level of the organism as a whole, as part of a species and finally as part of an interacting ecosystem’.209 By way of illustration of this argument, Levins and Lewontin apply the dialectical biology to the investigation of the interface between genes, organism and ecosystem in triggering selective mechanisms of biological evolution.210 Their purpose is to establish that an adequate account of natural evolution has to integrate different and seemingly opposed principles of analysis within an explanatory whole. On the one hand, it is clear enough that sheer chance or contingency at the level of the ecosystem has a key role to play in accounting for evolutionary outcomes. For example, it is likely that without the great extinction of the dinosaurs, brought about it would appear by the intervention of a cataclysmic event from outside the ecosystem, the evolution of the hominids could not have occurred, at least not on this planet. But, on the other hand, it is also certain that the developmental pathways of organic species are not governed by mere chance or contingent events that are biologically significant, since even the play of contingency occurs on the terrain of a structure of constraints, enablements and impulses imposed by physical laws of inorganic nature (such as the law of gravity) and the laws of genetics and biological structure. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it: ‘Invariant laws of nature impact the general forms and functions of organisms; they set the channels in which organic designs must evolve’.211

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It is, of course, the existence of such ‘laws of form’212 which ensure that natural evolution is an algorithmic process, and this is demonstrated by the appearance throughout evolutionary history of certain ‘selection universals’ or ‘good tricks’ (e.g. vision, sociality, communication, etc.) amongst different lineages occupying different habitats and time–space locales. Moreover, it is constantly evolving changes in the ecosystem, energized by the interaction of the mechanisms of inorganic nature with the chance events and genetic and biological laws of selection, which stimulate ‘punctuated bursts’ of evolutionary activity throughout the organic world. Such ecological changes present novel situations and opportunities to organisms and species (e.g. changing food supply, a transformed structure of competition for resources with other organisms and species, climatic cooling or heating, etc.) upon which selective mechanisms can work. In such situations, i.e. where existing adaptations are disrupted by thoroughgoing ecological changes, random mutations are more likely to enhance survival value than the conservation of existing genetic structures. Indeed, it was precisely tumultuous environmental upheavals in certain time–space locales on this planet (especially climatic cooling which diminished the rain forests of central Africa and replaced these with savannah-type terrains) which generated conditions of possibility for and perhaps a real stimulus towards the evolution of first the hominids and then the Homo line.213 I have now said enough about the abstract or general philosophical framework of the left Darwinians, which I have argued is a specific appropriation and application of the Hegelian and Marxian category of ‘contradictory totality’. It is now time to consider the ways in which this framework is fleshed out or invested with added explanatory content by virtue of the left Darwinians’ appropriation and application of Engels’ ‘three laws’ of materialist dialectic. I have identified these as the transformation of quantity into quality, the unity and interpenetration of opposites (which is also in some cases another way of talking about internally generated development through contradictions), and the negation of the negation (which is a focus on the self-negating aspects of internally generated development in systems). This is necessary because these concepts are utilized as both specific explanatory accounts of how natural causality unfolds at a number of different levels of the world, and as providing theoretical guidance or orientation to research goals. Rose et al. provide a brilliant description and application of the ‘law’ of unity and interpenetration of opposites in the life sciences. The argument outlined here has a familiar starting point: this is that conventional dualistic or interactional models of the interface between organism and environment are inadequate because they drive a wedge between the two, treating both as external to each other, and as confronting one another as simple oppositions. As Rose et al. put it: ‘The organism is alienated from the environment. . . . There is an external reality, the environment, with laws of its own formation and evolution, to which the organism adapts and moulds itself, or dies if it fails’.214 But organism and environment do not simply confront each other as a dualism. Rather, their mutual interactions mould or shape each other in essentials. For one thing, ‘it is

Materialist dialectics 133 the organisms themselves that define their own environment’,215 in the sense they ‘determine which aspects of their environment are relevant’ to them.216 Moreover, organisms ‘do not simply adapt to previously existing, autonomous environments; they create, destroy, modify, and internally transform aspects of the external world by their own life activities to make this environment’.217 In short, then, those aspects of an eco-system, which constitute the habitat of a particular organism, depend to a significant extent upon the nature and behaviour of the organism itself, and so cannot simply be counterposed to the organism as an external force constraining or facilitating its behaviours. The organism is simultaneously subject and object of its own evolutionary history. This is in the sense that it is not simply the passive effect of external evolutionary pressures, but is also an active agent in fabricating and modifying those habitats necessary for its own existence and evolutionary development. Most profoundly, not only do organisms select and change their habitats, but they can also modify or transform the generative mechanisms that determine the objects of the physical world. Thus, ‘the entities that are the objects of laws of transformation become subjects that change these laws’: Systems destroy the conditions that brought them about in the first place and create the possibilities of new transformations that did not previously exist. The law that all life emerges from life was enacted only about a billion years ago. Life originally arose out of inanimate matter, but that origination made its continued occurrence impossible, because living organisms consume the complex organic molecules needed to create life de novo.218 A good illustration of what the left Darwinians are getting at is provided by Darwin himself. Even the humble earthworm, Darwin famously noted, is simultaneously subject and object of a developing eco-system, both product and producer of its own habitat. The soil is obviously the habitat of the earthworm, but the activities of the earthworm continually recompose the soil in which the earthworm lives, rendering it habitable for future generations of earthworms. And the same is true of all other living things: Plant roots alter the physical structure and chemical composition of the soil in which they grow, withdrawing nutrients but also conditioning the soil so that nutrients are more easily mobilised. Grazing animals actually increase the rate of production of forage, both by fertilising the ground with their droppings and by stimulating plant growth by cropping . . . [But] the most powerful change of environment made by organisms is the gas composition of the atmosphere. The terrestrial atmosphere, consisting of 80 percent nitrogen, 18 percent oxygen, and a trace of carbon dioxide, is chemically unstable. If it were allowed to reach an equilibrium, the oxygen and nitrogen would disappear, and the atmosphere would be nearly all carbon dioxide, as is the case for Mars and Venus. It is living organisms that have produced the oxygen by photosynthesis and that have depleted the carbon

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Materialist dialectics dioxide by fixing it in the form of carbonates in sedimentary rock. A present-day terrestrial species is under strong selection pressure to live in an atmosphere rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, but that metabolic problem has been posed by the activity of the living forms themselves over two billion years of evolution and is quite different from the problem faced by the earliest metabolising cells.219

This is indicative that the relationship between organism and environment is not an ‘alienated’ one, in the ontological sense, but is rather a relationship of mutual presupposition or ‘interpenetration’. But this is exactly what Engels was getting at where he argues: Hard and fast lines are incompatible with the theory of evolution. . . . Either–or becomes more and more inadequate. . . . For a stage in the outlook of nature where all differences become merged in intermediate steps, and all opposites pass into one another through intermediate links, the old metaphysical method of thought no longer suffices. Dialectics, which likewise knows no hard and fast lines, no unconditional, universally valid ‘either–or’ and which bridges the fixed metaphysical differences, and besides ‘either–or’ recognises also in the right place ‘both this-and-that’ and reconciles opposites, is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to this stage.220 Particularly illuminating, for the purpose of demonstrating how the unity and interpenetration of opposites specifies development through internally generated contradictions, is Rose’s discussion of the ‘dialectic of life’, contained in his Lifelines. Rose’s argument is that life itself is a contradictory totality, a bounded unity of opposites, since it ‘demands of all its forms the ability simultaneously to be and to become’.221 This is most obviously true of those organisms whose life cycle involves a series of radical transformations of body structure (e.g. the ‘negation’ of the butterfly’s egg by the caterpillar, the ‘second negation’ of the caterpillar by the chrysalis, and the ‘triple negation’ of the chrysalis by the butterfly). But this is also a property of life in all its varied forms. Parrington describes the development of human optics to demonstrate Rose’s point. ‘The eye develops in association with its connection with the brain that is also developing. As both eye and brain grow and mature, the connections between them are broken and reformed many times, yet the overall pattern of the relationship between them must be maintained if vision is not to be impaired. At the same time the developing eye seems to be resistant to environmental “noise”, yet is still sensitive enough to respond to changes in the environment if they are sustained’.222 Thus, suggests Rose, the organism is necessarily subject to a dialectic of ‘two opposing forces – specificity versus plasticity’,223 inasmuch as the lifeprocess of the organism is constituted by the containment and continual interchange and transmission of these interdependent but contradictory pressures or impulses (one into the other) within a unitary system.

Materialist dialectics 135 This understanding of the dialectic of life fits hand in glove with, and is indeed a theoretical specification of, Engels’ own summary sketch of the dialectic of life: The plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself, by absorption and escretion of substances, by respiration, by cell formation and death of cells, by the process of circulation taking place, in short by a sum of incessant molecular changes which make up life and the sum total of whose results is evident to our eyes in the phases of life – embryonic life, youth, sexual maturity, process of reproduction, old age, death. . . . Life therefore consists primarily in the fact that every moment it is itself and at the same time something else; and this does not take place as the result of a process to which it is subjected to from without. . . . [O]n the contrary [it] is a self-implementing process which is inherent in, native to, its bearer.224 But, aside from providing a striking illustration of Engels’ concept of development as involving the dynamic interchange of opposites, Rose’s dialectic of specificity versus plasticity also exemplifies the kind of process which Engels described as the transformation of quantity into quality. This concept is given substantive treatment by the left Darwinians, in the sense that their positive account of evolutionary change in biological nature is precisely the kind of process designated under the terms of the transformation of quantity into quality, though the left Darwinians do not specifically refer to it as such, and they are perhaps vindicating this concept of Engels and Hegel without being aware of doing so. In any case, basing their arguments on the evidence provided by the fossil record, the contribution of the left Darwinians to understanding the dynamic of evolution has been to demonstrate that this could not have proceeded simply in an orderly and gradual fashion, through very slow accretive molecular adaptations to species, none of which are decisive in bringing about a radical change (i.e. the transformation of one species into a different species), but has instead proceeded by virtue of relatively abrupt and rapid spurts of evolutionary activity, interspersed by long-run periods of equilibrium in which very little change occurs. Gould refers to this process as ‘punctuated equilibrium’,225 and Rose argues that it occurs because ‘genetic variation can be dampened, rendered essentially neutral, until such time as it accumulates sufficiently to tip the next generations of organisms into new stable states’.226 Yet Engels’ concept of the negation of the negation is, if anything, better equipped than the transformation of quantity into quality to get to grips with this dialectic of organic life and evolution. The point Engels is trying to make can be summarized as follows. All material things (structures or systems), by virtue of the fact they are acted upon by opposing forces from without and opposing forces from within, are eventually destined to be destroyed, and their elements recomposed as new things. But, this having been said, there are certain kinds of things – including and especially organisms – which are sufficiently plastic to

136 Materialist dialectics respond differently to these pressures, at least for a period of time.227 Organisms possess the capacity to absorb external impulses or forces in such a way that these are converted into forces of internal growth or development, and to develop internal positive and negative feedback mechanisms which ensure that they remain stable in their own life-process in relation to their environments. Taken together, these mechanisms allow the organism to preserve its specificity as a particular kind of system whilst at the same time rendering it sufficiently flexible to develop. In short, then, a condition of existence of the organism is that it is both internally self-negating and capable of negating external negations. But, as the left Darwinians have shown, this kind of process is exactly what natural selection entails. For this is a dialectic of genetic conversion and mutation, sustaining adaptive self-modification over time, in response to internal and external negations that threaten the cancellation or absenting of organisms or species. Levins provides an excellent example of how the negation of the negation works at the microbiological level. He draws our attention to the longstanding orthodox view of medical science that the ‘epidemiological transition’ had occurred. This was the view that ‘new drugs, antibiotics, better vaccines, more subtle diagnostic techniques’ would ensure that ‘infectious disease [must] decline and be replaced by chronic disease as the major health problem in the [human-social] world’. But, this perspective was utterly false, because it failed to grasp that biological nature is not simply the passive object of human intervention and manipulation, but is an active subject in its own right, which is capable of continually developing novel negations to the most ingenious of negations. Hence we should not, says Levins, be surprised (as the medical science establishment has been) that previously successful medical interventions wind up ineffective in the longer term: The expectation that the new technologies of drugs, antibiotics, pesticides and vaccines would ‘win the war’ with the pathogens grossly underestimated both the dynamic capacity of organisms to adapt and the intricacies of natural selection. Microbes not only undergo mutation but can also receive genes from other species. Therefore, genetic variation is available for selection. Therapies that threaten the survival of the germs also focus natural selection on overcoming or evading these therapies. The genetic makeup of pathogen populations therefore shifts readily, not only in the long run but even in the course of a single outbreak and within a single host during a bout of illness. There are strong opposing demands on the pathogen’s body to select for access to nutrients, to avoid the body’s defences and exit to a new host. Variations in a body’s state of nutrition, its immune system, the presence or absence of other infections, access to treatment, the treatment regime and conditions of transmission, all push and pull the genetic makeup of pathogen populations in different directions. This means that we constantly see new strains arising, new strains that differ in their drug and antibiotic resistance, clinical course, virulence, and biochemi-

Materialist dialectics 137 cal detail. Some even develop resistance to treatments that have not yet been used if these threaten the survival of pathogens in ways similar to old treatments.228 I conclude that Engels is correct to argue that nature is dialectically structured, and that this structuring exhibits certain regularities or patterns (which may be described as ‘laws’). But it is important to be clear that dialectical ‘laws’ are not scientific laws under the terms of either empiricist or critical realist understandings of causality in nature. These laws do not specify ‘constant conjunctures’ between events (the idea that phenomenon A is always associated with phenomenon B), nor explain the specific nature of particular generative mechanisms of structures in giving rise to certain empirical phenomena or to emergent structures. Rather, they are ‘laws’ that operate at a different, higher level of abstraction. On the one hand, dialectical ‘laws’ are ‘clearly not analogous to, say, Einstein’s equation e  mc2, but rather are analogous to prior principles’.229 In this sense, they generate philosophical and methodological terms of reference for the empirical sciences. On the other hand, these dialectical ‘laws’ constitute ‘ways of seeing the underlying pattern of a process of change after having worked out and understood the concrete details of the process concerned’.230 In other words, dialectical ‘laws’ are an abstraction ‘from the features common to social and physical processes . . . produced by a wide variety of different mechanisms’,231 which then constitute a philosophical framework of concepts for contextualizing and organizing and interpreting and synthesizing research data. In this sense, dialectical ‘laws’ are like critical realist concepts of emergence, causality and structure, which are derived from transcendental arguments, but which function to orient scientific research, offering it conceptual and methodological guidance, and indicating profitable ways of interpreting specific findings within a wider conceptual framework. As such, dialectic is not a set ‘of rules derived simply from nature’, but is ‘specifically designed to help solve some of the problems of [reductionist and empiricist] philosophy’, translated into scientific practice and concepts.232 This means that materialist dialectics have a simultaneously methodological and ontological aspect. For dialectic is not only a set of principles and critical methods of analysis informing research, but is furthermore a picture of an overall pattern of interactions in reality, based on an integration of scientific research findings, theories, concepts and laws in historical development. So, for example, the law of value indicates a specific generative mechanism of the capitalist mode of production (explaining a range of additional mechanisms and phenomenal forms of the capitalist mode of production), which can then be seen as a particular instance of self-negating contradictions as the engine of structural or systemic change. However, this specific generative mechanism (the law of value in a capitalist economy) cannot simply be ‘read off’ from the general dialectical concepts, but has to be based on what social science theory and research can provisionally tell us about what is going on.

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Thus, on the one hand, the dialectical perspective in its ontological aspect ‘suggests that we should see the dialectic of nature as a broad philosophical conception of nature rather than a set of general laws from which more specific ones applicable to particular aspects of the world can be deduced’. The advantage of this conception of the dialectic is that it ‘rules out the kind of dogmatic dictation to working scientists which gave the idea a bad name under Stalinism, but it implies a fairly loose and open relationship between dialectical philosophy and scientific research which ought to be explicitly recognised’.233 Yet, on the other hand, the dialectical framework of ‘laws’ understood as reality-based research principles (contradictory totality, transformation of quantity into quality, unity and interpenetration of opposites and negation of the negation) do furnish the social researcher with conceptual tools for investigating and integrating the specific generative mechanisms at work in social reality, and can help the social analyst design a theoretically coherent research programme which will allow him or her to approach a range of problems within their proper systemic context. As Levins and Lewontin point out, the ‘principles of materialist dialectics that we attempt to apply to scientific activity have implications for research strategy and educational policy as well as methodological prescriptions’.234 For these render the analyst sensitive to the historicity of the objects of research, their universal interconnections with other objects, the heterogeneity of systems of interacting elements, the interpenetration of opposites and the relative autonomy yet essential unity of different levels of analysis. This draws our attention to additional good reasons for endorsing a ‘dialectics of nature’. First, dialectical materialism, like critical realism, provides a philosophical rationale or resource for countering empiricism, reductionism (macro and micro) and anti-scientific irrationalism or romanticism. Lacking this kind of outlook, scientists and philosophers have traditionally found themselves drawn towards micro-reductionist world-views where science is making rapid progress and is confident (for want of a sophisticated alternative), and back towards ‘the mystical path’ where the contradictions of old established theories are becoming glaringly apparent and where the suspicion dawns that growing scientific knowledge of the world does not always translate into a more rational world.235 Second, the dialectical perspective equips practising scientists and philosophers of science with the requisite flexibility of thought or ‘open-mindedness’ to view far-reaching transformations of scientific knowledge as a natural aspect of its internal development, not as threats to the rationality or stability of the enterprise.236 This point has been made explicitly by a number of eminent natural scientists. For example, John Haldane, surveying the crisis of physics in the 1940s, made the point that ‘it is astonishing how Engels anticipated the progress of science in the sixty years since he wrote. . . . Had Engels’ methods of thinking been more familiar, the transformation of our ideas on physics which have occurred during the past thirty years would have been smoother. . . . Had these books [the Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring] been known to my contemporaries, it [is] clear that we should have found it easier to accept relativity and quantum theory’.237 Haldane’s point is that Engels’ dialectical material-

Materialist dialectics 139 ism philosophically under-labours these scientific breakthroughs in a way beyond the ken of other philosophies of science (such as positivism, empiricism, conventionalism, pragmatism, etc.). This is because a dialectical materialist understanding of nature, such as that powerfully argued by Engels, is an explicit acknowledgement of its complexity, its fluidity, its capacity for continual innovation and development, its inherently self-negating aspects, and thus of the challenge it poses to static commonsense, and so of the approximate and provisional nature of scientific discoveries.

Conclusion The fundamental aim of this chapter (and the previous chapter) has been to show two things. First, a fully adequate philosophical ontology, which is capable of under-labouring the human and natural sciences, must be forged in the interface between critical realism/dialectical critical realism and materialist dialectics. Second, Marxian dialectic is uniquely equipped (conceptually and methodologically) to incorporate the useful philosophical insights of critical realism/ dialectical critical realism on the terrain of social theory, and deploy these incisively in social scientific analysis, whilst at the same time overreaching them in certain key respects. I have argued in this chapter that materialist dialectics are ontologically and methodologically indispensable to critical philosophy and the sciences. By the same token, these offer the prospect of grounding and preservatively sublating the insights of Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist philosophical systems. However, I have also tried to demonstrate that Bhaskarian realism offers philosophical and methodological insights that are useful for Marxism. There are a number of good reasons why critical realism/dialectical critical realism requires a distinctive Marxian or materialistic foundation (ontology) and application (methodology), if it is to live up to its rich promise of apprehending the social and natural worlds. First, only a realist ontology constructed as materialist dialectics allow a constructive alternative to dualism, and avoids the danger of idealist slippage (the positing of the Ideal as ‘rock bottom’ reality and ‘realist agnosticism’ as the rotten compromise position between materialism and idealism). And, of course, materialist dialectics also offer a framework of theoretical concepts (co-determination of parts and wholes and the heterogeneity of systems) that precludes reductionism, whether idealist or otherwise. Second, the central analytical categories of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic (totality, mediation, transformative change and contradiction) allow a concise yet incisive analytical purchase on the dynamics of transformative change in social and physical systems. These concepts have demonstrated their efficacy in practice, since they have been successfully deployed by the classical Marxists to resolve major problems in socio-historical science, philosophy of science and in socialist or liberatory politics. As Bhaskar himself says, only dialectic permits ‘empirical “open texture” ’ and imparts ‘structural fluidity and interconnectedness’ to social and natural forms.238 Dialectic is thus ‘ontologically . . . the

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dynamic of conflict and the mechanism of change’.239 This is exactly right. But Marxian theory, because it is dialectical to the core, and a conceptually and methodologically coherent model of applied dialectics to boot, has the toolkit to apprehend processes and mechanisms of transformative change, especially on the terrain of substantive socio-historical analysis, and to historicize transformative change in nature more generally as contingency-within-necessity. These concepts (differentiated totality, mediation, transformative change, contradiction) constitute the methodological framework of Marx’s ‘logic of capital’, and of Marx and Engels’ socio-historical materialism, which overcomes the traditional antinomies of sociological theory (reductionism – whether of the atomistic or holistic variety, determinism, voluntarism, teleologism, historicism and so on). They also inform Lenin’s refinement of epistemological materialism, which in turn philosophically under-labours for revolutionary socialist praxis. Lenin’s epistemological materialism reconciles the perspectival and objectivist dimensions of knowledge, or defends the alethic truth of knowledge without withholding from it the status of epistemic relativism, thus offering a practical alternative to both positivism and rationalism (or conventionalism) in the philosophy of science, long before critical realism accomplished the same goals. Finally, the deeper analytical specification and application of these dialectical concepts as ‘laws’ (transformation of quantity into quality, negation of the negation, unity and interpenetration of opposites), provides the researcher with a powerful philosophical ontology of being (Engels’ dialectical materialism), which grasps stratification and material emergence as organic evolutionary process, but without collapsing into teleologism or conflationism (i.e. of objective and subjective dialectics) or reductionism. This philosophical ontology is based on the theories and methods and evolving knowledge-base of the empirical sciences, provides these with conceptual and methodological guidance, and generalizes from them a framework for interpreting their findings as aspects of a differentiated totality. I have shown that Engels’ dialectical materialism possesses the conceptual toolkit to make sense of some of the most significant breakthroughs in natural science of the past century (such as relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and chaos theory), and in a way quite beyond the ken of traditional perspectives in the philosophy of science (empiricism, pragmatism, etc.). This basic framework of dialectical concepts has also been applied brilliantly by the left Darwinians to make sense of scientific knowledge on the terrain of the ecological and biological domains, and to generalize from this a critique of biological and environmental determinism, of cultural reductionism and of dualistic interactionism in the philosophy of science. This renders Marxian dialectical materialism an extraordinarily rich and powerful philosophy of science. But, of course, this is not so say that Engels’ dialectical materialism is not without significant problems. As Levins and Lewontin point out, ‘Engels’ understanding of the physical world was, of course, a nineteenth century understanding, and much of what he wrote about it seems quaint’. Moreover, many of Engels’ own examples of his dialectical ‘laws’ do not really illustrate the processes he wished to describe (though many

Materialist dialectics 141 others are excellent examples). Nonetheless, all of this having been said, the structure of dialectical concepts first outlined by Engels is still compelling. Levins and Lewontin are thus right to dedicate their The Dialectical Biologist to Engels, who although he ‘got it wrong a lot of the time’, nonetheless ‘got it right where it counted’.240 Engels’ reworked concepts of the unity and interpenetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality and negation of the negation do offer genuine explanatory purchase on the problem of internally generated transformative change in natural systems, and hence on the issue of the historical unfolding of emergent strata, and this has been demonstrated in scientific practice, on the terrain of physics and biology. The same is true of the work of the left Darwinians in developing and applying the central category of a genuinely dialectical understanding of natural processes – i.e. the concept of ‘contradictory totality’ as the linchpin of all dialectics. This holds on to what is essential in materialist dialectics, thereby exercising a measure of necessary conceptual discipline over the process of dialectical thinking. This would otherwise have the tendency to relentlessly over-complexify its own philosophical categories (a danger of all dialectical thinking – as Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism amply shows), losing sight of what are necessary and secondary aspects of a dialectical analysis, and thus problematizing an incisive application of the dialectic in practical scientific research. As I intend to show in later chapters (4 and 5), Marx’s dialectics (of forces of production and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict) do offer genuine explanatory purchase on the historical development of social systems. In short, Marxian dialectic allows the social analyst to conceptualize geo-history as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes. Moreover, as I have attempted to substantiate in this chapter, Marxian dialectic allows the philosopher to legitimately grasp human social being as an integral part of the ‘common historicity’ of matter-in-motion, the outcome of evolutionary algorithms of self-negating development in natural systems. I conclude that it has not been transcended.

3

Socio-historical materialism

Introduction As is well known, Marx famously argued that history is comprehensible as a whole in terms of class struggle.1 This renders history a function of the doings of human agents, particularly those doings that bring about social malintegration. But, as is equally well known, Marx also wishes to say that macroscopic societal change is a function of the structural contradictions of modes of production.2 History, from this perspective, is a function of structural malintegration. Now teasing out the relationship between the structural and agential dimensions of Marx’s historical sociology has proven a very difficult task for social theorists. This is reflected especially in the traditional parting of the ways between those Marxists who wish to endorse ‘young Marx’, the humanist, and those who wish to endorse ‘old Marx’, the structuralist.3 My argument is that Marx (young and old) would not have endorsed the either–or positions, structure versus agency. On the contrary, Marx implicitly drew a distinction between structure and agency in his theoretical and political writings. This was based on his recognition that both played a crucial role in explaining social systems. The task of this chapter is to make theoretically explicit what is implicit and theoretically undeveloped in Marx’s own work. Critical realism (as social theory) is indispensable to this task, precisely because it provides the analyst with the conceptual tools to integrate structure and interaction in a causal theory of systemic dynamics. My argument will proceed as follows. First, I will attempt to demonstrate why Marx’s sociological materialism is best ‘constructed’ as a form of critical realist social theory and why critical realist social theory requires the kind of materialistic theoretical and methodological application which Marx’s approach provides. Second, I will explore the relationship between the fundamental strata that comprise social systems (structure and agency), in order to tease out how the causal powers or generative mechanisms of each are interlinked in determining historical systemic outcomes. I intend to show that this critical realist conceptualization of social reality permits a materialistic and dialectical account of human social history grasped both as ‘societal evolution’ and as epochal progressive ‘structural transformations’ of social relations. This renders defensible Marx’s understanding of

Socio-historical materialism 143 history, as forged in the interface between distinct kinds of generative mechanisms – the structural contradictions between forces of production and relations of production, and the social conflicts between agents who are the occupants of interlinked class positions within relations of production. I will demonstrate that this critical realist or emergentist articulation of socio-historical materialism is neither reductionist nor deterministic, and nor is it fatalistic, but instead identifies objective determinate tendencies or impulses of societal development, which impart to geo-historical change an epochal directionality from less developed to more developed social systems, from lesser to greater human freedom or autonomy from constraining ills.

Sociological emergentism and critical realism What is sociological emergentism? By emergentism, of course, I mean a scientifically informed philosophical ontology, which specifies a stratified material world, comprised of irreducible levels, extending from the most basic structures of inorganic matter to the higher strata of mind, self and society.4 This stratification of the world can be validated by both transcendental arguments of the kind presented by Bhaskar (the world must be stratified if scientific experimental work is to be possible) and by the actual practices and procedures and resultants of the various sciences (which have failed, and often despite their best efforts, to support ‘greedy reductionism’).5 Each of these levels may be established as real and emergent by virtue of their possession of discrete autonomous causal properties and conditional effects (a causal rather than empirical criterion of ontological depth), and each level of being arises once a given complexity of interaction at an anterior or underlying level of organization is reached. By sociological critical realism I mean a causally validated ontology of society. This specifies a stratified social world, comprised of distinct levels of necessarily and internally related phenomena. Each of these levels is irreducible to the others, ‘precisely because of the properties and powers which only belong to . . . them and whose emergence from one another justifies their differentiation as strata at all’.6 The methodological task of critical realist social theory is to investigate the dialectical interplay between these distinct strata of the social world in shaping structural or systemic outcomes. A central proposition of critical realist social theory is that ‘the vexatious fact of society’7 must be grasped in terms of a dialectic between two levels or strata in particular. These are ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ as analytically distinct properties of the social world. This is necessary because structure and agency, on this view, possess their own discrete emergent properties and causal effects. Agency is the mechanism by means of which human beings make and remake their social world; social structure is the environment and outcome of social agency, both the pre-existing context of social interaction and its (in part unintended) consequence.8 The significance of agency is that it is alone responsible for structural elaboration, transformation or statics (history-making is the task of human beings, not abstract social systems). The significance of structure is that it

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comprises a social and material integument (of institutional role-positions, and pre-distributions of authoritative and allocative and cultural resources), historically predating the interaction of human agents. These constrain and enable their subsequent activity, by determining their respective degree of access (and the manner of their access) to these material and cultural resources, and consequently by defining their objective collective interests vis-à-vis other collectivities of human agents.9 On the one hand, structures possess causal powers due to their capacity to both define what human agents can reasonably expect to achieve through their actions (given their location in social relations) and their status in structuring or over-determining the kinds of social action that agents need to pursue if they are to assert their real (i.e. structurally determined) interests in opposition to those of other agents (also structurally determined). On the other hand, human agents (collective and individual) possess causal powers by dint of the simple fact that structures can only be produced and reproduced through the collective interaction of human beings and social actors. There are no ‘structural laws’ determining historical outcomes. Rather, ‘[people] make history, [though] not in circumstances of their choosing, but in conditions inherited and transmitted from the past’.10 Thus, critical realism points social analysis firmly away from all forms of conflationist theorizing and towards the ontological grasp of society as a complex totality of interlinked and relatively autonomous strata. This means that the really interesting philosophical debate in the social sciences is less critical realism versus its various theoretical rivals in the social field, and more, which kind of critical realism is best to apprehend society and history? An acceptance of the necessity of an emergentist or critical realist social ontology immediately furnishes the sociologist with stringent guidelines as to which forms of explanatory methodology and modes of practical research are appropriate to the task of analysing society. Realists argue that the autonomy of structures from flesh-and-blood human agents and their social interaction is revealed by their pre-existence: every generation of individuals is born into an already functioning societal organization which is constraining and enabling of its activity and ideas. This is, in itself, a practical demonstration of the existential distinctiveness of structure and interaction in social systems, since it is indicative that these two key strata of society are not co-existent in time. Because structure always predates the interactions which reproduce or elaborate it, and because interaction always predates the elaborated or reproduced structure which results from it (structural elaboration necessarily post-dating social interaction), it follows that the two cannot be identical, and hence must be treated as analytically separable for purposes of social theorizing. Margaret Archer has commended the morphogenetic-static approach to social analysis.11 This is the practical application of methodological dualism in social analysis. Its warranty is a function of the necessity of social analysis to approach the study of the dialectical interface between structure and interaction in a way which allows the theorist to grasp the manner of their mutual interplay across time and space. From this perspective, since structure always predates and pre-

Socio-historical materialism 145 conditions the social interaction which replicates, modifies or transforms it, and since structural replication/elaboration/transformation always post-dates the activities which have given rise to it, it follows that social theory must conceptualize and study the dynamics of social systems accordingly. In practice this means endorsing a diachronic and sequential mode of analysis, whereby structural conditioning (p1) is ‘present’ in the social interaction of agents, in which structurally conditioned social interaction (p2) then gives rise to an elaborated or reproduced structure (p3), which in turn preconditions subsequent interaction (p4), hence marking the start of a new morphogenetic/static cycle (p1) of societal dynamics. Thus, grasped concretely from this realist perspective, structural contradictions and compatibilities (conceived as emergent entities constraining and facilitating action) operate to distribute differential life-chances, vested interests and causal powers to differently situated collectivities of agents and institutional functions. By doing so, they exert a directional pressure upon agents to act in ways which protect or further their interests. These are the antecedent conditions for social malintegration (i.e. inter-agential antagonisms and conflicts), and these correspond to the first phase of the morphogenetic cycle. The actuality and outcome of social malintegration (p2 and p3 respectively) is then subsequently resolved, either in terms of system replication or elaboration, or in terms of system transformation, depending crucially on the success or otherwise of agential groupings or collective agents in articulating their common interests in stability or change, and mobilizing their structural and institutional capacities (of organization, political leadership, ideology, etc.) towards the realization of these ends. Realism and morphogenesis thus provide the sociologist with the analytical tools to reconcile the ‘structuralist’ and ‘activist’ dimensions of sociological thought within a unitary theoretical research programme. For the first time coherent philosophical and methodological grounds can be given to justify Percy Cohen’s famous assertion that in all sociological inquiry it is assumed that some features of social structure and culture are strategically important and enduring and that they provide limitations within which particular social situations can occur. On this assumption the action approach can help explain the nature of the situations and how they affect conduct. It does not explain the social structure and culture as such, except by lending itself to a developmental inquiry which must start from some previous point at which structural and cultural elements are treated as given.12

Sociological emergentism and socio-historical materialism My reason for constructing socio-historical materialism as critical realist social theory is therefore clear. Only by doing so can this long-standing dilemma of voluntarism versus determinism, structure versus agency, be resolved.

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An emergentist ontology of the social world, together with those ‘analytical logics’ consistent with it, is a necessity for Marxist theory, because it provides the researcher with an invaluable redoubt against the various reductive forms of contemporary social theory which have bedevilled attempts to grasp the nature of the individual–society or micro–macro connection. What such approaches have in common is a commitment to treating one or other of the constitutive strata of social reality (whether individuals, practices or structures) as alone providing the ‘master key’ by which it should be analysed or explained. By contrast, emergentist Marxism is resolutely anti-reductive, by virtue of its advancement of a critical realist ‘stratified model’ of reality. Emergentist Marxism endorses the key philosophical and methodological positions of sociological critical realism. But it is committed to defending the controversial but central claim of classical Marxism that specific forms of human agency (social labour and class struggle) and social structure (the forces of production and relations of production) have explanatory primacy in shaping the constitution and dynamics of social systems. Thus emergentist Marxism is a radicalized form of critical realist social theory. Its point of departure from ‘orthodox’ sociological critical realism is its acknowledgement that the socio-cultural emergents which predate social interaction, and which condition it in specific ways, are hierarchically structured in terms of their explanatory function in determining social systems and their developmental dynamics and possibilities. From this perspective, socio-economic emergents (and those ‘substructural’ levels they presuppose) vertically explain other social and cultural emergents, as well as exercising a disproportionate weight in the horizontal conditioning of social interaction and its structural resultants.13 But why should a critical realist theory of the social world be radicalized as emergentist Marxism? My answer is that only by doing so can two unacceptable theoretical-methodological positions in the social sciences be avoided. The first of these is a residual idealism. This can be justified on the grounds that ‘cultural elements’, because irreducible, are autonomous of social and material structures. The second is ‘pluralism’, or what Althusser once (rightly) dismissed as a ‘theory of factors’. One major conceptual difficulty with conceptual-analytical pluralism is that it sanctions an understanding of society which disassembles it into autonomous institutional spheres or ‘modes of social power’. In doing so this approach abstracts away from the relational nature of social reality. Little wonder that practitioners of ‘multi-factoral’ social theory (notably postmodernists and neo-Weberians) often find themselves denying the reality of social systems. A second major conceptual difficulty of pluralist social theory is that it cannot support an understanding of societal change as development or evolution, which I consider to sit uneasily with the historical facts of the matter. Instead history has to be grasped as just-so empirical narrative, which in practice reduces it to Weber’s ‘chaotic flux’ or ‘meaningless multiplicity’. Emergentist Marxism offers a solution to each of these difficulties. First, the ‘ideal elements’ of social systems are explainable in terms of material structures which are ‘basic’ to them, yet are not ‘explained away’ by them, or denied emer-

Socio-historical materialism 147 gent powers or real-world effects in their own right. They remain real and efficacious apart from their ‘causes’ or ‘conditions’. Second, the idea of ‘structure’ or ‘system’ is preserved, because sets of social relations constitute a ‘unity-indifference’ by virtue of their common locus or anchorage in relations of production and/or modes of class power. Finally, an adequate explanation of the fact that social change is not a directionless or meaningless flow of events can now be given. This is because the ‘dominance’ of the modes of production in shaping structural dynamics allows one to account for the fact of directionality in historical process, by virtue of its unique generative powers in enabling and stimulating overall societal evolution and/or transformation, and its ‘tendency to assert its own movement as necessary’ (as Engels once famously put it), even against obstruction from the non-economic structures and practices of social systems. But it should be noted that the socio-historical materialism of Marx himself is implicitly realist. My critical realist construction of Marxism is thus an attempt to theorize what is already there (albeit underdeveloped and unacknowledged) in socio-historical materialism. Marx’s own socio-historical materialism, I want to argue, offers us a theory of society that is better grasped as a particular variant of sociological critical realism.14 The chief reason for this is that Marxism (in its classical form as practised by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and a handful of more contemporary figures) is virtually alone in implicitly (though decisively) rejecting the conceptual and analytical assumptions that inform all of the various forms of reductive theorizing that have bedevilled classical and contemporary sociology and social theory. For classical Marxism, on the one hand, structures should not be reduced to the social action and beliefs of abstract individuals (as happens in Weberianism, social exchange theory and rational choice theory), and most of all cannot be reduced to the genetic make-up of individuals (as happens in socio-biology).15 On the other hand, in sharp contrast to functionalism and structuralism, the classical Marxists clearly reject the idea that human agents can be treated as epiphenomena of abstract system needs or structural laws operating ‘behind the backs’ of individuals.16 But, in addition to rejecting individualism and holism, the classical Marxists would have regarded as equally false the claims of today’s social constructionists and post-structuralists. The former would have been rejected for neglecting human beings as a ‘natural kind’, as concrete manifestations of humanity’s ‘species being’, for portraying human beings as no more than the malleable constructs of their mutual interactional encounters and for reducing structures to interpersonal constructs forged by everyday interaction.17 The latter would have been dismissed for endorsing a ‘subjectivism without subjects’,18 for collapsing structure and agency alike into open systems of linguistic difference and for reducing the complex totality of social life into a reductionist metaphysic of power or desire.19 In contrast to all of these influential theoretical paradigms listed above, sociohistorical materialism implicitly endorses the central ontological claim of social realism: societies are complex, stratified totalities, whose constituent strata are irreducible to any of the specific relations or structures which comprise the

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systemic totality of which they are a part. Society, on this view, is a contradictory totality, a ‘unity of opposites’, of which ‘circumstances’ (structure), ‘traditions’ (culture) and agency (the doings of people) are the key elements. Social structures are best analysed, not in reductionist terms as analogous to linguistic systems, cybernetic information hierarchies or biological organisms, or as expressions of systems of meanings, values, ‘rationality’, or the omnipresence of power and domination, but as a pre-existent ‘action-environment’ of both material and cultural distributions, which agents inhabit and have to come to terms with in thought and deed. Human agency, in turn, is best analysed, not in reductionist terms as simply the expression of a fixed human nature (standing outside the socio-historical process), or as the unwitting product of structural and cultural determinations, but as an emergent property of humanity’s ‘species-being’, as this is mediated by the distributional, cultural and positional dimensions of the structures into which individuals are inserted or enter. Many would doubtless find this latter argument controversial. After all, Marxism is committed to the philosophical doctrine of materialism, which for many commits us to the view that social consciousness is reducible to social relations, and that social relations are reducible to economic relations. It is true that Marxism is predicated upon philosophical materialism (and I have argued in Chapter 2 that such an ontology is necessary), but it is not true that materialism necessarily implies reductionism or conflationism. In sharp contrast to the economism of mechanical materialism, dialectical socio-historical materialism commits us not to the notion that human agency and social ideas are inefficacious in bringing about ongoing social change and epochal societal transformations, or that social activity and ideas are simply ‘determined’ by the economic and social structures of society, but rather to the notion that in the interplay of being/consciousness, material factors/ideal factors, base/superstructure, the former should in some sense be attributed causal priority in the explanation of social history. How does this work? Since it is material social relations which define or prestructure the limits and possibilities of human consciousness and human social conduct in any historical epoch, it follows that these should be regarded, ontologically, as the ‘basis’ of social reality, and, methodologically, as the necessary starting point of any scientific investigation of the human condition, even if the next task of the analyst is to explore how agents ‘react back’ on these circumstances, either resisting or reinforcing them through social practices. This point of view is given cogent expression by Chris Arthur: Marx wants to say that all men are both products of circumstances and potential changers of circumstances. . . . Marx . . . insisted on a more dialectical relation between circumstances and activity which must be grasped as ‘revolutionary practice’. . . . One might ask why, if Marx does justice to both sides, he calls himself a materialist instead of something more neutral? The answer can only be that any Marxian attempt to resolve the apparent antithesis between mechanical determination and self-conscious activity

Socio-historical materialism 149 must include the point that in the first instance material circumstances condition us, however much we revolutionise those conditions later. We cannot create our being by some undetermined pure act. We have to be produced as living substantial beings before we can begin to act. This is true both of the individual and the species. The individual cannot determine the historical period or the class he is born into – which fundamentally limits his possibilities. The species itself at the dawn of history already had a specific mode of life before it could begin to recreate itself through solving the problems which faced it with solutions also conditioned by the given circumstances.20 So re-jigging socio-historical materialism as critical realist social theory renders explicit in a defensible theoretical form much in Marx’s own approach that gravitates it towards emergentism. But it also strengthens critical realism as social theory without taking anything away from it. For emergentist Marxism, although endorsing the view that social systems are composed of different strata, possessing their own discrete causal powers and independent effects, nonetheless offers good reasons why certain strata pertaining to both ‘parts’ (i.e. relations of production emergent from social labour; class structure emergent from relations of production) and ‘people’ (i.e. constitutive social labour emergent from species-being; class conflict emergent from class structure) should be attributed explanatory primacy in analysing social reality.

Species being and social being The starting point of Marx’s social theory is his recognition that the material roots of human society, culture and history reside precisely in organic and inorganic nature.21 Certainly, this naturalistic conception of the ‘micro-foundations’ of social life underpins Marx’s critique of Lassalle’s argument that ‘labour is the source of all wealth and culture’ in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.22 Philosophical materialism, once translated into social theory, thus postulates the essential complicity between human beings and nature, between human history and natural history. Such an understanding dictates in turn that social theory has both a definite method and point of departure when analysing human society and history: The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical [i.e. biological] organisation of these individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic, and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the actions of men.23 In other words, the scientific or materialist investigation of humanity’s lifeprocess must start from the biological constitution of human beings and from the

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physical structure of the material environment with and within which they are compelled to interact in the production and/or procurement of their cultural and economic needs. Only after elaborating these ‘natural bases’ – ‘the actual physical nature of man [and] the natural conditions in which man finds himself’ – can sociological and historical analysis proceed; in effect by examining the manner in which the psycho-organic and environmental foundations of human society are modified or even transformed through history by the socio-cultural mode and activity of modern Homo sapiens. The materialist conception that, instead of standing apart from nature, human beings are in fact a constituent part of nature, is only the starting point of Marx and Engels’ philosophical anthropology. The fact that humanity is a part of nature, arising as a product of biological evolution, and remaining always dependent on the physical environment for its intellectual and material sustenance or livelihood, does not mean that human beings should not be clearly differentiated from the rest of nature. It should be recalled that Marxian philosophy and social theory was developed not only in opposition to Hegelian idealism but also the mechanical materialism of the radical enlightenment. A genuinely dialectical materialism demanded a transformation of the meaning of materialism, as Feuerbach and the utopian socialists then understood it. Marx and Engels were thus amongst the first to recognize that mechanical materialism inevitably ends up negating itself in a kind of elitist idealism, since in order to overcome the radical determination of human beings by the biological, environmental and socio-cultural facts of their life-process, it has to postulate the existence of ‘great individuals’, ‘visionaries’ or ‘charismatic leaders’ who are magically emancipated from these conditional pressures.24 This Marxian solution to the impasse of mechanical materialism is a dynamic one. Rather than portraying human beings as determined by a mute or static biological constitution, and as merely adapting themselves to a pre-given and essentially unchanging physical environment, Marx and Engels instead posit the role of creative human agency in modifying or even transforming the natural and social worlds. They also stress the manner in which the changed circumstances which result from this activity (and the actual process of changing these circumstances) simultaneously changes the nature of its human authors. Thus: ‘Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their actual world, also their thinking and the product of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness’.25 It follows from the Marxian critique of mechanical materialism that the key to understanding human society and history lies in uncovering the defining characteristics of humanity’s species being. This is because, in the absence of such an account of the psycho-organic powers and dispositions of human persons, it is impossible to explain how they are able to differentiate themselves from the rest of organic and inorganic nature and react back upon it in a redirective or transformative way. What, then, is the Marxian theory of human nature? On the one hand, Marx and Engels clearly reject the notion of an unchanging human nature (i.e. a human nature which is not the product of evolutionary

Socio-historical materialism 151 history and which is not amenable to further evolutionary change under certain circumstances). To endorse such a metaphysical abstraction as this would, from their point of view, constitute a violation of the dialectical method, which stresses the historical status of all of nature’s elements and interconnections. One of Marx’s major criticisms of Feuerbach was that the latter conceived of human nature as an eternal essence, totally abstracted from the socio-cultural mode of modern Homo sapiens, from humanity’s natural history and from the specific social relations emergent from these bases.26 For Marx, by contrast, the concrete characteristics of human persons have to be regarded as a simultaneously socio-cultural and evolutionary psycho-organic construction.27 On the other hand, however, Marx and Engels certainly did accept that human persons in widely different societies, societal contexts and historical epochs share fundamental characteristics in common. This apparent contradiction between humanity’s species-nature and its socio-cultural nature dissolves once we recognize that these two aspects of the human life-process are interwoven and mutually reinforcing, with each providing necessary enabling preconditions for the historical development of the other. Now Norman Geras rightly detects in Marx an analytical distinction between ‘human nature’ and the ‘nature of humanity’28 (or between ‘species-being’ and ‘social being’). This draws a contrast between the relatively permanent (albeit historically produced) objective characteristics and tendencies of human persons, which exist in a wide variety of societies throughout history, and those provisional and contingent objective characteristics, which individuals take on as a result of their immersion within specific kinds of socio-cultural relationships. From this point of view, the precise nature of human beings in any concrete societal and historical context depends on the interrelationship between ‘human nature’ and ‘the nature of humanity’, that is, on the interface between their ‘species-being’ and their ‘social being’. It follows from this that the task of contemporary social analysis is not to conflate these two dimensions of ‘human reality’ (i.e. its social and nonsocial components), or reduce one to the other, but to examine their interplay over time. But what are these relatively enduring attributes or dispositions of modern Homo sapiens which transcend specific cultures or societies? Broadly, the Marxian conception of human nature defines it in terms of a wide range of powers, capacities, qualities and tendencies which are quite unique to human beings (to the best of our current scientific knowledge).29 The Marxian conception of human nature also defines it in terms of a range of universal psycho-organic needs and interests.30 Now the ‘capacities’ and ‘tendencies’ component of human nature is theoretically significant for Marx because it furnishes historical materialism with an explanation of how human society and socio-cultural development is possible. The theoretical function of the ‘needs’ and ‘interests’ component of human nature, by contrast, is to furnish historical materialism with part of the explanation of why society and history have a dynamic. Now Marx regards four species-capacities as being of particular salience to explaining society and history. These are: consciousness, self-consciousness, sociability and labour. These he appears to regard

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as especially essential enabling prerequisites of humanity’s socio-cultural mode of existence, of humanity’s cultural history and of the wider species powers which human beings have acquired during the course of their social and biological development. To grasp his meaning here, I will examine briefly the role of each of these ‘human capacities’ in historical materialism. The fairly self-evident role in historical materialism of human ‘consciousness’ (i.e. the powers of abstraction, reflection and intentionality) and selfconsciousness (i.e. the ‘I’ who does the reflecting and purposive acting) as a gift of human nature (or the interface between human biology and the object-world it encounters from birth) rather than a product of social conditioning and cultural learning has long been a source of discomfort to those Marxists and non-Marxists who would like to pigeonhole Marx and Engels as ‘social determinists’, ‘anti-humanists’ or ‘anti-naturalists’. Yet it is Marx’s contention that one of the more important species-capacities peculiar to human beings, which sets them apart from the animals, is precisely conscious intelligence and selfconsciousness, since it is these powers which enable human beings to meet their material and other needs in a wide variety of ways and which make human society and culture possible.31 Human beings, says Marx, are capable of utilizing their superior mental equipment to reflect upon their conditions of existence, subjectively raising themselves above the social and material facts of their ‘life-world’ in order to formulate new or innovative ways of changing or even transforming these conditions, before translating reflections and abstractions into conscious intentional practical activity geared towards these ends. In other words, unlike other animals, which are condemned by their biology to simply reproducing themselves and their narrow range of specialized behaviours, human beings can transform themselves and their social and material circumstances, precisely because they possess the mental power to abstract themselves from their activity and the products of their activity, and hence dream up innovative ways of modifying or improving them. It should go without saying, of course, that without this universal species-capacity for conscious and self-conscious activity, there can be no more possibility of human beings qualitatively differentiating themselves from the rest of nature than there can be of a distinctively human history. It is important to stress, however, that Marx and Engels do not regard these human qualities of consciousness and self-consciousness as purely static or contemplative ones. Rather, their contention is that these species-powers, although an essential prerequisite of human society and social history, have nonetheless been developed socially and historically. From this perspective, although human persons are biologically endowed with the capacity to engage in self-conscious reflection upon the social and material circumstances of their life-process, they develop and refine these (and other powers) by putting them to work – i.e. by translating them into concrete practices or activities in relation to the world. The development of self-conscious reasoning power is, in other words, a practical accomplishment, or is merely an abstract potentiality of the individual until realized through labour on and active engagement with the object-world.

Socio-historical materialism 153 It follows from these arguments that abstract appeals to ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘rationality’ will not alone suffice to provide the ‘genetic micro-foundations’ of complex socio-cultural organization and elaboration. On the contrary, as Marx and Engels were the first to grasp, it is precisely because human beings are by nature conscious and self-conscious producers, i.e. labouring animals, that society and humanity have a history as opposed to an endless cycle of mere adaptation to external circumstances.32 This conception of the interrelationship between human practical activity – i.e. labour – and human consciousness informs Marx’s famous assertion that ‘labour is the essence of man . . . it is just in his work upon the objective world . . . that man proves himself to be a species-being . . . through his production nature appears as his work and his reality’.33 But it is important to be clear that there is no question here of Marx reducing human nature to ‘labour’ or ‘production’, as is often suggested. The reason for this is that human beings can only be producers (as opposed to mere adaptors) given their species-dispositions of abstraction, reflection and intentionality, which themselves are emergent from the organic structure of the human brain.34 Rather than deny the reality of species-dispositions other than labour, Marx’s point is instead that labour constitutes both a practical demonstration of the existence and importance of these wider capacities – i.e. the sphere of activity where they are manifest – and the vehicle by means of which these capacities are tested and developed in practice. Thus, precisely by engaging in redirective and constitutive labour upon the physical world in the realization and expansion of their subsistence, human beings expand their control and practical knowledge of nature, and simultaneously refine and enhance their own natural powers and attributes of sociality, intelligence, self-consciousness and rationality. Of crucial importance in understanding these above aspects of human nature, and their relationship to Marxian sociology, is the final dimension of speciesbeing I referred to earlier. This is human nature as essentially social or cooperative. The importance of this element of human nature, for Marx and Engels, is that it allows them to account for the fact of humanity’s perpetual immersion in socio-cultural relations without resorting to some or other convoluted version of the ‘ruse of reason’. This, in turn, enables them to expose the totally fallacious logic which dwells behind liberal social theory’s efforts to abstract individuals, and their properties and characteristics, from the historically developed social relations of which they are a constituent part. Much of the power of Marx’s critique of political economy stems from the fact that he scrupulously uncovers the social and historical prerequisites of the primitive theoretical categories of private property and the atomized individual which lie at the heart of liberal social and political thought. Thus, Marx notes how the social relations of commodity production generate the impression that ‘in this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate’.35 In contrast to the claims of the methodological individualists of his own day, Marx argues that it is simply because human beings are sociable by nature which explains why they are to be found in society in the first place.36

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Despite the ritualistic abuse heaped upon it by those who accuse Marx and Engels of ‘economic reductionism’ or ‘productive force determinism’, perhaps the greatest strength of this Marxist conception of human beings as essentially conscious social producers is that it establishes the conceptual foundations of an entirely plausible and (to my mind) uncontentious materialist theory of agency and culture. Given these aforesaid species-powers and dispositions (of sociality, consciousness, self-consciousness, rationality and labour), Marx’s argument is simply that human beings, being ‘somewhat rational’ social producers, will tend to act in ways which develop their modes of social labour (provided social and material constraints are not prohibitive). This they will do in order to reduce their vulnerability to the capricious forces of nature, and to meet and expand their needs and interests in more efficient, less arduous, less time-consuming and more innovative ways. Yet, in doing so, human beings will inevitably develop their knowledge, along with these species capacities and tendencies. This is because the development of the tools and techniques of social labour, and the growth in the forces of production this brings about, enables the accumulation of a deeper and broader base of practical know-how in relation to nature, which each successive generation of persons can reflect and react upon in seeking to further develop its needs. So, from this point of view, the cumulative growth in the product and technology of social labour, which necessarily accompanies improvements in the productivity and economic output of the human labour-process, correspondingly generates cumulative advances in human knowledge of practical constitutive tasks vis-à-vis the material environment. This enables a simultaneous and ongoing historical refinement of the human powers of abstraction, reflection, rational thought and linguistic ability. At the same time, however, in developing their forces of production, human beings also allow themselves the capacity to construct and sustain increasingly sophisticated and differentiated socio-cultural relations (e.g. systems of material culture and distinct political and other institutions). This is because an expanding economic output creates the possibility of a greater societal investment of human and material resources in social functions other than those directly involved in the production or procurement of the means of subsistence.

Human interests and social interests I conclude that the human species powers of consciousness, self-consciousness, sociality and labour have a quite definite analytical function in historical materialism. This, essentially, is that of providing a ‘genetic’ or ‘micro-foundational’ explanation of why human persons are predisposed towards living in societies or communities and how complex socio-cultural structure and ‘history’ is possible. But what explanatory role does Marx’s concept of human needs and interests perform? Well, apart from providing socio-historical materialism with its ‘fundamental premises’ (‘[m]en must be in a position to live in order . . . to make history’),37 the concept of human needs/interests also furnishes Marxian theory

Socio-historical materialism 155 with an elementary ‘micro’ explanation of the ongoing process of social conflict and class struggle which provide socio-cultural elaboration and transformation with its historical dynamic. As I noted in Chapter 1, in my discussion of critical realism, human beings have, by virtue of their biological and psychological species-nature, a substratum of universal needs, the satisfaction of which is indispensable to ensure their ‘well-being’. Such needs are not static, determined simply by whatever social provisions (food, clothing, shelter, etc.) are necessary to preserve life, but are historically variable and constantly evolving, by virtue of the cumulative development of the forces of production. The more economically developed a society is, the greater is the abundance of material resources which might be distributed amongst its members, and the more developed or refined is the definition of basic human needs which is embraced culturally within that society. Yet it is important to be clear that socio-historically developed human needs are still real needs, not mere random preferences. For, as Marx rightly suggests, inasmuch as the forces of production are capable of improving the welfare (free-flourishing) of society as a whole, but are prevented from doing so by the way social relations are organized (normally by virtue of their division into exploiting and exploited social classes which allow the former to monopolize the benefits of economic progress), it is clear enough that objective human needs are being curtailed.38 But it follows from this that humans also possess fairly straightforward interests in ensuring these objective needs are met. This in turn supplies humans with urgent imperatives to modify or even overthrow those unegalitarian social relations which retard or deny their real interests in ensuring this happens. Marx is also correct to insist that our species-being is such that social relations based upon egalitarian and altruistic norms are especially conducive to the ‘free flourishing of each and all’. This gives most humans (i.e. other than the members of elites who monopolize authoritative and allocative resources in class societies) fundamental interests in struggling to achieve socialistic or communalistic modes of social being. It is an instructive historical fact that human needs and interests have generally been defined by people in a rich variety of socio-cultural contexts in accordance with normative-ethical principles of ‘distributive justice’ and ‘fairness’ of a relatively egalitarian character (again within the constraints imposed by the level of economic development of society). Wherever one cuts into the cultural and historical record, ideologies are found that articulate normative principles of justice and fairness in terms of the obligation of society to maintain its members at socially acceptable standards, in terms of the immorality of ‘free-riding’, and in terms of the ethical undesirability of permitting the existence of grossly unegalitarian social relations.39 This is demonstrative, I think, of the manner in which human sociability and rationality combined provide a certain stimulus to the universal production of certain normative definitions of human needs and interests, which are not reducible to the specific social relations which individuals inhabit, and which are a powerful motivational source of their social agency aimed at societal reform or transformation.

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Yet it is important to grasp that neither social interaction nor social structure can be reduced to human needs and interests. There is a distinction that needs to be drawn out between naturalistic human interests and the structural interests of historically and socially situated interactants. All human beings have the same biological needs for food, drink, clothing, shelter and sexual relations at the requisite quality and quantity to maintain their human well-being. Moreover, all human beings have roughly similar psychological needs – including the need for identity, fellowship, community, egalitarian living and a measure of control or empowerment (i.e. freedom) in their daily lives. And, of course, in so far as human persons possess these psycho-organic needs, they possess also objective human interests in realizing or satisfying them. Now it is undoubtedly the case that such interests when acted upon have been the motivational source of much of the ‘struggles from below’ which have provided human history and sociocultural development with its dynamic. Despite this, however, it remains the case that social struggles motivated by the denial of basic human needs can exist only in the context of hierarchical social relations which systematically generate significant asymmetries or inequalities in material resources and human lifechances (i.e. in class-divided societies). For, only in the context of social relations which negate or repress the objective species needs of human beings, does it becomes meaningful to speak of human interests being the source of social struggles aimed at recovering or protecting them. Moreover, the mediation of human needs and interests through hierarchical social relations ensures that these often take on emergent properties and become associated with specific social powers (‘structural capacities’).40 For example, although employers and wage-workers in modern capitalist society share human needs and interests in common of the kind specified above, the inter-agential relations which pertain between them, over-determined by the total social structure of which they are a part, ensure that these take on a specific socio-cultural and historical coloration. The effective monopoly possession by the bourgeoisie of the means of economic production and subsistence, and its subdivision into mutually competing economic units, ensure that the human needs and interests of its members translate into social interests defined by the competitive accumulation of capital, the appropriation of surplus value from the workers, and hence the suppression of general living standards below the cultural average. Equally, the specific causal powers or ‘structural capacities’, which members of the bourgeoisie derive from their monopoly control or possession of production and exchange (i.e. the power to exploit, hire and fire, to withdraw investment, to relocate capital, etc.), normally enable them to safeguard these common agential interests against other social groupings. By contrast, the separation of the proletariat from the means of production and subsistence, and the consequential need of its members to alienate their labour-power as a commodity, translate into social interests rooted in resistance to exploitation, the pursuit of higher wages, increased health and safety at the workplace and a reduction in the working week. At the same time, since the proletariat of modern capitalism is a majority class which produces value (and

Socio-historical materialism 157 hence surplus value) at the point of production, it follows from this that its members are the owners of causal powers (i.e. the power to strike, to work-torule, to picket, etc.) which can paralyse the profit system in the pursuit of these social interests.41 As this example demonstrates, neither category of ‘social interest’ (whether capitalist or proletarian), nor the structural capacities that correspond to each of them, can be collapsed into the undifferentiated category of ‘human nature’ or ‘human interests’. For, although anchored in human needs, these social interests can only emerge given the specific structural and agential configuration of capitalist society. The need for social analysis to embrace a stratified (or critical realist) conception of ‘interests’, which distinguishes between naturalistic and social (institutional) interests, is thus clear. Naturalistic interests are human interests, definable in terms of the goals, objectives or end-states which have to be acted upon and brought into being if human persons are to satisfy their objective species needs. Social (or institutional) interests are the specific social practices or strategies – ‘modes of articulation’ and the ‘structural capacities’ they bring into play – by which individuals may realize or enhance both their human needs and/or (in the case of superordinate classes) safeguard or further their cultural and material advantages vis-à-vis the members of other agential collectivities. These socially defined practices or strategies, by which agents further or defend their livelihood, are precisely social interests, because they are overdetermined by the immersion of agents in particular kinds of social relations, and by their agential location within these social relations. To return to my earlier example, the differential location of capitalists and workers in the relations of production ensure that each can satisfy or guarantee their well-being or life-chances only by pursuing different (and mutually antagonistic) social ‘modes of realization’ of their needs, which involve in turn the exercise of their specific structural powers. One advantage of this critical realist account of interests over ‘orthodox’ interest-explanations of social agency is that it overcomes the ‘randomness of ends’ associated with subjectivist definitions of interests. This it does without breaking the link between wants and interests: human interests pertain to ‘primary’ or ‘first-order’ wants which correspond to human needs deducible from human nature. And this it does without denying interests a causal role in explaining social agency: human and social interests, anchored in objective human needs, not random subjective ‘preferences’, are the major source of human social agency aimed at societal reform or reproduction. Thus, interests can be conceptualized as the motor which powers human social agency (furnishing persons with impelling reasons to act collectively in defence of their lifechances), and as the linchpin connecting interaction to structure (structures furnish individuals with agential interests which motivate their collective struggles to change or reproduce social systems). A second great strength of the critical realist account is that the analytical distinction it draws between needs and wants, and its identification of the former

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but not the latter with interests, allows the theorist to account for the distance between the subjective ‘preference set’ of individuals and their objective needs. Moreover, this it can do without making the disastrous error of assuming that ideology or power can ever be so absolute that it can function to prevent persons from recognizing or acting upon the more fundamental of their human and social interests. To repeat an earlier point, since interests relate to both elementary human needs, and the social mechanisms by which they can be satisfied in a given structural and interactional context, it follows that the ‘preference set’ of individuals will generally comprise those wants which correspond with their real interests, as well as those which do not. Of course, this does not mean that unequal power-relations and the impact of dominant ideology is not a force preventing the members of subordinate groups from fully articulating or recognizing those desires which, if put into practice, would improve their welfare. Nor does this mean that power and dominant ideology is not capable of inducing artificial wants which do not enhance and often damage their life-chances. Nonetheless, it is equally certain that the effects of power and ideology can no more prevent the oppressed or exploited from recognizing the reality of their own alienation than eradicate their capacity to resist it in pursuit of at least some of their basic material needs and interests. I conclude that it is the interface between human needs and the social ‘positions’ individuals occupy in social relations that ensure that the former are translated into agential interests (i.e. those social modes of realization of human interests which correspond to agential collectivities as defined by inter-agential relations). Understood thus, and translated into the categories of Marx’s historical materialism, the concept of social labour connects human interests and needs to economic structure (the forces of production), whereas the concept of class interests connects class structure to class struggle (the relations of production). This allows the theorist to postulate a dynamic historical account of societal process rooted in their mutual interplay.

Base and superstructure This stratified or differentiated concept of human nature constitutes the foundation of the Marxian understanding of society and history, even if the specific explanation of social behaviour in any society or social environment has to be sought in the interplay between human agents and the cultural and structural properties of the social systems they inhabit. For Marx and Engels, it is the core activity of social labour in the procurement or production of the basic material necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, etc.) which has allowed and which continues to allow humanity to enjoy a cultural existence and history. Furthermore, this core activity of material production has also played an absolutely central role in the self-creation of humanity as a particular biological species with distinct capacities and needs. From this perspective, humanity’s species-capacities of intellect, self, rationality and language arose as an evolutionary emergent from the ‘basic’ or ‘core’

Socio-historical materialism 159 human activity of social labour for subsistence.42 This occurred as part of the lengthy historical process during which our hominid ancestors evolved into fully modern human organisms. At the same time, humanity’s subsequent sociocultural history and development has been made possible and given a powerful stimulus by the ongoing historical interchange between productive social labour and the physical environment. This process has also been constrained and facilitated by the economic structures which have arisen from this interaction between humanity and nature and which feed into the process as a causal power or generative mechanism in their own right. This is because the dialectic between socioeconomic production, its emergent properties (the economic structures which every generation of agents find ‘already made’) and material nature generate the output of economic resources that are necessary to support non-productive social activities. This dialectic thereby provides ‘conditions of existence’ for the construction and increasing differentiation of non-economic social structures over time. This historical process of socio-cultural development, to say it again, is interestgoverned. Agents develop the forces of production and struggle to reform or overturn relations of production and modes of class domination in order to improve or defend their livelihood or quality of life. In doing so they draw upon the ‘structural capacities’ to assert their interests which their positioning in social relations grants them. But they also encounter resistance from those agents (with privileged access to authoritative and allocative resources) who have socially mediated interests in mobilizing their own structural capacities to frustrate the aspirations and struggles of their subordinates for greater freedom and better life-chances. This is typically the situation where superordinate class agents possess socio-cultural privileges or advantages which are secured at the expense of the majority of producers. The famous Marxian distinction between base and superstructure is sketched out above in the simplest terms. Base/superstructure basically represents a hierarchical analytical model of structural determinations, positing a range of generative mechanisms that pertain to the social environment that agents encounter ‘already made’. Marx wishes to say that the generative mechanisms of the economic structure of society have in some sense explanatory primacy over those derived from the political and ideological superstructures. My argument is that it is reasonable and defensible to construe this structural primacy of the mode of production as follows: (1) as pre-setting the most fundamental limits and possibilities of social life generally in any specific historical context;43 (2) as the ‘raw material’ from which all superstructural relations, institutions and practices are ultimately derived;44 (3) as the major determinant of the vested social interests and hence socio-political consciousness of human agents in most historical societies;45 and (4) as vertically supporting and sustaining a range of non-economic modes of domination (such as stratification by ‘race’ and gender).46 These are strong claims, amounting to a materialist conception of society. Now theses (1) and (2) seem uncontentious to me. Thesis (1) has already

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been elaborated, and I will have nothing more to say about it here. Thesis (2) is presupposed by the historical dependence of cultural and social forms on the development of material production. As a matter of historical fact, the first human social relationships were economic relationships, and the growth of material culture and specialized social institutions is a process that has been enabled by the freeing up of labour time beyond subsistence requirements, and the generation of sufficient surpluses of wealth to support non-productive enterprises.47 Thesis (3) is a function of the fact that stratification by social class mechanisms, based on the possession versus non-possession of productive and consumptive goods, has been the key factor in determining the distribution of life-chances in societies past and present. Neither stratification by ‘race’ nor gender has the same socio-historical significance in this respect, and this has meant that mechanisms of ‘race’ and gender conflict have simply not had anything near the epochal significance of mechanisms of class exploitation and conflict in explaining the overall historical process of social evolution and successive revolutionary structural transformations of social systems. Thesis (4) (which I will defend in Chapter 4) is based upon the claim that non-economic modes of domination, such as stratification by ‘race’ and gender, are functional to the requirements of class exploitation, and have their historical locus in specific sets of production and property relations. Thus, the origin of women’s subordination is to be found in the historical transition from pre-class horticultural relations of production and communal ownership to class-divided relations of production based upon either state property or private property.48 Thus, the origin of ‘racial’ domination is to be found in the transition from feudal to capitalist relations of production and forms of ownership.49 Now it is important to be clear that the Marxist base/superstructure distinction does not correspond to a simple contrast between ‘economy’ and ‘society’. There are two reasons for this. First, Marx, unlike for instance Max Weber, is fully alive to the fact that economic relations are not simply technical transactions or naturalistic relations between individuals and scarce objects of utility, but are also social relations between people and between the class ‘positions’ which people occupy in society vis-à-vis the means of production and subsistence. Because of this there can be no legitimate abstraction of society from economy, or of the science of economics from the science of sociology, of the kind recommended by Weber. Second, the Marxist application of the base/superstructure model is not simply restricted to outlining a hierarchy of structural causality in society (the determination of politico-ideological forms by the forces of production and relations of production), although of course this is one of its most important functions, but extends much deeper and wider than this. More broadly, in fact, the base/superstructure model is designed to illuminate the ‘rootedness’ of the social and cultural structures constitutive of social systems in those deeper non-social structures ‘basic’ to these which have direct relevance in explaining society and history. From this point of view, superstructural social forms have their roots in

Socio-historical materialism 161 the socio-structural ‘level’, and structural social forms have their roots in nonsocial substructural levels or strata. Base/superstructure, in its wider application, is thus theoretical shorthand for a tripartite model of hierarchically ordered structures: substructure (human biology and its natural powers), structure (the mode of production and surplus extraction of a society) and superstructure (those social relations and ideological forms which are not themselves integral aspects of the structure).50 My contention is that it is reasonable to ‘reconstruct’ the base/ superstructure model, in the light of the critical realist philosophy of science, as one in which the higher-order strata are ‘emergent’ from the lower-order strata. Certainly this kind of interpretation is consistent with Marx and Engels’ commitment to an anti-reductive form of materialism in both philosophy and social theory. But this means that the relations between structures in this ‘chain of being’ are best grasped as those of ontological presupposition (the higher existing only by virtue of the lower and not vice versa) and vertical determination (the lower explaining the higher without explaining them away). This throws into sharp relief the controversial issue of whether economic structure can plausibly be seen as ontologically basic to politico-ideological and ideational superstructure in social analysis. My argument is that this is indeed the case. However, the unilateral ontological dependence of superstructure upon structure is plausible only if grasped diachronically, as specifying the historical origins of distinct cultural and political institutions in the development of the forces of production and relations of production. I have already pointed out that the first human social relations were co-operative economic relations, and it was the development of these economic relations which provided a basis for a more diversified social and cultural existence. These economic relations (the hunter-gatherer mode of economic subsistence of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, archaic humans and finally fully modern Homo sapiens) were themselves in turn the historical product of a dialectic of economic labour and biological elaboration. And it is this which provides the link between a materialist anthropology of humanity and society and a materialist sociology of politics, culture and history, the former founding the latter. By contrast, if grasped synchronically, as specifying the one-way ontological dependence of superstructure upon structure in a specific society or at a given point in time, this argument is for the most part unsuccessful. This is because superstructural forms, especially politico-military relations, where these are not directly relations of production, often function to ‘fix’ or stabilize the relations of production which vertically explain them. As Collier observes, base/ superstructure is a thesis of vertical not horizontal causality in social systems.51 Politico-ideological superstructures always rest on economic structures (vertical causality), but socio-historical outcomes are always conditioned by a multiplicity of structural mechanisms – political, ideological, etc. (horizontal causality). Despite this, however, as I will soon argue, there is a sense in which Marx’s materialist social science more generally affirms an understanding of historical dynamics as ‘reciprocal but unequal interaction’ between base and superstructure

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that is consistent with a weaker non-deterministic form of horizontal causality in social systems. The second point to make is that Marx’s base/superstructure model, in its narrower application (as a thesis of the relationship between modes of production and non-economic social structures), does not map neatly on to a distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘culture’, as is often imagined. The distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ is a broader one, and one rooted in the simple recognition that the social world is populated by material and cultural structures, both of which are aspects of a social world which (from the point of view of every generation of individuals) is ‘already made’. Critical realist social theorists quite rightly argue that material and cultural structures are both emergent properties of the social activities of the dead generations, which confront the living as a set of constraints, enablements and impulses upon their thinking and conduct. Both are ‘basic’ to social interaction and human agency in this sense. But, this having been said, it is nonetheless necessary to draw a distinction between structure and culture, for the obvious reason that these terms refer us to ‘societal emergents’ which are different in kind. ‘Structure’, for instance, refers us to relations governing the production of use-values and the appropriation–distribution of allocative and authoritative resources in a society. ‘Culture’, by contrast, refers us to the ensemble of ideological and ideational structures of a society (i.e. systems of communication, meaning, legitimation and knowledge). Because the base/superstructure model, in its narrower application, does not correspond exactly to a simple contrast between ‘economic emergents’ and ‘cultural emergents’, it can hardly be construed as logically excluding the possibility that the economic structure of society is itself comprised of ‘material’ and ‘cultural’ elements. Furthermore, because the superstructure of any society is determined not simply by the economic structure upon which it rests, but also by the substructure basic to the economic level (humanity’s biologically given needs and capacities), nor can it be plausibly affirmed that Marx wishes to categorize all superstructural spheres or properties as ‘reflexes’ of economic conditions or class interests. In fact, Marx is committed to neither of these positions often attributed to him. He does not affirm the unilateral determination of superstructure by structure, nor does he affirm the purely ‘material’ nature of structure.52 Whatever Marx’s own view, however, what cannot be doubted is that certain cultural structures are an integral part of the material basis of a society (broadly defined). Others are neither base nor superstructure but are interwoven with and essential to both. And still others are shaped as much by substructural levels as by the structural level of economic and class relations. Into the first category fall cultural emergents such as scientific knowledge of natural laws, ‘recipe knowledge’ of the material world, and the technical know-how derived from scientific and practical knowledges of nature combined. These are an indispensable part of the base for two simple reasons. First, because they are the emergent products of modes of constitutive social

Socio-historical materialism 163 labour which immerse human agents most immediately and directly in the ‘natural terrain’ upon which their social relations and interactions are based (i.e. practical labour on the material world to procure a livelihood and scientific labour designed to reveal the underlying structures of nature by rational procedures of experiment and empirical checking). This renders these cultural emergents ‘material’ in a way that political and ideological structures are not (the latter of which are emergent from the ‘artificial terrain’53 of society and express the vested interests and outlooks of specific agential groupings in social relations). Second, because the primary function of both scientific and recipe knowledge is to extend practical human control over nature so as to develop material production in the service of human needs and social interests. Into the second category fall the linguistic structures of a society. These are simultaneously base and superstructure because indispensable to every complex form of social activity (and hence social structure), all of which are dependent upon the communication of meaning in interaction. This does not free them from ‘ultimate’ material determination, of course. But the material basis of linguistic structures nonetheless lies outside society itself, in the biological needs and capacities of humanity’s species-being, as these were generated historically in the interface between co-operative labour and physical reality. Finally, into the third category falls a whole range of cultural forms (religious, artistic, philosophic, etc.). Certainly these are, for the most part, shaped in terms of their content and function by economic conditions and class relations and positioning, though often indirectly via intermediate superstructural mechanisms. But since ‘men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live in nature, and to receive from it occasion and material for their curiosity and for their imagination’,54 it seems plausible that certain cultural structures will inevitably embody some-or-other expression of the ‘general human condition’. This is clearest of all in the case of artistic and religious productions. These are never straightforward articulations of economic or class mechanisms, though of course we can be sure that these will be present, not least because people living naturally do not cease to live socially. In fact, they are also expressive of general human emotions, aspirations and needs (for fellowship, community, meaning, order, love, sexual relations, aesthetic expression, or of the pain and anger of their absence or frustration, of fear and lament of old age, sickness and death, etc.), which are themselves comprehensible only in terms of the biological constitution of human beings.55

Being and consciousness A common mistake of Marxist and non-Marxist interpreters of Marx is to treat his couplet of base/superstructure as pretty much the same thing as his distinction between ‘being/consciousness’. This is not the case. The couplet of being (including social being) and consciousness (including social consciousness) is

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the most general concept of all in Marx’s social ontology, and as such it corresponds neither to the broader or narrower applications of the base/superstructure model (though obviously it is closer to the first than the second). On the contrary, it refers not only to vertical relations between those emergent structures (biological, psychological, socio-economic, socio-cultural, etc.) which ‘bound’ and ‘found’ human agency and interaction in determinate ways, but to the totality of social and material relationships (anterior and adjacent – structures and practices) into which individuals are inserted at birth or enter into during their life-cycle. Thus, whereas Marx’s base/superstructure model establishes the case for a materialist account of the emergent entities which constitute and which immediately found a social system, his couplet of being/consciousness establishes the case for a materialist ontology and method in the human sciences generally. This it does on the grounds that human beings are not born with concepts, values, beliefs or properties of self-consciousness ‘ready-made’ (the human ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’, etc.), but instead acquire them. This they do through active ongoing interaction with subjects and the sensuous object-world (the ‘inorganic body’ of human thought and conduct) within an inherited social and material environment shaped by both natural laws and by a history of human manipulation of these laws. By grasping the determination of consciousness by being in this sense (and not under the narrower terms of base/superstructure), it becomes possible to avoid the dilemma that Marx’s materialism is suggestive of an implausible abstraction of thought from action, or of ideas (superstructure) from social practices such as economic production (base).56 Of course, when analysing social practices, the theorist cannot dispense with the ideas or beliefs or reasons (i.e. forms of consciousness) which energize or motivate them. But this is beside the point, for such an analysis pertains to the ‘life-world’ of human social and practical and physiological interaction, not to the properties of a social and physical environment which is ‘already made’. To repeat it once more: base/superstructure is about the emergent properties of human biology and social interaction and their hierarchical ordering in a social system. By contrast, being/consciousness is a thesis of the ‘determination’ of the consciousness of living individuals by the totality of material and social circumstances and relations (physical, socialstructural, social-interactional) in which they are placed or enter into during their life-process. An example: Kautsky versus Weber on the origins of capitalism Specifying the nature of this relationship between realfaktoren (being – including socio-economic structure) and idealfaktoren (consciousness – including ideological superstructure) is probably the most contentious theoretical issue of sociology. This particular debate is as old as the discipline itself, with no end in sight. However, my contention is that emergentist Marxism (with its crucial distinction between vertical and horizontal causality

Socio-historical materialism 165 in social systems) offers the prospect of a productive resolution to this particular problem. Traditionally, there are three philosophical positions in the debate. First, that ‘material factors’ determine ‘ideal factors’ and not vice versa (vulgar Marxism or mechanical materialism). So, from this perspective, the overall logic and direction of societal development is determined by a dialectical economic law, of which cultural events are passive mirrors, which operates via the mediation of objective economic interests upon which agents are compelled to act, leading inexorably to a determinate historical end-state, the classless communist utopia.57 Second, that ‘ideal factors’ determine ‘material factors’ and not vice versa (social idealism). So, from this perspective, the ‘objects of consciousness’ (i.e. values, beliefs, subjective wants, etc.), because these energize social interaction and therefore generate institutions, must also be regarded as the sole cause of social change.58 Third, that the debate between materialists and idealists is misplaced, on the grounds that processes of societal change are determined by the interaction between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the material’, as discrete factors or autonomous properties of social reality (social pluralism).59 From this point of view, neither the ideal nor the material is basic in social analysis, for although at certain points in history material factors determine ideal factors, at other historical junctures the reverse holds true. I take it that none of these either–or positions are adequate. Idealism breaks down, because the ‘objects of cognition’ that explain society and history also require explaining, and this requires reference to the socio-historical situation of which individuals are themselves a part. Materialism (in its orthodox form) fails, because it reduces agents to their historical situation, treating them as the bearers of anonymous historical laws, and because it implausibly regards all social life as interest-governed and economically motivated. Pluralism fails because it does not overcome the abstract dualism of materialism versus idealism, but instead combines the two in an unstable hotchpotch. So, for example, ideational elements are often treated as ‘free-floating’ phenomena, divested of any underlying grounds or causes, but are as often reduced to economic interests or other materialities, in an arbitrary and ad hoc fashion. More generally, the pluralist analytical treatment of the social world as composed of detachable or autonomous causal factors – the economic, the political, the military, the cultural, etc. – is an unwarranted abstraction from the relational nature of social reality, and thus a return to the kind of narrow descriptive empiricism which insists that ‘things are what they are and nothing else’.60 How can the dialectical ‘emergentist’ Marxist approach I have outlined indicate a fruitful alternative to these abstract polarities sedimented in social theory? By way of illustration, I will consider a single and well-known controversy in sociology: the question of whether the historical root of modern capitalism is to be found in ‘material elements’, ‘ideal elements’ or in the interplay between them (the materialist, idealist and pluralist philosophical stereotypes outlined above). The first position has been defended by Karl Kautsky, who insisted that the prior development of capitalist industry gave rise to religious ethics (such as

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Calvinism), which reflected the class interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and the economic rationality (accumulation for accumulation’s sake) of the new capitalist system. Capitalism caused Protestantism.61 The polar opposite view has often been attributed to Weber, on a certain reading of his work. This is that the prior development of certain ideological forms (ascetic Protestantism in general but Calvinism in particular) gave rise to capitalism. This occurred by virtue of the role of these religious forms in providing believers with values and beliefs conducive to profit making, and to the frugal reinvestment rather than consumption of wealth in expanded production and commerce. Protestantism caused capitalism.62 The pluralistic viewpoint, and probably Weber’s real opinion on the matter, conceded that the origins of capitalism were attributable to the interface between economics, politics and culture, grasped as a chance configuration of causal factors, but nonetheless held that capitalist development could not have occurred save for the prior existence of Protestantism as a force apart from the economy. Protestantism was a necessary condition of capitalism, but not the only one.63 All of these viewpoints have a certain superficial plausibility if insulated from the arguments of opponents, and all can mobilize empirical evidence in their support. Consider, in the first place, the idealist and pluralist standpoints. Weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic can certainly be read as a statement of idealist metaphysics, particularly if isolated from the wider context of his historical studies, despite his later claim that ‘it is . . . not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history’.64 After all, Weber’s ontological dualism does not involve an outright rejection of idealism. His point is, rather, idealism in its place. Sometimes idealism is appropriate, sometimes not, just as sometimes materialism is appropriate and sometimes not. So Weber does argue that Protestantism was a system of ethical beliefs divested of economic and material determinations, a position consistent with idealism and dualism. And he does argue that Protestantism explains why capitalism developed first in Western Europe and New England, in the seventeenth century, but not elsewhere in the Islamic world, in India and China. Weber’s argument is persuasive and empirically informed where it reveals the ‘elective affinity’ between capitalist economic activity and ascetic Protestantism. He does demonstrate successfully that many of the first successful capitalist industrialists were members of Calvinist communities or influenced more generally by Calvinism. And he does offer a reasonably plausible (though far from watertight) explanation of why the content of certain Protestant beliefs (especially ascetic self-denial, predestination, plus the idea that wealth acquired through frugal ‘good works’ in a vocational ‘calling’ evidenced the individual’s ‘worthiness’ in God’s eyes) were especially compatible with capitalist enterprise. Weber is also right to say that Protestantism existed prior to the development of industrial capitalism proper, and was not simply a reflection of capitalist economic interests or behaviour, but was instead efficacious in shaping the development of capitalism in its own right.

Socio-historical materialism 167 Nonetheless, Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis is not successful in demonstrating either that ascetic Protestantism was a necessary cause or condition of capitalism in the West, in the absence of which it could not have arisen, or that the absence of ascetic Protestantism was crucial in preventing the development of capitalism elsewhere, particularly in Asia. A crucial empirical disconfirmation of the thesis is indicated by the comparative research of a number of social analysts and historians, who have noted that the great Asian civilizations of premodernity possessed the material and ideological means of potential capitalist industrialization, prior to capitalist development in the Occident, yet were not to the forefront of such development.65 But this means ideological elements play no independent role at all in the explanation of capitalist development in the West, or its absence in the East, because religious ethics conducive to capitalist enterprise existed in both, and could not therefore function as the ‘independent variable’ explaining the relevant historical facts in either case. In particular, the great imperial states of China, India and Islam enjoyed an abundance of economic wealth for investment in trade and industry, sufficiently developed technological knowledge and forces of production to support a diversified economy and rationalized administration in advance of anything to be found in the Occident. These also possessed a prosperous commercial sector, a stable monetary system, a plentiful supply of labour, rational law and science, plus certain ideological forms (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Islam) that were obviously not incompatible with these developments. Buddhism was, in fact, originally forged as a rejection of the aristocratic privileges of the Brahman monarchies, an attempt to reassert the values and lifestyle of the egalitarian nomadic hunter-gatherer communities against private property and caste subordination, which were being extinguished as the Brahman kingdoms vied for control in northern India from 600 BC onwards. Later on, however, Buddhism was adopted by the urban merchants, artisans and lesser gentry of India and China, and was refurbished accordingly.66 Confucianism was able to co-exist with Buddhism in China and borrow from it, and vice versa, following its arrival in the country from the first century AD.67 Even Hinduism, on some accounts the most irrational and idealistic of the Eastern religions, allowed a renaissance of trade, manufacturing industry and urbanism in India. This was prior to the consolidation of the caste system, between 500 and 400 BC, which itself blocked off further development, and modified the content of Hinduism to reconcile it to the reality of caste domination.68 Of even greater significance, Islamic religion was, from its seventh century origins, far more commercialistic in content than any other before or since, picturing Allah as the ideal businessman, and positively recommending commerce as the appropriate vocation for believers. The point has been made that the Koran is saturated with mercantilist symbols, which are not merely illustrative, but are also central to doctrine.69 By contrast, early Christianity set itself against petty capitalism and private property, condemning profit making and usury, demanding followers renounce material possessions and live together in egalitarian communes or brotherhoods, and prophesizing a ‘New Jerusalem’, where

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the wealth of the propertied would be restored to the poor and downtrodden. It was not until Christianity became adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, and later converted into Catholicism proper during the feudal period, that it made its peace with private property, developing a full-blown endorsement of landlordism and the ‘divine right of kings’.70 Yet the crucial point is not that Weber and his idealist interpreters were simply wrong to postulate Protestantism, a particular form of ideology, as crucial to capitalist development or its lack in different parts of the world. Rather, the crucial point is that Weber’s ontological position that ideological factors are as often uncaused by material and social circumstances, and therefore may often function as independent forces of societal change, by virtue of the irreducible content of their beliefs or values, is called into doubt by historical facts. One reason for this is that Weber needs to provide some kind of account of the specific reasons why ascetic Protestantism arose and played an important role in shaping societal change, which is lacking in his writings, and any such account would reveal at once Protestantism’s lack of autonomy from the material and social worlds. Failing this, no real explanation can be given of the causes or conditions of Protestantism. The implicit assumption underlying this ‘lack’ is that ideologies (especially religious ideologies) often simply ‘come and go’ in the historical record, their determinations beyond rational explanation. But how could the ‘spirit of capitalism’ have come into existence in the absence of the social relations of merchant capitalism or petty commodity production? These are precisely the structural forms which Weber has to ‘take as given’, when specifying the causal role of Protestantism in stimulating full capitalist industrialization in the Occident. For example, when the puritan Benjamin Franklin writes, in his Necessary Hints to Those that would be Rich and Advice to a Young Tradesman, that ‘time is money’, that ‘credit is money’, and recommends that followers ‘pay debts on time’, what is presupposed in his remarks is precisely the social and institutional forms of a fairly developed commercial society – the money form, the value form, trade, financial institutions, a system of credit, a specialized division of labour and so on. In the absence of these social relations, Franklin’s sentiments would have been unthinkable, and so too would have been many of the core attitudes or values informing Calvinist doctrine. Weber cannot afford to admit this, however, and this is perhaps why he insists that the ascetic or self-denying character of Puritanism constitutes an irrational value-orientation towards the world, which if explainable is explainable only in terms of little-understood psychological mechanisms. The acquisition of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment . . . is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that vis-à-vis the happiness of, or utility to, the particular individual, it appears as quite transcendental and wholly irrational. Man is dominated by acquisition as the purpose of his life; acquisition is no longer a means to the end of satisfying his material needs. The reversal of what might be called

Socio-historical materialism 169 the ‘natural situation’, completely senseless from an unprejudiced standpoint, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.71 But, of course, the Calvinist emphasis on ‘worldly good works in a vocation’, frugal self-denial, yet insistence that believers ‘must . . . gain what they can and save all they can . . . that is, in effect, to grow rich’,72 is precisely rational once it is rooted in the social structure of trading communities within an expanding global competitive marketplace. For, situated in this antecedent context, ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ is obviously a necessity forced on economic agents by the law of value, which pressurizes them to ‘out-compete’ rivals or else face bankruptcy. Nor is Weber able to explain why religious forms, which initially differed radically in their doctrinal content, such as Catholicism and ascetic Protestantism in early modern Europe, were ultimately both able to express attitudes to life that promoted capitalist development. Medieval Catholicism was in many ways antithetical to capitalist development, though not to private property or self-enrichment per se. Yet, throughout Europe, Catholicism was refurbished to fit in with a changing economic and social reality, to render it more accommodating to business activity, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. In fact, the earliest centres of merchant capitalism in Europe were the great Italian city-states, especially Venice, Florence, Genoa and Pisa, which traded with the East.73 These were nominally Catholic, but were nonetheless enthused with Weber’s ‘capitalist spirit’ of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, centuries before the emergence of ascetic Protestantism. By the middle of the fourteenth century these mercantile centres were also centres of manufacture, employing wage-labour as well as guildsmen, utilizing rational methods of profit making and monetary budgeting, such as share ownership and double-entry book-keeping, and enjoying a high level of occupational specialization, including vocationalism.74 Later on, by the close of the fourteenth century, a parallel though lesser movement had taken place in the western part of Belgium and north-west of France, again under the auspices of Catholicism, which linked up with the Italian city-states to form the first European world economy.75 In each case, a modified social environment facilitated a modified religious attitude, amongst those who wished to rationalize or legitimize the changed circumstances and use religion as a cultural resource to change these circumstances some more, to remake the world in their own image. Yet Weber’s argument is that religious world-views can function as independent forces of society and social change, because they express values and beliefs that are not simply articulations of the ‘lived experience’ of individuals in the world. But this understanding hardly fits the historical facts of the matter. For if Catholicism was changed to accommodate it to a social world in which profit making was an increasingly important aspect of economic life, by those social agents appropriately placed in social relations and with vested interests in so doing, wherein lies the warranty for denying that Protestantism was

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generated by the same kind of interactional process between ‘conditions’ and ‘consciousness’? After all, Protestantism did not emerge from a cultural vacuum, but rather from Catholicism itself. And Catholicism was undoubtedly as ‘other-worldly’ as the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Confucianism throughout the pre-modern period, yet became increasingly ‘materialistic’ as capitalism supplanted feudalism, though this was a process fraught with religious and social conflict. But this means that Weber’s observation that Hinduism under the Brahmans and Confucianism under Chinese absolutism were too ‘idealistic’ to support or promote capitalist development beyond a certain level is merely truistic. For some kind of explanation now has to be given for why these ‘other-worldly’ religious forms did not undergo the kind of worldly rationalization that occurred to Christianity in the Occident, and this can be done only by referring social consciousness to social structure. The point is that religious ideas, when embodied in practical activity, sometimes feed into processes of societal change, not because they are divorced from the material world, but because they are sufficiently plastic to be converted into expressions of the contradictions and struggles of real, material life. Weber’s dualistic pluralism also fails because, if ideological elements compatible with capitalistic activity were to be found in many of the leading Eastern societies (i.e. Buddhism and especially Islam), some kind of explanation is required of why this was the case, and why these failed to engender capitalist industrialization. This, again, necessitates a materialist analysis of the structural configurations of social and economic relations in these modes of society. Of course, religious attitudes compatible with business activity existed in the Eastern civilizations of Islam, India and China, in the Middle Ages, because these (like the societies of England, Holland, Huguenot France, New England and many other European states at a later date) contained elements of merchant capitalism and petty commodity production. Commodity production and trade were more advanced in India and China than in Europe until the late feudal period.76 And commerce, backed up by military power, was the dominant economic form of the Islamic Empire from its seventh century origins.77 In fact, capitalism was able to prosper in parts of Western Europe, but not in the great Asian states, because feudal relations of production had prevailed in the former, whereas tributary relations of production had prevailed in the latter. Feudalism was synonymous with a decentralized and fragmented social structure, based on landed property and the local manor, and this allowed the development of towns as independent centres of trade and industry. Commerce and manufacturing could develop in these ‘spaces’ as independent power centres in the social structure, and petty capitalists could consolidate their wealth and power and articulate interests in opposition to the feudalists, balancing between different factions of the feudal aristocracy during their internecine wars for land and serf labour.78 The tributary societies of the East, by contrast, were governed by an urbanized state class, headed by an absolute monarchy (or priesthood), and organized

Socio-historical materialism 171 as a centralized bureaucracy. This state class derived its income from the extortion of tribute from freeholding peasants and feudal nobles, and from the taxation of merchant capitalists and artisans, all of whom were subordinate to its authority.79 In this mode of society there did not exist the same scope for capitalist forces to develop as independent elements of the social structure, since no power base could be established by petty capitalism either in the towns or in the country apart from the state officials or the feudalists. Because of these structural constraints placed on independent business activity, capitalism could not develop beyond a certain point, and nor could religious forms emerge which could fundamentally challenge or help undermine these structural constraints to capitalist development. Hence the ‘failure’ of Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism to undergo ‘worldly rationalization’ or acquire a ‘salvationist’ aspect. The drift of my argument might lead the reader to assume that I am straightforwardly siding with materialists such as Karl Kautsky against the dualism and/or idealism of Weber and his supporters on the question of the origins of capitalism. This is not the case. I have said that orthodox reductive materialism in the social sciences is no more acceptable than its traditional foes. Yet Kautsky’s mechanical materialism does allow him to make some telling criticisms of Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis. He is right, for instance, to point out against Weber that ascetic Protestantism grew up in towns and cities where commerce and commodity production were already firmly established. But Kautsky wrongly concludes from this that Protestantism was simply a passive mirror of capitalist interests and rationality, which functioned simply as a legitimatory ideology of capitalist expansion. The problem is that Kautsky’s brand of reductive materialism has to deny ideological factors, such as Protestantism, any real role in shaping historical events or social and economic institutions. Because he has saddled himself with a form of materialism, which does not distinguish between critical realist vertical and horizontal causality in social analysis, he is forced into accepting the standpoint that every social or cultural ‘happening’ or ‘object’ must have a corresponding economic ‘cause’. But this means that Kautsky, like Weber, misses an important link in the chain of historical explanation. Certainly, he is correct to say that Protestantism (in common with all ideological forms) was rooted firmly in social and material reality, and was determined in the first instance by this reality, in the sense that agents encountered here ‘ready-made’ a specific set of circumstances (emergent cultural and structural properties) which framed their options for thought and action in determinate ways. Nonetheless Protestantism then assumed a ‘life of its own’, by virtue of its irreducible causal powers (generative mechanisms) and real-world effects. This included the capacity of ascetic Protestantism to instil in business enterprise a moral purpose it would otherwise have lacked.80 This allowed the early capitalists to adapt better to the disciplines of the market, in effect to become better (i.e. more ruthless) and more influential businessmen. This also included its crucial role in mobilizing and fermenting ideological and political opposition to the feudal regimes (and the religious forms which legitimated them) amongst those whose ways of acquiring a living were

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increasingly frustrated by the constraints of the old system. In the latter case, ascetic Protestantism became a revolutionary force, feeding into and helping mobilize and generalize social and class struggles against the ancien regime, even if this was not the intention of its founders, who tended to be conservative (often reactionary) on most social issues.81 Thus, there can be little serious doubt that ascetic Protestantism was an ideological form which, though vertically determined by underlying material structures, nonetheless played an absolutely crucial role in the horizontal determination of historical outcomes, in this case the defeat of feudalism and absolutism by capitalism, and the rise of the West to global predominance. Bhaskar’s critical realist distinction between the levels of the empirical, the actual and the real, is useful in illuminating this issue.82 To recap: the empirical is the level of events, as these are perceived by agents, or experienced events; the actual is the broader level of events, both experienced and unexperienced by agents; the real is the deeper structures that underpin events or phenomena, and whose generative mechanisms generate the phenomenal world, whether experienced or otherwise. Now the actual is the stuff of geo-history, because the trajectories of societies are shaped by events which can never be experienced by all, and such events have macroscopic effects even where they are not perceived by those subject to their influence. Geo-historical events are the products of agents, whose doings are conditioned by the activation and interplay of a complex ensemble of structural generative mechanisms (economic, political, ideational, ideological, communicative, etc.) in the open system of social being. Any historical outcome is the resultant of agential projects as these are facilitated by this complex articulation of generative mechanisms, and cannot be predicted in advance of the specific manner in which these structural powers interact and intersect. But, at the level (or more accurately levels) of the real, it is possible to identify a hierarchical layering of generative mechanisms, whereby the economic level is basic to the political and cultural levels, in the sense that the former sets the limits and boundary conditions of the latter, and the latter are emergent from the former. I have said that these critical realist analytical distinctions can illuminate the vexed question of the role of Protestant ideology in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. How so? Protestantism was vertically determined by the generative mechanisms at work at the basic structure of the social real (the economic level), but nonetheless played a crucial role in horizontally determining the sequence of historical events (on the terrain of the actual) that generated capitalism. To summarize the evidence, Protestantism did not create capitalist modes of wealth creation, but was rather a specific ideational response by class agents (in this case the agents of commerce and petty commodity production) to the problems, challenges and opportunities posed by their ‘situational logics’ within a developing capitalistic social environment fabricated by previously materialized social agency. This was an attempt by class agents to rationalize that social environment in a manner that was meaningful and advantageous from the point of view of their structurally determined interests.

Socio-historical materialism 173 Protestantism did not possess a unique or privileged conceptual essence that rendered it a revolutionary force. On the contrary, it is likely that ideological forms other than Protestantism could and would have arisen to play its historical role in facilitating further capitalist development in its absence, since ideologies are always expressive of existential problems (posed by human interactions with their social and other environments), and real world contradictions (particularly inasmuch as these constrain the life-chances of agents) will always stimulate ideological efforts to get to grips with these. Nonetheless Protestantism did function as an ideological spur for transforming petty capitalism into full-scale capitalist industrialization proper. However, Protestantism did not play this crucial role as a force apart from material social being (a discrete, irreducible ‘factor’ of change). Rather, it did so only by virtue of being a specific classconditioned articulation of material social being, because situated in structural social relations which precisely enabled it (once it had gripped the imagination of class agents) to become a force for macroscopic societal change.

Emergentist Marxism as socio-historical materialism I have said that Marxian materialism in the social sciences is not only committed to a theory of structure but also to a theory of history. According to this, sociohistorical processes are governed by the motion of the forces of production, the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and the dynamic of class conflict emergent from these structural contradictions of the modes of production. These are universal mechanisms of societal motion (in class societies), though the precise form which they take is determined by the nature of the relations of production which prevail in a particular social system. Yet it is important to grasp that this socio-historical materialism is not a theory of social change as such, but rather of a particular form of social change. That is to say, socio-historical materialism is an attempt to theorize societal evolution, the developmental tendencies or ‘logics’ which impart to societal change a certain directionality towards more developed social forms out of less developed social forms, and the mechanisms (structural contradictions and attendant class struggle) which bring about the revolutionary overthrow of one form of social system by another. Therefore, a mere postulation of momentous historical events which have no apparent economic locus or cause is not sufficient to refute socio-historical materialism, despite the contrary belief of most antiMarxist scholars. In a nutshell, then, as I have suggested beforehand, Marx’s theory of history is a thesis of horizontal causality in social systems. And it is only by virtue of its status as such that it is possible to speak of a ‘materialist conception of history’ as opposed to a ‘pluralist’ or ‘multi-factoral’ one. Before entering into an exposition and defence of Marx’s theory of history, I would like to briefly address one issue. This is the question of whether privileging the economic base vis-à-vis the politico-ideological and ideational superstructures of society, in a causal explanation of historical process, is inherently disreputable, in the sense of being logically unsustainable. For most

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philosophers and social theorists the answer to this is a definite yes. For them it makes no sense to postulate the primacy of socio-economic mechanisms (i.e. the modes of production and attendant class relations) in imparting directionality to systemic evolution and transformation for the simple reason that all historical events are determined conjointly by the plurality of generative mechanisms (economic, political, linguistic, ideological, etc.) at work in society. None of these mechanisms can be attributed any kind of explanatory primacy in governing societal dynamics because all are necessary and indispensable to any passage of social interaction leading to any determinate socio-historical outcome. There cannot be a development of the forces of production, for example, unless individuals draw upon a linguistic and cultural structure to communicate meaning during economic production. There cannot be a social revolution, to offer another example, unless merely economic conflicts are generalized into political and ideological struggles: subordinate social agents have to draw upon economic, political and ideological structures if they are to defeat entrenched elite groupings and refashion social relations in their favour. The purpose of Marx’s materialist conception of history is not to deny a key role to politics and culture in shaping the historical movement of social systems. Rather, its purpose is to affirm that particular kinds of political and cultural mechanisms (i.e. those which are directly connected to or expressive of the structural contradictions between the forces of production and relations of production and social classes) are fundamental in explaining the developmental possibilities of all social systems. This is still a strong claim, a materialist theory of systemic dynamics. This is in the sense of attributing explanatory primacy to those cultural forms which are integral aspects of the forces of production (in shaping economic development), and to those political and ideological struggles which are thrown up by the fettering of forces of production by relations of production and resultant class malintegration. For it is not true that any kind of politics or culture will suffice to bring about societal development or (especially) societal transformation. Those which soar above the ‘contradictions and struggles of real life’ will have little substantive systemic impact. Nonetheless it is clear that Marx’s socio-historical materialism does not involve a neglect of politics or ideology, as is commonly asserted. For Marx, it is precisely the developmental dynamic of the forces of production, and the fettering of the forces of production by relations of production, which facilitates the political and ideological struggles which govern societal elaboration/transformation. For this reason it is quite legitimate to regard the ‘economic’ as the decisive factor of historical advance. Now these general points allow us to obtain a balanced assessment of the following much-maligned argument of Engels: The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and especially the reflections of all these real struggles in

Socio-historical materialism 175 the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogma – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner connection is so remote and so impossible to prove that we can regard it as non-existent and neglect it), the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself.83 The standard objection to Engels’ formulation is twofold. First, that it crudely and falsely abstracts economic relations from social relations and social consciousness, suggesting a relationship of ‘external causality’ between base and superstructure. Contra Engels, we are told, ‘social being’ and ‘social consciousness’, economy and society, are ‘interpenetrated’, presupposing one another so closely that it is scarcely plausible to separate them even in thought. Second, that it compounds this error by insisting that economic generative mechanisms are privileged in the sense that these alone exercise the decisive influence in determining socio-historical outcomes. In the latter case, of course, Engels is taxed by the critics for transforming socio-historical materialism into a monistic theory of horizontal causality in social systems, according to which economic structures or ‘economic conditions’ are ‘the ultimately determining factor in history’. Neither of these criticisms is valid. The first is the easiest to dispose of. At the risk of repetition, if the distinction between base/superstructure is interpreted, not as a broad distinction between ‘social being’ and ‘social consciousness’, but as a specification of the hierarchical–vertical ordering of emergent structures in social systems, it is clear that no implausible abstraction of ‘consciousness’ from the practices of economic production or class struggle is implied here. The second objection to Engels’ above abbreviated statement of socio-historical materialism has more substance to it than the first. His argument here and elsewhere is clumsy in the sense that it can be interpreted as expressing the view that the economy always and everywhere determines the long-term fate of any society or social system, even if in the short or medium term superstructural factors (law, polity, ideology, etc.) are capable of arresting or facilitating its historical dynamic. This objection is not a decisive one. Of course, it is true that a range of social mechanisms (and non-social ones besides) are efficacious in explaining interactional processes and socio-historical outcomes. But I have already pointed out that Marx’s double distinction between base/superstructure and between being/consciousness does not imply a denial of this elementary fact: economic structures and processes are never simply ‘material’, but are also ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, and in a certain sense ‘political’ too. Notwithstanding the ambiguities of Engels’ terminology here and elsewhere, therefore, it does seem more reasonable to interpret his account of the historical interface between base and superstructure, not as ‘determination in the final analysis’ (as the Althusserians

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would have it), but as a statement of reciprocal but unequal interaction between the two.84 This understanding of structural dynamics is logically consistent with a materialist theory of history. Yet this is one which avoids economic determinism without collapsing into pluralism. For, according to this view, although socio-historical outcomes are shaped ‘horizontally’ by a plurality of socio-cultural mechanisms, a ‘structured dialectic’85 if you like, at the same time those mechanisms derived from the structure have a long-run tendency to ‘assert their own movement as necessary’ vis-à-vis those derived from the superstructure. But what is the warranty for rejecting an interpretation of Engels’ formulation as a kind of shamefaced smuggling of economic determinism through the back door just as it has seen out through the front? Certainly, such an interpretation would not be consistent with Marx and Engels’ well-documented commitment to an anti-reductive materialism in the social sciences. Moreover, as Chris Harman points out, non-economic factors play an absolutely pivotal role in Marx’s own version of socio-historical materialism, which Engels fully endorsed, and cannot in any meaningful way be seen as ‘ultimately’ determined by the economic base: The way the political and judicial feed back into the economic is absolutely central to Marx’s whole approach. It is this alone which enables him to talk of successive distinct ‘modes of production’ – stages in history in which the organisation of production and exploitation is frozen in certain ways, each with its distinctive ruling class seeking to mould the whole of society to fit in with its requirements. Far from ignoring the impact of the ‘superstructure’ on the base, as many ignorant critics have claimed for more than a century, Marx builds his whole account of human history around it. Old relations of production act as fetters, impeding the growth of new productive forces. How? At least in part because of the activity of the ‘superstructure’ in trying to stop new forms of production and exploitation that challenge the monopoly of wealth and power of the old ruling class. Its laws declare the new ways to be illegal, its religious institutions denounce them as immoral, its police use torture against them, its armies sack the towns where they are practised. The massive political and ideological struggles that arise as a result decide, for Marx, whether a rising class, based on new forces of production, displaces an old ruling class. And so it is an absolute travesty of his views to claim that he ‘neglects’ the political and ideological element.86 Clearly, then, neither superstructural emergents nor non-economic modes of human agency are in Marx’s historical sociology ‘derived exclusively from the economic institutions of human societies’, or ‘relegated to the status of dependence on economic developments’, as for instance Tony Spybey has asserted.87 Indeed, in socio-historical materialism, ‘[s]o great is the reciprocal impact of the superstructure on the base, that many of the categories we think of as “economic” are in fact constituted by both’.88 The institution of the family in modern capitalism, for instance, is ‘superstructural’ (by virtue of certain of its cultural

Socio-historical materialism 177 and social functions), but is also ‘basic’ (by virtue of its economic function of reproducing labour-power). The same is true of both law and the state in capitalism, both of which have economic and non-economic functions. But is Engels’ interpretation of socio-historical materialism as an account of the ‘reciprocal but unequal interaction’ between base and superstructure theoretically defensible? My argument is that it is. In order to see why this is, however, it is necessary to articulate the fundamental premises of Marx’s theory of history, and to reconsider them in the light of the theoretical and methodological insights of sociological critical realism. By teasing out the interplay of structure and agency with resort to Archer’s critical realist social science methodology (analytical dualism and the morphogenetic-static methodological framework of practical social research), it becomes possible to affirm Marx’s understanding of history as essentially a story of progressive tendential societal development powered by the dynamics and contradictions of successive modes of production. Now the hierarchically organized generative mechanisms identified by Marx’s base/superstructure model of the social system are precisely the emergent properties of previously materialized social interaction and human agency. These are the cultural and structural properties of the social environment that every generation of human agents has to confront as a range of constraints, enablements and impulses on their freedom of thought and action. These inherited structures of society are the essential starting point when analysing social processes because, although history-making is the task of human agents alone, human agency is always oriented rationally to the material and cultural contexts in which it is situated, and is comprehensible only by referring it to these action contexts. The significance of the structural emergent properties of society is that they ‘account for what is there (materially and culturally) to be distributed’ amongst a society’s members, the ‘shape of such distributions’, and the way these distributions are related to each other and specific social groupings. From the perspective of socio-historical materialism, then, the first phase (p1) of the morphogenetic-static cycle is precisely the conditional influences exerted on interactants by virtue of their ‘situational logics’ within specific relations of production and ownership structures. ‘It is the situations to which people respond that are mediatory because they condition (without determining) different courses of action for those differently placed, by supplying different reasons to them.’89 The significance of the involuntary placement of agents within relations of production is that it distributes different vested interests to those differently placed90 – interests in maintaining structural statics or reproduction in the case of the propertied classes; interests in fundamentally reforming or transforming structural relations in the case of the propertyless classes. Vested interests are definable as those appropriate modes of social agency which interactants have to engage in, given their positioning in relations of production, if they are to defend or enhance their life-chances against other interactants differently placed vis-àvis distributions of allocative and authoritative resources.

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The significance of relations of production in allocating agents to different positions vis-à-vis the means of life and command is also that these exert real ‘directional pressure’ on agents to think and act in ways which are broadly in correspondence with their vested interests.91 This is because structural situations in society attach specific ‘opportunity costs’ to different modes of social agency.92 Forms of social agency which are out of phase with the vested interests of specific structurally situated collectives of interactants are likely to incur punishing sanctions.93 This is not a deterministic account of structural conditioning, since agents are not compelled to act in accordance with their vested interests. Yet most agents will nonetheless do so, at some point, because they will find good reasons for doing so, and they will be placed under systematic pressure to act more-or-less rationally. This is especially the case during periods of social and economic crisis, where the contradictions and fault lines of society are thrown into sharp relief. These considerations allow the analyst to grasp why material emergent structures (i.e. those constitutive of the modes of production) should rightly enjoy explanatory primacy over non-material emergent structures in accounting for both stable reproduction and macroscopic transformations of social systems. The crucial point is that the involuntary placement of agents as ‘haves’ and ‘havenots’ within relations of production exert directional guidance on them to appropriate, construct and refashion cultural resources and social and political institutions in ways which correspond with or which do not obstruct their vested social interests. It follows from this that there is a long-run tendency in any social system for cultural and social and political emergent properties to ‘accommodate’ or ‘correspond’ to structures of economic production and class power. This is acknowledged by Weber, in one of his more insightful moments, where he points out that human agents will not for the most part tolerate too great a discrepancy between their cultural and political values (‘ideal interests’) and their material (economic and class) interests. Now methodological (sociological) critical realism proposes that the dynamics of social systems are best grasped in terms of the morphogenetic-static cycle. As we have seen, this proposes a basic analytical model for exploring system dynamics, whereby agents at the start of each cycle are subject to structural conditioning (p1), where structurally conditioned social interaction (p2) is responsible either for structural change or structural reproduction (p3), in accordance with whichever structurally situated group of agents (‘haves’ or ‘have-nots’) prevail in the political and ideological struggle for control of society which is part and parcel of their mutual interaction. Having addressed p1 of the morphogenetic dialectic of control, from the point of view of socio-historical materialism, it is now time to address how the four phases of the morphogenetic cycle can be mapped onto, and used to illuminate, Marx’s historical sociology. Marx’s conception of the ‘privileged’ role of the modes of production (p1) in constituting social systems (the ‘determination’ of superstructure by the economic ‘base’ of society) informs his conception of macroscopic historical social change (p3) as being energized by specific modes of social agency (p2). History,

Socio-historical materialism 179 argues Marx, is essentially forged in, first, the interplay between social labour (a particular mode of human agency) and the physical environment, and second, in the interplay between class agents and the forces of production and relations of production of society and the politico-ideological superstructures they support. Where relations of production take the form of class relationships, this interplay between forces of production and relations of production, base and superstructure (p1), on the one hand, and social production and the interaction between differently positioned class agents (p2), on the other hand, assumes a dialectical or antagonistic form. Systemic developmental outcomes (p3) are then a function of the working out of societal or systemic contradictions or fault-lines, which then confront agents as a new ‘action-environment’ (p4), which exerts a different pattern of structural constraints and enablements upon their consciousness and activity, though one that is efficacious only in relation to the projects and practices of agents that bring them into collision with them.94 These contradictions are both structural (institutional) and social (interactional). On the one hand, there is the structural incompatibility between forces of production and relations of production (which also take the form of a contradiction between forces of production and those superstructural forms that exist to preserve or protect the dominant property relations of a society), as this is expressed as conflicts of interest between the incumbents of interlinked class positions. On the other hand, there is the social conflict between rival social classes struggling for control over the destiny of society. In this dialectic of control and its contestation, agents draw on the causal powers invested in them by virtue of their positioning in relations of production, and mobilize every political and ideological resource to hand to further their struggles against one another. For Marx, systemic transformation occurs where subordinate class agents defeat those propertied class agents who have vested interests in preserving the status quo, and brush aside the relations of production and attendant supporting superstructures upon which their structural predominance was dependent. Structural reproduction, on the other hand, occurs where propertied class agents defeat or contain or repress the struggles of those subordinate agents who have vested interests in thoroughgoing change. Irrespective of the historical outcome of a particular phase of class struggle, however, class-divided societies always contain the seeds of their own eventual destruction, since such societies inevitably enter periods of profound social crisis (where the fettering of the forces of production by the relations of production is at its most acute), which has a strong tendency to translate into recurring episodes of convulsive class conflict, which will continue until the structural incompatibilities are resolved. In other words, class-divided societies are inherently unstable and vulnerable to overthrow, since they are subject to recurring crises whereby structural malintegration is translated into social malintegration, these being the two essential preconditions of a revolutionary transformation of social relations. Marx summarizes his approach in two famous passages, which bring out the structural and activist dimensions of his ‘materialist conception of history’, and

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which identify thoroughgoing societal change as a function of both structural and social malintegration: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruination of the contending classes.95 At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing social relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the 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 the epoch of social revolution. With the change in economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.96 To come to grips with Marx’s approach requires us to understand how the interplay between social labour and physical nature, between forces of production and relations of production, and between exploiting and exploited classes, hangs together in bringing about structural elaboration or transformation (or its absence). Now it seems to me that G.A. Cohen is fundamentally on the right lines where he argues that Marx’s theory of history is committed to two basic theses: the Development Thesis and the Primacy Thesis.97 Cohen identifies the Development Thesis as the proposition that ‘the productive forces have a tendency to develop throughout history’, and he identifies the Primacy Thesis as the proposition that ‘the nature of a set of production relations is explained by the development of the productive forces embraced by it’.98 Andrew Levine has usefully broken down Cohen’s Development Thesis and Primacy Thesis into six distinct propositions: 1 2 3 4 5 6

the Development Thesis; the Compatibility Thesis; the Contradiction Thesis; the Transformation Thesis; the Optimality Thesis; and the Capacity Thesis.99

Levine argues these can be understood as theses that are not necessarily reliant on functionalist explanations. By contrast, Cohen’s reliance on a functionalist interpretation of socio-historical materialism leads him into technological determinism, and inevitably along with this a remarkably undialectical understanding of social and historical processes. However, a substantially revised ‘dialectical’

Socio-historical materialism 181 reformulation of Cohen’s argument, which frees it from the ‘mystical shell’ of his functionalist economism, leaves us with the following propositions. First, there exists a general (albeit fitful) tendency for the forces of production to develop historically, irrespective of the specific structural organization of particular modes of society: forces of production tend to be a dynamic element of most social systems. Marxism is thus committed to a form of economic evolutionism (the Development Thesis). Second, a certain level of development of material production is compatible with only a certain range of relations of production (the Compatibility Thesis). As Andrew Levine puts it: ‘forces and relations of production are compatible whenever the relations of production allow for the further development of the productive forces, and whenever productive forces help to strengthen and reproduce existing relations of production’.100 Third, given the Development Thesis and the Compatibility Thesis, the forces of production will tend to develop in such a way that they will become constrained by the relations of production within which they have previously developed, and so the latter will become incompatible with or will contradict the dynamic of the former (the Contradiction Thesis). This will lead to severe strain or tension in the social structure (structural malintegration), and if the contradiction is not relieved, to an intensifying process of class conflict (social malintegration). This in turn will generate a thoroughgoing economic, political and ideological crisis of prevailing social relations (system malintegration). Fourth, where forces of production and relations of production contradict one another (as they invariably do in class society), and where this contradiction or incompatibility between them has generated structural malintegration, there exists a definite pressure upon the direct producers (who suffer disproportionately from the impact of the systemic crisis) to strive to rationally comprehend the nature of the structural incompatibilities which are blighting their lives and to struggle for a new social order which overcomes or transcends them. There is, in other words, a real tendency for system malintegration to encourage or facilitate the kinds of social struggle (i.e. revolutionary class conflict) necessary to bring about system transformation (the Transformation Thesis). Yet, fifth, it is necessary that the direct producers possess the kind of ‘structural capacities’ which allow their struggles a reasonable chance of success in achieving this objective (the Capacity Thesis). Finally, insofar as this class struggle is successful in bringing about the removal of the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production, by means of a revolutionary transformation of relations of production, and the destruction of the old superstructures that fixed and legitimized them, there exists the strong possibility that economic progress (and hence structural elaboration) can be renewed within the new set of limitations and enablements established by new relations of production (the Optimality Thesis). I will examine each of these arguments in turn.

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1 The Development Thesis The Development Thesis is perhaps the most controversial element of sociohistorical materialism. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Anthony Giddens complains: ‘Marxist authors are virtually everywhere committed to evolutionism in one guise or another.’101 By ‘evolutionism’ Giddens appears to have in mind an account of social change, which he attributes to Marx, as determined by the level of development of the forces of production: these have an ‘internal dynamic’, which is the source of all historical change. Because this view, commonly known as technological determinism, entails a fundamental misinterpretation of Marxism, it is necessary to be quite clear about what the Development Thesis does and does not commit us to. Chris Harman explains: [Marx’s] approach locate[s] . . . one element of the social whole that has a general tendency to cumulative development on its own: the action of humans in working on their environment to get a living for themselves. Past labour provides the means for increasing the output of present labour: both material means (tools, machines, access to raw materials, economic techniques) and new knowledge. . . . Material production does [then] have a tendency to move in one direction rather than another. Its output is wealth, the resources which allow lives to be free from material deprivation. And these resources can be piled up in ever-greater quantities. But in adopting the new ways of working humans also adapt new ways of relating to each other. These changes will often be so small as to be barely perceptible (a changed relationship between two people here, an additional person engaged in a particular labour process somewhere else). Small, cumulative changes in the forces of production can take place which encourage changes in the relations between people which are just as small, but also just as cumulative. But if they continue, they will bring about systematic molecular change in the whole social structure. . . . People change their relations with each other because they want to produce the means of livelihood more easily: increasing the means of livelihood is the aim, changes in the social relations of production the unintended consequence. But if they continue they will bring about systematic molecular change in the whole social structure. The succession of quantitative changes then have a qualitative impact. . . . The forces of production rebel against the existing relations of production, not the other way round.102 The reason why Marx regards the forces of production as a privileged agent of structural elaboration has a lot to do with his account of human species being and the theory of social agency that is based upon it. As we have seen, human beings are for Marx conscious social producers. Being ‘somewhat rational’, and having a definite human interest in easing the burden of arduous work, in freeing a portion of their working day to pursue more diversified activities and improving their output and consumption of material goods, the direct producers will

Socio-historical materialism 183 tend to seek improvements in their methods or techniques of labour. Even in societies which involve class-divided relations of production, where much of the product of the direct producers is appropriated by non-producers, and where the labour-process is no longer the exclusive property of the mass of the working population, this general dynamic of social agency is rarely extinguished in its entirety. In most class societies the direct producers have known that they can derive some kind of benefit from improving the output and productivity of their social labour. Indeed, the concentration and centralization of material resources in the hands of propertied elites in the first class societies actually helped to facilitate economic advance beyond the limits of hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies, allowing a level of economic planning and net investment in technological advance which was not possible hitherto. But, in all class societies, in addition to this rational human imperative of the direct producers to develop production, the exploiting class always has a definite socially determined interest in improving its own lavish consumption. This as often translates into a greater or lesser effort to increase the productivity of the direct producers as it does the seizure of a greater portion of a fixed product. The universal human imperative to develop the forces of production is supplemented by, and sometimes subordinated to, the class interest of ruling propertied elites in expanding their access to the surplus-product. The rate of economic development of any society depends crucially on the structural organization of the relations of production and modes of exploitation specific to it, and upon the wider cultural and political forms which can be inferred from these specific configurations of relations of production. Yet it is only in exceptional cases that these structural relations can curtail the cumulative development of production in its entirety. The general tendency is for the productive forces to develop historically across the whole range of different societal types, as Marx rightly insists. Despite the obvious plausibility of this basic insight into the dynamics of human society, it is far from being an intellectually respectable one amongst contemporary social theorists and historians. Indeed, much of the critique of socio-historical materialism by certain neo-Weberian scholars is in fact based upon the flat rejection of this ‘Development Thesis’. This appears to be based upon the misconceived belief that evolutionary accounts of human and societal development must always entail teleological and deterministic assumptions. For example, neo-Weberian sociologists such as Tony Spybey, in counterposition to an ‘evolutionism’ construed in these terms, make much of the fact that there have existed innumerable specific societies which have shown little compunction to develop production over and above the subsistence level: hunter-gatherer societies do not always develop into horticultural or pastoral societies; horticulture does not always develop into agriculture proper; agrarian societies do not always, or even normally, transform themselves into industrial societies. As Spybey puts it: ‘The assumption [in historical materialism] is that all societies will maximize their productive capacity in response to what Western economists have referred to as the principle of “scarcity”. . . . But there are instances of societies that have chosen, i.e. made a socio-political decision,

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not to respond in this way.’103 To hold the Development Thesis to be true, from this point of view, is to subscribe to a ‘Eurocentric’ outlook – i.e. to impose the values of western capitalistic rationality (economic growth and technological innovation as the be-all and end-all of social existence) upon pre-capitalist communities where these values have little relevance.104 There are three major difficulties with this style of reasoning. First, as Erik Olin Wright observes, a usable (Marxist) evolutionary theory commits us neither to teleologism nor productive force determinism. We can, in other words, hold the Development Thesis to be true without subscribing to a theory of necessary cumulative stages of societal development. On this view, an evolutionary account of social process is simply one which postulates the existence of ‘social forms which potentially ha[ve] some kind of directionality to [them]’, which have a greater probability of staying at the same level of development than of regressing, and which have ‘a positive probability of moving from a given level of [development] to the next higher level’.105 If this is accepted, far from endorsing the view that societies have needs or teleologically driven imperatives towards achieving some necessary or predetermined end-state, and indeed far from rejecting the possibility of historical periods of societal regression (as, for example, Cohen’s version of the Development Thesis does),106 a sensible evolutionary theory is simply committed to the thesis that ‘there is some positive impulse for [upwards, ascending] movement’, so that all ‘that is implied in the criteria for evolutionary theory is that given enough time some societies will evolve in the manner indicated in the evolutionary typology’.107 This kind of evolutionary theory is relatively unproblematic, as I intend to demonstrate. Indeed, a version of ‘societal evolutionism is to be found in the historical writings of many of those neo-Weberian theorists (notably Giddens and Mann)108 who formally repudiate it, notwithstanding their views to the contrary.109 Wright identifies three important reasons (in addition to those which can be inferred from Marx’s account of species-being) why there exists this general trend for the forces of production to develop. First, ‘there are in general no groups in a society with interests directly in reducing the level of productivity of labour’ (although this might occur on occasions as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of other social interests or practices – for example military defeat or inept political administration). And so, ‘once a level of productivity is reached there will not in general be groups organized to reduce it’.110 Second, knowledge of productive techniques (which can be used to restore a given level of production even if means of production are destroyed) tends to be transmitted across the generations, is less easily lost to societies than physical tools and technology, and thus has a tendency to be retained. Finally, as Marx and Engels themselves recognized, ‘once a given level of the forces of production is reached by whatever route, it tends to engender needs in people which are dependent on that level of development . . . [so that] in addition to there being no groups (in general) with strong interests in the reduction of labour productivity, there will be groups with strong interests in the preservation of a given level’.111

Socio-historical materialism 185 The second major difficulty with the neo-Weberian critique of Marx’s Development Thesis is that it is rooted in a rather unsteady grasp of socio-historical materialism. For, although it is perfectly true that not all (or even most) human societies have acted to develop their forces of production, it is also certain that this insight counts only against positivistic appropriations of Marxism, such as those associated with Second International and Stalinized interpretations. As always, it is important to stress the radical difference between Marx’s own views and those who have appropriated his heritage. As I have suggested, unlike most versions of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, Marx’s own account of the Development Thesis commits us only to the notion that the forces of production associated with different modes of society (not every empirical society) have a certain general tendency towards cumulative development, where ‘progress’ is defined not in moral terms (as progress in civilization), but rather in terms of an increasing yield of economic output from a given expenditure of social labour.112 According to Marx, it is this dynamic of productive force development which underpins and which allows the development of other socio-cultural forms. Understood thus, Marx’s Development Thesis does not, contrary to Spybey, add up to the proposition that every society (or most societies) must follow the path of economic ‘progress’, irrespective of the specificity of their historical situation or material circumstances.113 Tendencies or trajectories or even impulses of societal development are not the same thing as immutable historical laws leading to certain or predictable results. Communities of human beings (or rather the leaders or elders of communities) can always choose or undergo directional guidance to do otherwise. This is especially the case where specific historical conditions act to compromise the sensibleness of such development, and thereby operate to negate or countervail this general trend of human social agency. For example, anthropologists and archaeologists have shown that most of the earliest hunter-gatherer societies did not make the transition to horticulture or pasturage for many hundreds of thousands of years (and some, of course, not at all). The natural environment of our hominid and early modern ancestors was sufficiently plentiful in foodstuffs and other raw materials to support what Marshall Sahlins has described as a ‘relative abundance’ (in the context of societies where relatively low wants–expectations were culturally institutionalized), which did not require the expenditure of a prohibitive burden of socially necessary labour.114 So long as population pressures did not threaten the food supply, there was no great pressure on the direct producers to seek improvements in the productivity or output of their labour, and few rational reasons why they should do so. With gradual climatic changes, population growth, and the displacement of human communities to all corners of the globe, however, these circumstances could not persist indefinitely. Faced by competition from other societies, and by an increasingly recalcitrant nature (i.e. gradual climatic cooling with attendant gradual depletion of natural foodstuffs such as wild fruits and grains and deer), some hunter-gatherer peoples were bound to seek consciously to improve their techniques and methods of labour. And some of these were bound to eventually make the breakthrough into horticulture or pasturage.115

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Yet horticultural social relations were not introduced by innovative human agents out of any preconception on their part that these were culturally superior to hunter-gatherer social relations, or that these would generate ‘progress’ in civilization. Rather, under pressure from circumstances, and having the interest and capability to alter the labour process so as to increase their means of livelihood, hunter-gatherer peoples introduced molecular and cumulative alterations in their mode of subsistence, whose unintended consequence was the undermining of the old ways of acquiring wealth. Conversely, those innumerable huntergatherer societies which never did make the transition to horticulture or pasturage, did not normally fail to do so because they simply ‘chose’ (as for example Spybey’s voluntarist account implies)116 not to plant subsistence crops or rear animals. On the contrary, their ‘failure’ to develop tended rather more to result from the prohibitive nature of the physical environment within which they found themselves. The aboriginals of Australia, for instance, probably remained hunter-gatherers due to the scarcity of indigenous plants suitable for cultivation and animals suitable for pasturage in the outback. To transform mere adaptation to the environment into the cumulative modification of nature in the service of human needs requires a ‘somewhat cooperative’ nature as well as Cohen’s ‘somewhat rational’ human beings. This is why the earliest horticultural and agricultural societies, class-divided city states and ‘traditional’ civilizations mostly emerged in river deltas or valleys where there was an abundance of fertile land suitable for agrarian production involving very basic techniques.117 Where material or environmental circumstances are conducive to economic development, there can be no doubt there exists a definite tendency for such development to occur. Horticultural communities did, as a matter of historical record, appear spontaneously and independently of one another, first in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, then at different points in history ‘in Meso-America, (present day Mexico and Guatemala), the Andean region of South America, in at least three distinct parts of Africa, in Indochina, in the Highland valleys of Papua New Guinea, and in China’.118 This same dynamic of internal socio-economic development eventually transformed many of these early agricultural settlements into the first towns and cities and imperial states, as the growing agricultural surplus allowed an unproductive elite stratum (originally the priesthoods who administered the vast grain stores) to emerge and assume control of society, and the proliferation of new urban-based nonagricultural occupations, both of which were freed from dependence on the land.119 Another good example of Marx’s Development Thesis ‘in action’, so to speak, is the historical movement from agrarian class societies rooted in peasant (tax and rent) exploitation to industrial capitalist societies rooted in wageexploitation. In both the feudal societies characteristic of medieval Europe and India (in the early medieval period) and the assorted ‘tributary’ states and empires which existed alongside feudalism in Asia, North Africa and the Americas,120 historians and economists have noted the existence of a very definite ‘combined but uneven development’ of forces of production, a certain conver-

Socio-historical materialism 187 gence of different economies and peoples following a similar path of ‘progress’, albeit at a varying pace and tempo prior to the full flowering of capitalist social relations in north-west Europe. This pattern can be observed as a global master trend of development, despite the rise and fall of particular civilizations, and despite the ebbs and flows of particular regional power centres. The essential material preconditions of industrial capitalism (a technologically advanced agricultural sector, a growing manufacturing sector, a degree of mechanization, a specialized division of labour, a monetary and credit system, embryonic commodity production, a class of merchant capitalists, a smaller class of industrialists and the first elements of a class of propertyless wagelabourers) became a globally dispersed phenomenon from as early as the late fourteenth century. The economic infrastructure that would support capitalism existed in various regions of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.121 By the seventeenth century these were firmly consolidated, having emerged from steady productive force evolution in the medieval period. Previously these developments were confined to particular advanced enclaves, especially in China, which made these innovations (and others such as book printing, paper manufacture and iron casting) many centuries before Europe, but also in India at a later date.122 For the first time the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa were interlinked by commercial transactions, supported by developments in transport technology (better ships and better navigational skills). Venice emerged as the centre of a European ‘world’ economy, challenging the monopoly enjoyed by the Islamic Empire on eastern trade, and the Islamic world consolidated its trade with the city-states of Africa.123 These changes were brought into being by molecular changes in the means of wealth-creation and in the productivity of social labour. And they were pioneered by class agents with the vision to recognize (and the opportunity to exploit), in the changing material conditions, the possibility of establishing new modes of wealth-creation which might take production forward (and in doing so enrich and empower themselves). But it is important to reiterate that Marx’s productive force evolutionism does not, contrary to the fashionable neo-Weberian critique, propose that every society must undergo this kind of economic development. What it does mean, however, is that some societies belonging to each major societal type (i.e. hunter-gatherer, pastoral, horticultural, feudal, tributary, etc.) will eventually be associated with a certain cumulative development of the labour-process, at least within the fetters imposed by their respective relations of production and the politico-ideological superstructures which exist to defend them. Even if a majority of actual historical societies never started along this road of economic development (or found it road-blocked by unfavourable historical events or circumstances), Marx’s general tendential law would still not be invalidated. For it is necessary only for a minority of representatives of each societal type to make the necessary innovations to take the forces of production of humankind to a higher stage of development. Moreover, where a minority of societies do succeed in making the breakthrough from pre-class social relations to class-divided social relations, from

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hunter-gatherer and horticultural modes of wealth-creation to agriculture proper or even industry, the very fact they have done so serves to strengthen the general trend or tendency of the forces of production to develop. The reason for this is that such (class) societies will tend to thrive economically (and hence militarily). So eventually they reach the point of being able to dominate those societies where the forces of production have been fettered by (relatively unproductive) egalitarian social relations, which function to disperse the wealth of society too thinly and widely amongst the societal community, or which exploit the direct producers relatively inefficiently, hence preventing the accumulation of a substantial surplus. Once initiated by a handful of societies (at varying stages of evolution), a knock-on effect of economic development radiates outward from the more advanced societies to the less developed ones, and from these societies to other societies, and so on, partly motivated by the desire of agents of pre-class societies (or the agents of less developed class societies) to escape colonization or displacement by more powerful imperial states, and partly from the brute fact of imperial conquest itself. Thus, in this way, an initially weak and fitful (though definite) developmental tendency steadily gathers momentum, until it becomes an increasingly global ‘master-trend’ trend of human society. The argument is well summarized by Chris Harman: [V]ery few societies moved on from the stage of ‘barbarism’ to that of ‘civilisation’; but many of those that did not were enslaved by those that did. Again, feudal barons and oriental ‘despotic’ gentry were usually able to beat back the challenge of urban tradesmen and merchants; but this did not stop them from being overwhelmed by the wave of capitalism that spread out from the western fringe of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It did not matter, at the end of the day, how grandiose or elaborate the superstructure of any society was. It rested on a ‘base’ in material production. If it prevented this base from developing, then the superstructure itself was eventually doomed.124 The final major difficulty with the neo-Weberian rejection of the Development Thesis centres upon the reactionary political consequences that stem from it. Once we recognize that Marx’s theory of history was not intended as a ‘supra-historical’ schema into which all peoples had to be fitted ‘irrespective of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves’,125 then we are left with an approach which accords perfectly with commonsense. One should always treat commonsense with caution, and recognize that it can sometimes be deceptive or misleading (as Engels once famously put it).126 Nonetheless one should be sure not to depart company from it altogether (or at least should ensure that one has good reasons for doing so). But, by rejecting commonsense, the more facile neo-Weberian critics of socio-historical materialism effectively deny the reality of the cumulative economic development that has undoubtedly occurred across different modes of society. Moreover, their denial of the idea of ‘progress’ (defined here as the

Socio-historical materialism 189 development of economic resources which allow the possibility of an increase in the living standards of the global human populace) sponsors a highly irresponsible and permissive ‘postmodern’ attitude to issues of development and underdevelopment in the contemporary world. This attitude is highly congenial to the vested social interests of powerful elites. Thus: backwardness and poverty in the underdeveloped world magically become ‘cultural diversity’; and archaic modes of exploitation and oppression become exotic ‘ways of living’, which should not be criticized by those socialized into ‘Eurocentric language games’. This kind of ‘postmodern’ multiculturalism is rooted in an implicit denial (or obfuscation) of the fact that real human emancipation depends upon freedom from necessity, which in turn depends on the development of the forces of production and attendant socialist reorganization of relations of production. Not only is this viewpoint a form of idealism, but also a pernicious idealism at that. For in the guise of attacking Eurocentrism, it is blind to the real struggles of human beings to render their material conditions of life more habitable, and tolerant towards social structures and social interests which obstruct this struggle. In reality, of course, if it were true that human societies had generally been content to sit back and make ‘socio-political decisions . . . to keep their needs and demands within their limited productive capacity’,127 as is claimed for example by Tony Spybey, there would have been no consistent societal elaboration across successive modes of production. In fact, there would have been no successive modes of production, no development of production, no history. Instead there would have been nothing but structural and cultural reproduction at a given level ad infinitum. In other words, Spybey’s account scores points against technological determinism, to be sure, but at the heavy price of rendering itself incapable of explaining why development occurs, why change isn’t simply directionless. The toilers, workers and peasants of the ‘Third World’ will continue to struggle, against desperately unfavourable odds, to increase their means of livelihood against the express orders of a certain species of western academicus supercilious. But neo-Weberians are not alone in their (not consistently followed) rejection of ‘evolutionism’. In fact, another critique of the Development Thesis has come from an unexpected quarter, that is, from some contemporary Marxists. Alex Callinicos, for instance, draws attention to the incapacity of G.A. Cohen’s appeal to ‘the enduring facts of human nature’ (i.e. his trans-historical ‘rationality principle’) to bear the weight of a strong form of economic evolutionism. Callinicos argues: [My] argument is incompatible with Cohen’s claim that the development of the productive forces is a consequence of the ‘enduring facts of human nature’ – human beings’ rationality and capacity to innovate leading to such development in circumstances of scarcity. This is not so much to deny for example that actors are ‘somewhat rational’ but rather to assert that what it is rational to do will depend on their specific location within relations of production. The development of the productive forces arises not from some transhistorical principle of human conduct.128

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Paradoxically, or so it might seem, I am inclined to both agree and disagree with Callinicos’s argument. Insofar as his assertion is that ‘the enduring facts of human nature’ (in particular human rationality and creativity) cannot alone carry the burden of sociological and historical explanation, he is undoubtedly correct, and only methodological individualists would dispute his view. As it stands, Cohen’s version of the Development Thesis sponsors an untenable reductionism, which collapses both social structure and human agency into human nature and attendant ‘subjectivities’. But, in his efforts to depart from an under-constrained conception of agency, Callinicos seems to me to bend the stick too far in the other direction. For in effect he argues that the absence or presence of any development of the forces of production in a society is dependent upon the structural configuration of the specific relations of production and the superstructural relations which correspond to these. It is this viewpoint which encourages Callinicos to endorse Robert Brenner’s curious argument that technological innovation in labour-saving techniques and methods can only occur in capitalist relations of production, where the competitive structure of ‘many capitals’ and commodity production and exchange exert systematic pressure upon economic agents to do so.129 Elsewhere, in pre-capitalist modes of production, which lack these structural pressures, so the argument runs, extensive or quantitative growth of the forces of production must always be minimal, and intensive and qualitative growth (i.e. an increase in labour productivity and labour-saving technology) must be non-existent. The problem with this latter argument is twofold. First, it is flatly refuted by most reliable empirical and historical evidence. For example, historians and sociologists have shown that the forces of production of medieval feudalism in Western Europe, over a period of several centuries, most definitely did undergo a substantial extensive growth and a minimal but very significant increase in the productivity of social labour, in part stimulated by the putting to ‘industrial use technical devices which in classical society had been known but left almost unused or regarded simply as toys’.130 The heavy-wheeled plough, the three-field system, the modern horse harness, nailed horse shoes and the water mill were important technological innovations introduced or brought into general use in these societies between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, helping to raise annual grain yields from 2:1 in the ninth century to 4:1 by the twelfth century, and leading to a ‘general rise in productivity [during this period] . . . of 100 per cent’.131 This was a rate of intensive growth unmatched by any other pre-capitalist class society. Although levels of annual investment in economic production in feudalism were low by capitalist standards, they were very real. ‘Four to five percent of revenues went into gross investment and a level of one to two percent [was] quite representative.’132 As one historian observes: ‘The prime event in Europe’s history during the early middle ages was the development . . . of a novel system of agriculture appropriate to the northern lands. As the elements of it emerged, consolidated into a new pattern of cultivation and spread, it proved to be the most productive agrarian method, in relation to manpower, the world

Socio-historical materialism 191 had seen.’133 And as another puts it: ‘A great change in productivity, the only one in history until the great advances of the 18th and 19th centuries, occurred in Western Europe between the Carolingian period and the dawn of the 13th century’.134 Second, it is only by recognizing the real quantitative and qualitative growth in the forces of production under feudalism that we can explain an elementary historical fact that must appear baffling to those who deny its possibility. I refer to the capability of (initially) backward northwest Europe to subordinate or break the power of societies (i.e. the tributary states of south-east Africa, the Americas, China and Islam), which had once been either centuries in advance of it, or at an equivalent level of development in terms of economic (and hence military) capacity.135 Third, these elementary empirical failures of Callinicos’s argument are symptomatic of a conceptual error, which is the precise opposite of Cohen’s. This is the collapse of social agency and human interests and capacities into social structures. The fact that a very real development of economic output and productivity occurred in feudal Europe, despite structural relations which did not in any meaningful sense dictate it, shows that the rational imperative of human interests is sufficient to impart a certain upward directionality to productive force development, irrespective of the mediation of unfavourable social forms. This should not be taken to mean that pre-capitalist relations of production did not generate social and class interests (as well as human ones) in raising the productivity and output of social labour. Certainly, feudal relations of production, contrary to Callinicos, did not act to retard the development of the forces of production as radically as Brenner believes: feudal lords had a definite class interest in increasing the surplus-product, which translated into a weak interest in increasing the productivity of serf-labour; and the serfs, insofar as they tended to enjoy a certain limited control over their own labour-process, could often translate improvements in technique and output into a lesser burden of toil or even expanded consumption for themselves (although they had to fight for it). The rational kernel of Cohen’s version of the Development Thesis is his recognition that the ‘enduring facts of human nature’ have an explanatory role in accounting for societal development, social structure and social agency: human beings are ‘somewhat rational’ social producers with a general interest in developing their economic resources. This does not commit us to Cohen’s dogmatic belief that the forces of production must develop, or that periods of regression in economic production are examples of historical pathology which are ‘counterevidence to the Marxist theory of history’,136 or that social structures cannot conceivably exist which successfully retard this tendency of social labour (for example by prescribing with rigid religious or legal rules how every act of production should take place). But it does allow us to avoid the equally extreme and opposite view that only structures which coerce social agents into improving their methods of labour can develop material production. (After all, even in capitalism scientists seek to improve productive techniques for reasons other than the pursuit of profit or the enrichment of elites.)

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Surely one of the reasons Marx believed in the progressiveness of socialism was its capacity to remove the class fetters on the rational imperative or interests of the direct producers to meet and develop their material needs. By removing the stranglehold of class relations upon the direct producers, ‘somewhat rational’ human beings would be relatively unconstrained to develop the forces of production in accordance with democratic decisions made on the basis of human needs and interests. A rejection of Cohen’s teleological interpretation of the Development Thesis does not mean that we should reject productive force evolutionism altogether. One can account for the pervasive influence of structure on agency, and vice versa, without collapsing one into the other. I have said that Marx’s theory of history hinges crucially on the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and on the conflict between social classes, not simply on the developmental dynamic of forces of production. That is to say, socio-historical materialism is (or can be legitimately understood as being) committed to a number of additional theses other than the Development Thesis. To reiterate, these are: 2 3 4 5 6

the Compatibility Thesis; the Contradiction Thesis; the Transformation Thesis; the Optimality Thesis; and the Capacity Thesis.

Together these constitute a theorization of the dynamic ‘interconnection between the tendency for the productive forces to develop and the relations of production within which these forces of production are used’.137 The Development Thesis outlined above is precisely designed to account for the way in which the dynamic tendency of a privileged mode of social agency (social labour) and of social structure (the forces of production inherited by each generation of social agents) interact in bringing about system elaboration. The purpose of the remaining theses, by contrast, is to explain the manner in which the small-scale molecular changes engendered in the social structure by the interface between social labour and forces of production (system elaboration) gives rise at a certain stage of their development to the wholesale transformation of the existing social system (the overthrow of a given set of relations of production by class agents pioneering new forces of production). As I have suggested earlier, it seems to me that the only real difficulty with these distinct propositions lies in the manner of their appropriation by those ‘orthodox’ Marxists (i.e. Plekhanov, Kautsky, Cohen, et al.) who subscribe to one or other form of economic determinism. Either these theses can be seen as postulating determinate laws of historical movement or they can be regarded as embodying real dynamic tendencies of societal development. In what follows I will offer a reasoned defence of the second interpretation, primarily (but not exclusively) by means of a critical appraisal of Cohen’s framing of these interrelated hypotheses. The test cases of the transition from feudalism to capitalism,

Socio-historical materialism 193 and of the absence of capitalist industrialization in tributary modes of society, will be utilized to demonstrate the interplay between material structure (the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production) and material agency (social labour and class struggle) in bringing about system transformation or reproduction. 2 The Compatibility Thesis The Compatibility Thesis is the least controversial hypothesis of those listed above, and so I will not use up too much space in elaborating it. According to Levine’s interpretation of Cohen, the Compatibility Thesis involves the claim that ‘[a] given level of development of the productive forces is compatible with only a limited range of relations of production.’138 Thus, relations of production are compatible with forces of production where they enable a certain scope for development of labour productivity and economic output and incompatible where they do not. For example, a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence is compatible only with social relations based upon food-sharing and the egalitarian distribution of the social product, since any other mode of social co-operation and economic distribution would compromise the capability of the band to reproduce itself within its narrowly circumscribed material means. Slash and burn agriculture, to offer another example, is incompatible with feudal, slave or tributary social relations, for these rely upon a nomadic lifestyle which is antithetical to the concept of private (or state) possession of landed property. And an agrarian economy (i.e. forces of production rooted solely in agricultural production), to offer one last example, is compatible with horticultural, petty smallholding, tributary and feudal relations of production, but not with fully fledged capitalist or socialist relations of production. This is because the former requires a more developed division of labour and level of tradable surplus than can be provided by purely agrarian social relations, and the latter requires a level of development of the forces of production (beyond the ken of non-industrial societies) sufficient to abolish economic scarcity. Although some neo-Weberian scholars, most notably Anthony Giddens, have rejected this Compatibility Thesis, their reasons for doing so tend to be based upon a misapprehension of its meaning. Giddens’ objection to the Compatibility Thesis – ‘political systems are not, as Marx argues, expressions of underlying economic organization, [since] quite different types of political order may exist in societies which have similar production systems’139 – is precisely illustrative of this confusion. Yet it seems obvious enough, contrary to Giddens, that Marx is committed only to the notion that forces of production constrain and enable (but do not determine) relations of production, and hence modes of political order. There is nothing in the Compatibility Thesis, thus understood, which indicates that particular forces of production are compatible with only a singular form of relations of production or an invariant mode of political domination.

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3 The Contradiction Thesis Levine’s interpretation of Cohen’s (and I would argue Marx’s) Contradiction Thesis (‘the productive forces will develop to a point where they are no longer compatible with – where they contradict – the relations of production under which they had previously developed’)140 appears to me to be almost as uncontentious as the above argument. This primary structural contradiction of classbased modes of production, which comprises the structural antagonism between classes, is a classic example of what dialectical critical realist Bhaskar would identify as simultaneously an internal and dialectical contradiction of social systems. This is an internal contradiction, in the Bhaskarian sense,141 since the fundamental incompatibility between forces of production and relations of production in class society is precisely based on self-constraint. Forces of production are locked in an internally generated double bind with relations of production whereby the motion or development of one element negates or ‘absents’ the other. This also makes the Contradiction Thesis a specification of the chief dialectical contradiction of class-divided social systems. Dialectical contradictions, for dialectical critical realist Bhaskar, are radicalized internal contradictions. These are internal contradictions based on entities that are distinct yet inseparable elements of a totality. These are contradictory entities which existentially presuppose each other.142 There can be no relations of production without forces of production or vice versa. Nor can there be capital without wage-labour or vice versa. The relations between these elements is dialectically contradictory because, within classdivided social structures, these are also a unity of opposites or antagonisms. On the one hand, forces of production presuppose forms of property relations (in class societies hierarchic property relations), whereas conversely there can be no relations of production unless there are forces of production to exploit or develop. But, at the same time, any configuration of hierarchic property relations (although essential to economic development) acts to block the economic processes and logics these provide enabling conditions for and help animate. On the other hand, capital is exploitive of and parasitic on wage-labour yet under capitalism is the provider of life-supporting employment opportunities for workers. Yet, equally, wage-labour is the source of capital and of its own subordination to capital, and thus of the self-negation of properly human labour, i.e. the self-alienation of co-operative labour. In social systems rooted in classdivided relations of production, the internal and dialectical contradictions are also potentially Bhaskar’s radical or transformative negations.143 For the structural malintegrations (between forces of production and relations of production) feed into social malintegration (conflicts between social classes for control of society), which in turn open up pathways to a new social organization that overcomes the systemic fault-lines of the previous one. I will return to these issues below. As a logical outgrowth of the Development Thesis and the Compatibility Thesis, the Contradiction Thesis requires little further clarification or defence

Socio-historical materialism 195 here. Given the accuracy of Marx’s contention that the forces of production have a tendency towards cumulative development, and that productive force development is compatible with only a limited range of relations of production, it is inevitable that at some point the latter will fetter or constrain the former. The problem with the Contradiction Thesis, it is often claimed, lies less in this basic premise and more in the question of how the core structural contradictions specified by socio-historical materialism (i.e. those between forces of production and relations of production and within class structure) are related.144 In other words, a central unresolved task of contemporary Marxist theory is said to involve reconciling Marx’s claim that ‘class struggle is the motor of history’145 with his corresponding belief that the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production is the primary stimulant of social transformation.146 Contrary to the views of some Marxists, most notably Perry Anderson,147 it does seem to me that the Contradiction Thesis does offer the beginnings of a purchase on this question. Of what does this consist? First, in class-divided societies, the grossly asymmetrical distribution of the social product and the sharply contested frontier of control at the point of production always encourages an ongoing process of class conflict between exploiters and exploited (social malintegration) which has the potential (given the appropriate structural conditions) to destabilize and subvert the social system. For example, the periodic peasant revolts of the feudal societies of the Middle Ages in Western Europe were an important factor in weakening the politico-military power of the lords over landed property and freeing the peasantry from serfdom. These developments provided one necessary precondition for the development of agrarian capitalism in the countryside and the growth of the towns as centres of trade and manufacture (and of ideological and political dissent against the ancien regime) independent of the feudal social structure.148 Second, class-based relations of production always operate to freeze or fix the scope for development of the forces of production within limits pre-structured by the specific and often narrow (albeit structurally defined) social interests of the exploiting class (system malintegration). By doing so, they stifle economic innovation and engender an organic or generalized crisis of the existing dominant mode of production. For example, the structural organization of feudal relations of production (which allowed the lords to appropriate as much as 50 per cent of the wealth of a poor subsistence economy) generated periodic stagnation and breakdown of the forces of production. This in turn encouraged an exacerbation of the social conflict between classes.149 Thus, the Contradiction Thesis postulates that the dialectical nature of class-based relations of production generates a strong tendency towards the periodic conjuncture of system and social malintegration. The manner in which the ensuing organic crisis is resolved, and hence how the future trajectory of society is determined, will then depend upon the massive political and ideological (and sometimes military) struggles waged between rival collective (class) agents. But there is another aspect of Marx’s version of the Contradiction Thesis that needs to be highlighted. For if the internal-dialectical contradictions of modes of

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production are to generate revolutionary social struggles it is necessary for these to become generalized into wider ruptures in the social relations between base and superstructure. Now the internal and dialectical contradictions of class-based modes of production ensure that the relations between base and superstructure in the wider society or social system are also contradictory. Superstructural forms or functions (the non-economic roles or aspects of social institutions) are rooted in and emergent from structural (i.e. economic) forms that are inherently self-negating. This renders them a species or class of dialectical critical realist Bhaskar’s external contradictions. As I suggested in Chapter 1, translated into social ontology, Bhaskar’s concept of external contradictions refers us to the inter-relations that exist between structures of a given social system or social formation (e.g. the polity, education system, mass media, family, etc.). These are not relations of mutual presupposition (such as those of forces of production/relations of production or capital/wagelabour). So the contradictions they articulate are not internal or dialectical ones. Rather, these are contingently related social and cultural forms (or historically developed relations between social or cultural structures). Nonetheless they are linked as aspects of a total system but also are mutually incompatible in crucial respects. Superstructural institutions in class societies are shaped disproportionately by the vested interests and worldviews of the superordinate class. Such institutions will normally act to fix or stabilize the relations of production. This is often by means of ideological legitimation or by the suppression of radical dissent – whether by political persecution or (especially under late capitalism) the screening out of ‘dangerous’ opinion from the media. But, because these socio-cultural forms are based on self-contradictory economic forms, they too will inevitably express the contradictions and struggles of real life. As such, political and ideological and cultural forms will also express in some form the interests and experiences and aspirations of the subordinate classes. Normally this will be muted, since those agents who specialize in cultural and ideological production usually receive their patronage from the propertied elites, and are privileged class agents in their own right. However, this is not always the case, especially in circumstances where structural malintegration (the fettering of forces of production by relations of production) has developed into full-fledged social malintegration (an intensifying level of political and ideological conflict between owning and non-owing classes). In such circumstances, i.e. in the context of a systemic crisis of social relations, the structural-level contradictions may fracture the superstructural forms (politics and ideology) that would normally manage or stabilize them. This is what makes possible the radical transformative negation of social systems. 4 The Transformation Thesis If Cohen’s interpretation of Marx’s Compatibility and Contradiction Theses appears unproblematic enough, the same certainly cannot be said for the remain-

Socio-historical materialism 197 der of his theses. Consider, in the first place, Cohen’s interpretation of the Transformation Thesis. As we have seen, for him, ‘a given level of development of the productive forces is compatible with only a limited range of relations of production’, and ‘the productive forces will develop to a point where they . . . contradict . . . the relations of production under which they had previously developed’. The next step in Cohen’s argument (as Levine rightly understands it) is the proposition that ‘the relations [of production] will [my emphasis] change in a way which re-establishes compatibility between them [i.e. between forces of production and relations of production]’.150 This is, of course, a statement of technological determinism. Where there is a contradiction between forces of production and relations of production, on this view, the former will always act to transform the latter and so re-establish harmony between them: contradiction is always resolved in favour of the overthrow of relations of production which fetter forces of production. So Cohen’s approach pays lip-service to dialectics, before banishing them in practice. This is because his approach not only treats one element of the social structure – the forces of production – as the only dynamic element, but also as one which must prevail. Yet Cohen’s argument is refuted by historical facts. For there have undoubtedly been societies whose relations of production and attendant politico-ideological superstructures have succeeded in completely stifling forces of production, engendering societal stagnancy and even disintegration, rather than resulting in the revolutionary overhaul of the relations of production by the forces of production. This, for example, is what happened to a variety of Bronze Age civilizations,151 to the Chinese Empire between AD 1400–1800,152 to the Roman Empire between AD 150–400153 and to large swathes of Europe during the ‘Dark Ages’ between the fifth and seventh centuries AD.154 The Transformation Thesis is not, however, beyond redemption. For it can, in fact, be defended successfully in a non-determinist caste that is consistent with Marx’s general approach. How does this work? I have two key arguments here. First, given the veracity of the Development Thesis, the Compatibility Thesis and the Contradiction Thesis, human agents in class relations will come under systematic pressure (during a period of conjuncture between social and system malintegration) to organize collectively in pursuit of a radical reform or overhaul of the existing social system. Second, given the destabilization of society by the conjuncture of maturing structural contradictions, those class agents who are organized in opposition to existing relations of production (i.e. the members and supporters of the exploited class or of a newly emerging propertied class) will stand at least a reasonable chance (and often a very good one) of ushering in a radical transformation of the social system. Class-based relations of production fetter or contradict the development of the forces of production within limits prescribed by their own internal organization and the partial or narrow social interests they operate to protect (malintegration and breakdown). This structural contradiction tends to exacerbate or intensify the social conflict between rival exploiting and exploited classes (social malintegration). So class agents, under pressure from events and invested with

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urgent imperatives or interests in seeking to resolve the organic crisis, will precisely seek to do so, forming themselves into political organizations or social movements (i.e. corporate agents) which attempt to resolve the structural contradictions in their favour. But the periodic conjuncture of structural contradictions which are endemic to class-divided societies (the organic or systemic crisis) functions not only to exert a certain pressure upon class agents to articulate and struggle for a different kind of society (which appears to offer some prospect of relieving the existing contradictions). They also serve to weaken the existing structure of social relations, rendering it vulnerable to overthrow by organized class agents with a vested social interest in doing so. Structural contradictions, once they have matured into chronic system and social malintegration, thereby encourage a powerful tendency to manifest the radical social and class struggles (i.e. revolutionary upsurges) necessary to transform or overturn an existing social system. The Transformation Thesis, thus understood, addresses our attention to two transformative dialectical mechanisms of class-based social systems. First, the structural pressures which class-divided relations of production generate towards their own dissolution or overhaul. Second, the real objective potential of collective class agency (given the appropriate political organization and leadership) during an epoch of systemic crisis in bringing about structural transformation. It does not, by contrast, insist on the inevitability of the overthrow of outmoded relations of production by class agents bearing new forces of production. As Marx himself pointed out, there can be ‘the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large’ (e.g. the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the West), or ‘the common ruination of the contending classes’.155 5 The Optimality Thesis As summarized by Levine, Cohen’s interpretation of the Optimality Thesis (‘[w]hen a given set of relations of production become fetters on the further development of the productive forces and are transformed . . . they will be replaced by relations of production which are functionally optimal for the further development of the productive forces’)156 is inadequate for exactly the same reason as his Transformation Thesis. For there is nothing in the previous arguments elaborated above which justifies such a strong claim. The Transformation Thesis, in harness with the Development Thesis, the Compatibility Thesis and the Contradiction Thesis, does not guarantee that the replacement of one set of relations of production by another must allow the further development of the forces of production beyond the limitations or crisis-tendencies predetermined by the previous social system. It is, in fact, quite feasible that one set of relations of production might be replaced by another set of relations of production which does not succeed in unfettering the forces of production. There are, of course, many examples of former horticultural or agricultural societies which withdrew into a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. Moreover, it was perfectly possible that the periodic crises of the feudal mode might have resolved themselves in favour of petty-smallholding rather than capitalism.157

Socio-historical materialism 199 Nonetheless, given the veracity of the (revised) hypotheses I have elaborated above, it is reasonable to argue two crucial points. First, that systemic crises, by pressurizing class agents to struggle to rationally apprehend or confront the structural contradictions they face, generate the objective (i.e. socially conditioned) potential that solutions that will cure or at least ease the existing contradictions will be rigorously sought out by those with a vested social interest in doing so. This, for example, is exactly what did happen during the English and French revolutions, as the plethora of radical and moderate religious and other sects, political clubs and social movements thrown up by these tumultuous events sought to theorize the future trajectory of society and to act upon their theories.158 Second, given also that class polarization and conflict engendered by the systemic crisis serves to radicalize existing social and system contradictions, throwing the pathologies and irrationalities of society into sharp relief, rendering transparent the class aspect of social relations, there is a strong tendency that those solutions to the existing contradictions which are actively being sought will be ‘discovered’. Such innovations are those of individuals or groups who are talented enough to comprehend the ‘needs’ of the epoch and who are well enough placed to influence the modes of collective agency (political parties, social movements, revolutionary armies, workplace organizations, etc.) required to replace the old relations of production and corresponding superstructural forms with ones which allow the possibility of renewed economic advance in the evolutionary typology. There is, in short, a certain tendency for structural transformation to re-establish (a provisional and temporary) compatibility between forces of production and relations of production, hence enabling the further development of material production beyond the limits set hitherto. 6 The Capacity Thesis All of this brings me on to Cohen’s Capacity Thesis. Levine rightly summarizes Cohen’s view as expressing the idea that ‘[w]here there is an “objective” interest in progressive social change, the capacity for bringing that change about will ultimately be brought into being’.159 This is the most contentious aspect of Cohen’s reconstruction of socio-historical materialism. Cohen’s argument here is that the Capacity Thesis functions to specify the mechanism by which the Contradiction Thesis is related to the Transformation Thesis and the Optimality Thesis (i.e. the selection of appropriate relations of production by hitherto fettered or road-blocked forces of production). Forces of production ‘select’ compatible or functional relations of production by bringing into being and setting into motion the social (i.e. class) forces which are the agents of ‘optimal’ (i.e. progressive) structural transformation. Cohen articulates his defence of the Capacity Thesis as follows: if we want to know why class struggle effects this change rather than that, we must turn to the dialectic of forces and relations of production which governs class behaviour and is not explainable in terms of it, and which

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Socio-historical materialism determines what the long-term outcome of class struggle will be. . . . [T]he ground of the Marxian claim that the advent of socialism is inevitable is that a sufficient number of workers are so placed that the rational thing for them to do is to strive to bring socialism about. When capitalism is in decline, and socialism is possible, there are bound to be so many workers who have good reasons for joining the fight against capitalism that a successful socialist revolution will inevitably ensue [my emphasis].160

So the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production, for Cohen, determines what it is rational for class agents to do in any societal context. The direct producers, being ‘somewhat rational’, and endowed with the capacity to overturn existing relations of production, will then act (i.e. engage in revolutionary class struggle) to bring about the optimal realignment of relations of production with forces of production. But the main problem with Cohen’s argument here, aside from his tendency to regard social malintegration (class struggle) as epiphenomenal to system malintegration (the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production), is the excessive degree of explanatory weight he attempts to load onto social agency and human nature in determining structural outcomes. Paradoxically, having insisted upon reducing class struggles and their results to the developmental logic of the forces of production (arguably a pretty extreme form of structural determinism), Cohen can only square this argument by appealing to the ‘enduring facts of human nature’ in rendering progressive systemic transformations historically inevitable (an equally radical form of humanism and voluntarism). Thus, he claims that ‘people are too rational to allow barbarism to occur when they can choose [my emphasis] socialism’.161 However, contrary to Cohen’s view, it should be obvious enough that human agents (rational or otherwise) can never simply choose to usher in relations of production which restore compatibility between these and forces of production. In reality, of course, they will always be confronted with powerful ideological barriers to the realization of their objective interests (the pressure of tradition and dominant values, the marginalization of radical ideas in ‘official’ channels, etc.). And their class struggles can always be undone by the politico-military machinery of dominant elites (especially if the ‘progressive’ classes are poorly led and organized). In short, then, Cohen’s undialectical approach neglects the role of the ‘superstructure’ in preventing the forces of production successfully rebelling against the relations of production. The Capacity Thesis, as it stands, thus underwrites a purely formal solution to the problem of how the structural contradictions of society give rise to systemic transformations which enable the unfettering of the forces of production. The gap between the Contradiction Thesis and the Transformation and Optimality Theses is bridged only by resorting to the metaphysical assertion that human agents with objective interests in ushering in new relations of production which unblock the development of material production must always possess the ‘structural capacities’ to act in ways which generate this happy result. But, as Levine rightly

Socio-historical materialism 201 observes, ‘class capacities for struggle – the organizational, ideological and material resources available to class agents – are not identical to class interests in the outcomes of struggle’. This means ‘there is no necessary connection between the development of an objective interest in epochal social change and the development of class capacities for bringing about epochal transformations’.162 These conceptual and logical problems of Cohen’s version of the Capacity Thesis doubtless explain its elementary empirical-historical failings. Consider the example of the tributary mode of production. It is a commonplace that the tributary mode of production that dominated North Africa, the Middle East and major parts of Southeast Asia during the heyday of feudalism in Western Europe did not transform itself into the capitalist mode.163 Most likely it was not capable of doing so. Why was it not? Certainly, not because the ‘Asiatic’ societies lacked the ‘missing link’ of an appropriate religious ideology conducive to capitalist development, as, for instance, Max Weber would have it.164 Classical Islam was far more commercialistic in its orientation than medieval Catholicism; medieval Catholicism was no more and no less incompatible with capitalism than Hinduism and Confucianism. Nor was it simply because the forces of production of the tributary mode were unable to support capitalist socio-economic relations. For, although this is an important element of the explanation, it begs more questions than it answers. Why, for example, did the tributary mode fetter the forces of production to a greater extent than the feudal mode? In fact, as I have already suggested, it was the structural configuration of tributary relations of production which explains the ‘failure’ of the ‘Asiatic’ societies to undergo internally generated capitalist industrialization of the kind which occurred in Western Europe. Unlike in medieval feudalism, the structural contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and between exploiting and exploited classes here did not allow agents the ‘structural (i.e. class) capacities’ to resolve the periodic outbreak of chronic crisis in favour of capitalist development and bourgeois revolution. There were a number of reasons for this. First, because tributary relations of production effectively centralized politico-military power in the hands of a relatively homogeneous state class, there was always the potential for dominant elites to manage or suppress (within limits) the structural contradictions of the tributary mode and the impact of the systemic crises which stemmed from them. Local feudal landlords in the tributary societies (who were themselves often integrated into the state bureaucracy) always had the backing of a powerful ‘external’ force in putting down local peasant rebellions and in crushing or curtailing independent commercial interests in their infancy.165 The state could also function here to regulate to a certain extent potentially disruptive intra-class rivalries within the landowning class itself, arresting the ever-present threat of latent system disintegration.166 And the tributary state, by virtue of its urban locale and cohesive centralized bureaucratic and military apparatus, could tightly police independent commercial activity within the towns and cities and beyond, so that this could not become the basis of an alternative political form of class power and authority.167

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In European feudalism, by contrast, the dominance of landlordism proper translated into a decentralized social structure, subdivided into a plethora of relatively small-scale manorial estates. Under feudalism, neither monarchs nor emperors nor popes could obtain secure political control at the regional or local levels. This ensured that internecine warfare between rival lords (and between kings and popes) for access to land and serf-labour (or strategic advantage) raged virtually unchecked (by an effective centralized force). It also weakened an effective organized or co-ordinated (i.e. centralized) resistance by the dominant classes and elites to peasant uprisings in the countryside or the growth and consolidation of independent capitalistic interests in the towns.168 Second, the capacity of the centralized tributary state to exercise control (and hence tax-exploitation) over a vast geographical space ensured that the lavish consumption needs of the bureaucracy could be sustained without ever becoming over-dependent on foreign trade and hence indebted to capitalistic interests (as happened to the feudal aristocracies and monarchies of Western Europe).169 Third, the subordination of the feudal mode to the tributary mode in ‘Asiatic’ society meant that the local agrarian economy in many geographical areas tended to be dominated by the social relations of petty smallholding (i.e. a plethora of impoverished independent farmers).170 This not only ensured a less rapid rate of development of the forces of production than in feudalism proper (and hence a smaller surplus for trade or reinvestment), but also partially retarded the development of an effective rural force capable of overturning tributary relations of exploitation in favour of more dynamic feudal ones. Fourth, the location of the tributary state bureaucracy in urban centres in relative ‘structural’ isolation from the rural peasant economy ensured that the towns had limited scope to develop as independent centres of commerce and trade. This was quite unlike the situation under feudalism where the rural location of the exploiting class freed the towns to develop in this direction. Moreover, the urban location of the tributary state class meant that its members had no real interest in or opportunity to intervene systematically at the point of production in encouraging technological innovation or increases in relative surplus-product. Again, this was unlike the situation under medieval feudalism, where the location of the feudal aristocracy on landed estates generated the structures of local control which enabled its members to do so.171 Finally, insofar as a significant proportion of the direct producers of the tributary societies tended to be doubly exploited (i.e. subject to rent and tax exploitation combined at the hands of local landowners and state officials alike), the burden placed on the peasant economy tended here if anything to be even greater than in feudal Europe. But this eroded the motivation of the direct producers to seek out improvements in the methods and output of their labour.172 Economic development in the tributary mode thus most likely was slower and more fitful than in feudalism (hence reining-in the potential for establishing capitalist modes of wealth-creation), though it is impossible to be certain about this. Periods of systemic crisis probably tended also to take longer to gestate or mature than in the more dynamic feudal mode without generating the same

Socio-historical materialism 203 objective potential for resolving the structural contradictions which gave rise to them. The contradiction between petty peasant production and the oppressive weight of rent-tax exploitation guaranteed the periodic collapse of the social structure into convulsive social crisis, once the initial abundance of cultivatable land had been brought under the plough. But this took place without granting class agents the ‘structural capacities’ to usher in relations of production which might restore economic progress. This meant eventually a long-term stagnation and decline in the forces of production of the tributary mode (punctuated by innumerable peasant rebellions and periods of civil war).173 This vicious pattern was broken, following the resultant economic eclipse of Asiatic civilization by the feudal societies of Western Europe by the end of the fifteenth century, only to be replaced by another one, this time subordination to the forces of European colonialism in the centuries that followed. Yet the fact that Cohen’s specific version of the Capacity Thesis is untenable does not imply that a defence cannot be made for a revised interpretation of the Capacity Thesis. What, then, can be salvaged from the Capacity Thesis? Well, there is the argument that the ‘structural capacities’ possessed by class agents, by dint of their place in relations of production, have primacy in explaining the presence or absence of structural transformations, progressive or otherwise. Class relations structure most profoundly the distribution of economic, political and cultural resources.174 Consequently, they constitute the primary antagonism or division in society. This means that class relations operate not simply as the most important determinant of social conflict and struggle in a social system,175 but also as the key determinant of agents’ access to the material and other resources which they need to mobilize if they are to assert their interests against other (differently situated) agents. Further, since class relations are also relations of production, i.e. those social relations governing the production of material wealth upon which any social structure depends, it follows that class agents always possess the causal powers which enable system reproduction, elaboration or transformation.176 In tributary and feudal modes, for example, the monopoly possession of certain of the major means of production (as state property and landed property respectively) by the exploiting classes granted them the structural capacity to utilize politico-military coercion in extorting surplus-product from the direct producers, and hence access to the material means to reproduce the entire social structure in a given form. From class power, derived from the uneven distribution of the means of production, flowed political and military power, the capacity to freeze existing social relations in a particular caste. Conversely, the status of the peasants or serfs as producers of the economic wealth upon which the tributary and feudal modes depended, as possessors of at least some of their means of production and labour, and as the overwhelming majority class of precapitalist society, granted them the structural capacity to paralyse the supply of surplus-product upon which the politico-military power of their exploiters rested, and hence to undermine or compromise the material reproduction requirements of feudal and tributary social relations.

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These structural capacities possessed by class agents are unique or specific to them. The immersion of human agents in other forms of hierarchical social relations (for example stratification by ‘race’, gender or nation) do not equip them with the causal powers to bring about system transformation or statics. Oppression by ‘race’, gender or nationality are very real, and facilitate definite forms of struggle and resistance, but human agents, as subject to these oppressive relations, do not possess the structural capacities to undermine them. Since women, subordinate minority ethnicities and nationalist movements do not occupy the strategic position of class agents within relations of production, this means that they do not possess the causal powers to compromise or undermine the material reproduction of a given system of social relations. They can usher in fundamental social changes and reforms, but not the eradication or transformation of key modes of social domination and exploitation, or epochal shifts in the structure and evolution of social systems. It is for exactly this reason that practically every major epochal transformation of human society (i.e. Neolithic revolution, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the transition from antiquity to feudalism, the urban revolution, the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’, the rise of the city state, the formation of the modern state system, the shift to ‘post-capitalism’ and back) has been facilitated by contradictions of the modes of production (including, where appropriate, the social contradictions between opposed social classes). And it is exactly for this reason that these same epochal transformations of social relations have normally involved the intervention of class agency, either as a force for rendering the social system ripe for overthrow (e.g. as in the case of the crisis of antiquity and the various civilizations based upon the tributary mode of production), or as the vehicle of structural transformation (e.g. as in the case of the historical construction of modes of gendered and ‘racial’ oppression and the transition from feudalism to capitalism). But Marx’s Capacity Thesis not only argues plausibly for the primacy of the structural capacities possessed by class agents in accounting for structural transformation (or reproduction). Furthermore, it can also account successfully for the objective tendency of structural transformation to restore a certain (provisional) compatibility between forces of production and relations of production in stimulating renewed economic progress. How does this work? First, given that class agents generally tend to possess transformative capacity (i.e. the structural capacity to overthrow relations of production which have road-blocked the forces of production and brought about a systemic crisis), and given the validity of the revised version of the Development Thesis cited earlier, it follows that structural transformations will normally enable some kind of economic development (however slow or limited). This is irrespective of the nature of whatever new relations of production are established in place of the old. This is not simply because it takes time for the internal contradictions of any modes of production to mature and generate a systemic crisis which brings economic advance to a standstill. Rather, it is also because there is a general objective tendency for human agents to inherit the economic knowledge (and sometimes the forces of

Socio-historical materialism 205 production) developed previously within their hitherto existing relations of production. Second, given also the veracity of the revised version of the Optimality Thesis (i.e. the argument that the conjuncture of system and social malintegration generates a social environment especially conducive to the articulation of successful political solutions to the structural contradictions of the old modes of production by those social agents without vested interests in the preservation of the status quo), there is also the objective possibility that the transformative powers of rising (propertied) or subordinate (propertyless) classes will be mobilized in a way which is compatible with further economic advance. That is to say, there is the structurally determined potential for the class capacities of agents to be transmitted into modes of social interaction which lead to the replacement of relations of production which fetter economic progress with those which are genuinely progressive in the sense of allowing a longer-term period of growth and/or faster tempo of development of the forces of production than was possible previously. Again, it is possible to illustrate this argument with reference to the historical example of the tributary mode of production, which was dominant in the great civilizations and states of Africa, Asia and Meso- and South America from ancient times to the early modern period. Now, although the structural contradictions of the tributary mode ensured that its periodic crises were not especially conducive to capitalist developments, these did generate the objective possibility for two other historical outcomes that would have restored a provisional compatibility between forces of production and relations of production. The first of these was the collapse of the social structure into the social relations of petty smallholding (in the event of a successful class struggle by the peasantry against both the tributary state and the landowning class). The second was the replacement of the tributary mode by the feudal mode (in the event of a successful class struggle by the landed aristocracy against the peasants and the state class). The first outcome, although less enabling of economic development than the second (given the dispersal of the surplus-product amongst a plethora of small independent farmers), would nonetheless have allowed a limited (albeit snailpaced) development of the forces of production. This is because it would have resolved the immediate causes of the systemic crisis of the old modes of production (the burden of rent and tax exploitation upon the petty producers). Moreover, it would simultaneously have enabled the peasants to utilize the technological innovations made possible by feudal and tributary social relations to the full for their own purposes (expanded consumption, a lesser burden of work, a larger stored surplus, etc.). The second outcome, the triumph of the feudal mode over the tributary mode, would also have generated the objective preconditions for a renewed development of the forces of production, and for the above reasons. Indeed, aside from these immediate (but transient) economic benefits, the installation of feudal social relations would also have allowed a faster tempo of development of the forces of production than was possible under petty smallholding or tributary

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social relations. For the greater relative structural integration of the feudal aristocracy vis-à-vis the state class into the rural peasant economy, and the weak but definite pressure exerted upon it by the dynamic of intra-class military competition, would have enabled its members the opportunity for and interest in exercising local control over the production process, and for investing some of the surplus directly in technological innovation, in order to increase the output and productivity of social labour and hence build up the military capacity to defend or appropriate landed property.177 Finally, and related to the above argument, my reconstruction of Cohen’s Capacity Thesis also allows the analyst to specify the objective range of societal outcomes (in terms of structural transformations) which are historically possible on the basis of the class capacities invested in human agents by their specific place within the particular relations of production of a given social system. The Capacity Thesis is thus capable of identifying the unique potential of the discrete structural capacities possessed by rival social classes in generating structural outcomes which are conducive to economic development within specific social systems. To illustrate this argument let us consider, one last time, the examples of the feudal and tributary modes of production. As noted earlier, the developmental logic and structural organization of the feudal mode gave rise to the growth and consolidation of the towns as centres of trade, commerce and manufacture independent of the feudal social structure. The location of the exploiting class almost exclusively on landed rural estates, the segmentation of the social structure into self-sufficient politico-economic units, the relative integration of the feudal lords into the agrarian economy and the tendency towards intra-class military competition between rival manors, were all structural properties of feudal relations of production. But it was these which provided a certain space for capitalistic interests to develop and consolidate. The greater dynamism of the forces of production under feudalism (itself generated by the latter two features listed above), in harness with the small-scale character and hence limited economic capacity of the individual manorial estate, ensured the steady growth of a tradable surplus and the existence of a class (i.e. the landowners) with an interest in exchanging basic foodstuffs for luxury goods. This increasingly stimulated the growth of the towns, and with them the rise of a powerful and wealthy merchant class.178 At the same time, the growth of the forces of production (and hence the development of transport, communications and military technology) under feudalism also enabled the late-medieval earlymodern European states to open up trade routes to the far east, to pillage the city-states of south-west Africa, to break the power of Islam in the Mediterranean, to colonize the Americas and to establish the hugely profitable transatlantic slave trade. Some writers tend to attribute the ascendancy of the West following the Renaissance simply to the profits piled up by means of European piracy and plunder of the more prosperous regions of what subsequently became known as the ‘undeveloped world’ – initially of the coastal fringe of south-west Africa and later of the Aztec and Inca civilizations of meso-America.179 But this

Socio-historical materialism 207 ignores the fact that the major beneficiaries of early imperial adventures (Portugal and Spain) were not to the forefront of capitalist development. Here the vast fortunes were not invested in commercial or industrial development, but were largely wasted in luxury consumption. Nor does this explain how it was possible for the once relatively backward European countries of the north-west (especially Britain, Holland and France) to develop the military capacities to become the major imperial players. Imperialism was undoubtedly advantageous to those European countries which possessed the proto-capitalistic infrastructure to exploit them for industrial advance. Colonial exploitation did provide an impetus for the further development and strengthening of capitalistic interests in the urban centres. It did so by providing merchant capitalists with a growing surplus of finance capital to invest in the putting-out system of production and then in capitalist manufacture proper,180 and by further promoting the growth of networks of capitalist agriculture in the surrounding countryside to meet the expanding demand for basic consumption goods. But imperialism was not indispensable to the capitalist or imperial ascendancy of the West. This was made possible only by a prior development of material production beyond the level achieved by the great Asiatic and African civilizations, which had fallen into ‘temporary disarray’.181 One objective possibility of the structural contradictions of feudalism (i.e. the conflict between lordly surplus-appropriation and peasant consumption), and of the maturation of these contradictions into system breakdown (i.e. the terrible demographic crises of the fourteenth, fifteenth and seventeenth centuries),182 was of course the triumph of the rising bourgeoisie and the unrestrained development of capitalist social relations. The structural capacities possessed by the class agents of petty-capitalism (i.e. their effective control or possession of moneycapital, trade and revolutionary modes of wealth-creation and the labourprocess, and their location within strategic urban centres, etc.) gave them the economic and political clout to mount a powerful challenge to the old modes of production as it moved into chronic crisis. These capacities allowed them to present an ideological alternative to the old regime which was attractive to the ‘middling sort’ of propertyless labourers, artisans, small traders and handicraftsmen who were caught between the landowning class and the peasantry, and who were searching for radical solutions to radical problems.183 A triumphant capitalism was not, however, the only viable outcome to the crisis of feudalism. The structural capacities possessed by the peasantry (as producers of the bulk of the social product and as the overwhelming majority class) granted them the potential to replace landlordism with a system of petty peasant production. The structural capacities possessed by the lords (as possessors of landed property and hence military resources) granted them the potential to defeat the challenge mounted by rival class forces and (temporarily) stabilize the social structure. But these different historical outcomes, predicated in turn on the successful mobilization of the structural capacities possessed by rival class forces, were not equally possible or likely developments, and nor were they equally capable of generating sustainable economic growth.

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In fact, the most likely long-term outcome of the crisis of the feudal mode was not the persistence of landlordism (given its long-term stagnancy and the combined opposition to it of both major rival classes). Nor was it the long-term triumph of petty smallholding (because petty peasant production tends to evolve into landlordism proper, and peasant rebellions tend to be highly parochial, relatively disorganized and usually containable by a centralized force). So the historical fate of the feudal mode of production was not simply indeterminate. On the contrary, this was conditioned by the specific nature of the transformative powers invested in class agents by their particular location in feudal relations of production. Thus, the most likely long-term solution to the contradictions and crisistendencies of the feudal mode was the triumph of petty commodity production and then capitalism proper over petty smallholding and landlordism. This was precisely because the peculiar structural capacities of the rising capitalist class (as pioneers of dynamic and powerful forces of production and as a centrally organized politico-ideological and later military power of the cities and towns) rendered this outcome objectively more conceivable than any of its alternatives. Much the same analysis applies to the tributary mode of production. The only real difference here, as we have seen, was that the structure of tributary social relations did not enable the development of a powerful independent capitalist (or petty-capitalist) class capable of mobilizing the structural capacities to challenge successfully the status quo. Nevertheless, the outcome of the class struggle in the tributary mode was no more indeterminate than in feudalism. For, as noted earlier, there were always objective tendencies for the periodic crises of the tributary state to generate either the collapse of the social structure into the social relations of petty peasant smallholding (as in feudalism) or the usurpation of the state class by the landowning class. The fact that the tributary mode, based in part as it was on the extensive exploitation of a vast and impoverished freeholding peasantry, managed to persist for as long as it did in the face of societal stagnation and decay, was itself a testament to the centralized military power the state class could wield against its opponents, and to the limited nature of the peculiar structural capacities possessed by the peasantry. Thus the tributary state in China, for example, even when expelled from the south of the country by the landlords, and from much of the north by the freeholding peasantry, was always able to maintain control over a sufficient number of the peasants of the more backward economic regions of the Yellow River valley to survive.184 Yet persistence of the tributary mode was not inevitable. Nor was it even the most likely long-term historical result. Let us imagine capitalism had never succeeded in sweeping aside feudalism in Western Europe, forcing the tributary states of the East to submit to its developmental logic. Even so, the long-term decline of the tributary mode was bound eventually to have encouraged a more determined struggle by the class agents of the subordinate feudal mode (i.e. the landed gentry) to uncouple the agrarian economy from the burden of tax-exploitation. And sooner or later, of course, given the incurable nature of the crisis of the ancien regime, their class struggles were bound to have succeeded in doing so.

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Conclusion The fundamental aim of this chapter has been to show that an adequate social theory and sociology must be constituted as a specific application of emergentist materialism to the human and social worlds. Here I have sought to show that sociological emergentism is both supportive of a dialectical materialist understanding of society and history and is substantially deepened and enriched by being reconstructed as such. Failing this, it becomes vulnerable either to idealist regress (the fate of practically every major form of sociological theory) or to a depthless descriptive empiricism (as exemplified by Weberian and postmodernist theory). This fails, not least because it is incapable of coming to terms with the fact of evolutionary directionality in societal development. In both cases (Weberianism and postmodernism), the attempt to show that neither materialism nor idealism offers adequate understandings of society and social process invariably ends up collapsing into idealism in practice. So it is that postmodernists end up with ‘textualism’. This is the reduction of social structure and social interaction to ‘discursive practices’. And so it is that Weberians end up treating ideology and culture as ‘free-floating’ phenomena, as magically uncaused by anything external or anterior to itself. The classic statements of this are, of course, Weber’s postulation of a mystical ‘rationalization process’ as lying at the historical root of capitalism and his attempt to show that religious ethics are not explainable in terms of class relations or material circumstances. By contrast, my contention that neither idealism nor pluralism are defensible, whether as theory or method in the social sciences, is drawn logically from the ontology of Bhaskar’s own critical realism (before its degeneration into the godism and spiritualism of transcendental dialectical critical realism).185 This is plainly inconsistent with theoretical-analytical models of the social world which either treat ‘culture’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘discourse’ as its primary reality or which collapse it into a depthless space of autonomous practices or structures where everything determines everything else in a kaleidoscopic fashion. Such is indicative of the fact that explanation of ‘ideal elements’ must always be sought in underlying structures, whether the ‘situational logics’ defined by emergent social relations or the non-social structures anterior or basic to these (e.g. human biological needs and interests). Naturally this does not mean that ‘ideal elements’ passively register ‘material elements’, or that the former are not indispensable to any passage of social interaction leading to systemic elaboration or reproduction. But it does mean that those ‘ideal elements’ which feed into structural statics or modification or even transformation are always energized by and expressive of the ‘contradictions of real life’. For it is these material contradictions which explain why such cultural properties are efficacious in these crucial respects, and determine also the systemic possibilities which result from their translation into human agency. This critical realist ‘construction’ of socio-historical materialism allows the theorist to render defensible Engels’ controversial claim that in the historical interface between base and superstructure, the economic is bound sooner or later

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to ‘assert its own movement as necessary’. This is the position of ‘reciprocal but unequal interaction’ between economy and society I earlier attributed to Engels. How does this work? Class-based relations of production, and the superstructural forms which act to stabilize them, eventually become a barrier to crisis-free economic growth. Consequently, they inevitably fall under ever increasing pressure from internal and external forces (domestic class unrest and intra-class economic and military competition from rival states) to undergo reorganization by whatever means in the interests of unfettered economic development. Often these pressures build up until they become irresistible forces for progressive change. In this case, ‘economic dominance’ manifests itself ‘positively’. This is in the sense of stimulating or motivating class agents to engage in struggles to reform or overturn social relations, even if this is only top-down reform which preserves in a modified form the powers and privileges of existing elites. On other occasions, however, ‘progressive’ classes pioneering new forms of production and wealth creation fail to break the power of ossified property forms and their attendant superstructures. Or entrenched elites fail to respond appropriately to the economic constraints (introducing counter-productive or token reforms, etc.). In this case, ‘economic dominance’ asserts itself ‘negatively’. This is the scenario of the ‘common ruination of the contending classes’ or even ‘barbarism’.186 Here we have the internal disintegration or regression of a society or its subordination to economically and hence militarily stronger states. The second form of structural relationship that explains the tendency of the ‘economic movement to assert itself as necessary’ is that of the ‘relative autonomy’ and ‘structural dependence’ of the superstructure from and upon the economic base. This works as follows. First, ‘core’ superstructural forms (such as polity, education and law) are indispensable to the vested interests of propertied elites to secure their privileged position in the relations of production. For this reason it is uncontroversial that these will tend to develop in ways which promote (or which at the very least do not contradict) the dominant economic relationship between exploiting and exploited classes. Second, those agents who occupy positions of power and authority in superstructural relations or institutions draw their (normally privileged) life-chances from the surplus product or surplus value pumped out of the direct producers by the exploiting class. Therefore, it follows that they (in common with previous generations of superstructural role-incumbents) will undergo greater or lesser directional pressure to identify their interests and functions with those of propertied elites. This means that over time there will be a strong tendency for superstructural emergents to be forced into line with structural emergents.187 Naturally this does not mean that those superstructures closely tied to the economic base must develop in ways that guarantee the reproduction of existing class relations. Their relative autonomy is such that those elite groupings who live off the surplus in cultural and political spheres (i.e. those who command the armies, the police and the priesthoods) do tend to develop particular interests of their own. These are interests in obtaining for themselves and the institutions

Socio-historical materialism 211 they control higher prestige and material privileges than those which accrue to those operating in other branches of society. The relative autonomy of the politico-ideological superstructure from the economic base may even become a drain on the mode of surplus extraction, endangering the relations of production upon which the reproduction of social institutions and material culture is ‘ultimately’ dependent.188 Again, in these circumstances, the ‘structural dependence’ of the superstructures on the relations of production allows the ‘dominance’ of the economic in a negative way. The failure of the superstructures to adequately safeguard the relations of exploitation in which they are rooted must ultimately lead either to their overthrow by subordinate classes, or to the weakening or even collapse of society under pressure from economic decline and internal strife. Or, failing this, to the military or economic subordination or destruction of society at the hands of propertied elites from foreign territories. But the prohibitive sanctions of allowing those superstructural emergents which are ‘functional’ to dominant property relations to ‘get out of line’ is for the most part sufficient to ensure that those with vested interests in their preservation attempt strenuously to prevent them from doing so or rapidly attempt to bring them to book if they do. However, the structural malintegration of class-divided societies may often frustrate their attempts to do so. I conclude that socio-historical materialism is theoretically defensible as a thesis of ‘reciprocal but unequal interaction’ between base and superstructure. But I have argued that there is much more to Marxian social science than a theory of structural causality. Marx’s socio-historical materialism translates dialectical materialist philosophy into an explanatory theoretical research paradigm capable of specifying the precise relationship between the ‘parts’ (of the social system) and the ‘people’ (whose interaction is responsible for systemic dynamics). Understood as such, Marx’s theory of history offers us an account of progressive social change rooted in the interplay of distinct generative mechanisms, which pertain both to structures and agents. First, there is the interplay between social labour (a privileged mode of social agency) and the modes of production inherited from the dead generations (a privileged mode of social structure). Second, there is the interplay between class positions and class agency (i.e. between class structure and class struggle). Third, there is the interplay between forces of production and relations of production and the politicoideological superstructures, which act to freeze or fix prevailing property and class relationships. From this perspective, it is the unique causal powers that pertain both to material structure (the inherited ensemble of forces of production and relations of production and the structural capacities which these invest in human agents) and to material agency (social production, economic exploitation and class struggle) that condition most fundamentally the constitution and trajectories of social systems. This explanatory primacy of the modes of production in historical analysis allows the theorist to account for the self-evident fact of societal evolution across different modes of society, and for those periods of structural

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transformation that replace one social system with another. I have argued that this general theoretical understanding of social systems can be articulated as a number of distinct but interrelated hypotheses outlined by Andrew Levine. These are: (1) the Development Thesis, (2) the Compatibility Thesis, (3) the Contradiction Thesis, (4) the Transformation Thesis, (5) the Optimality Thesis and (6) the Capacity Thesis. Levine wants to say that these interlinked propositions add up to what he calls ‘orthodox historical materialism’, the most sophisticated version of which is provided by G.A. Cohen. This, he suggests, is indefensible, because undermined by the errors of functionalism and teleological determinism. Levine argues that socio-historical materialism is defensible only in a ‘weaker’ form that dispenses with the Primacy Thesis (and with this the Capacity Thesis and the Optimality Thesis), the central plank of Cohen’s reconstruction. But this seems to me to strip Marx’s theory of history of too much of its explanatory power, in effect reducing it to the Development Thesis, the Compatibility Thesis and the Transformation Thesis.189 I have argued that the Primacy, Capacity and Optimality Theses can be recast in a form that avoids the conceptual and methodological problems of Cohen’s approach. My argument overall is that forces of production develop because human agents have rational interests in developing them, but that the fettering of the forces of production by class-divided production and property relations will invariably give rise to system breakdown sooner or later. This will serve to polarize the exploiting and exploited classes into rival camps, throwing the existing structural contradictions of society into sharp relief. In this situation (i.e. the conjuncture of social and structural malintegration), the direct producers (or the members of a newly emerging propertied class) are better placed to recognize the fact of their own exploitation and subordination within existing relations of production, and the manner in which the dominant modes of production has become a barrier to further social and economic progress. Under systematic pressure from events and circumstances (the deepening crisis of society), being ‘somewhat rational’, and possessing the structural capacities to usher in systemic transformations, there is a tendency for human agents of the subordinate classes to translate their objective interest in and capacity for a revolutionary reconstitution of the existing social system into a class struggle aimed at the realization of this objective. Here, in the specific circumstances of structural malintegration, the interplay between involuntary positioning of class agents in social relations, the vested interests of agents which are an objective property of their positioning in class structures and the punitive ‘opportunity costs’ which attach to forms of social interaction that are not consistent with the vested interests of agents, ensure that subordinate class agents undergo systematic ‘directional guidance’ to combine themselves into collective movements that are oriented towards the revolutionary reconstitution of society. This will generate real historical tendencies for class struggles to resolve temporarily the contradictions between forces of production and relations of production integral to specific societies, hence allowing renewed development of the forces of production.

Socio-historical materialism 213 This is not, to say it once more, a fatalistic schema. As R.S. Neale notes: ‘The determination of the modes of production, which is not the same as economic determinism, actually relates structure to agency in interactive and “undetermined” ways . . . [placing] at the centre of its discourse human agency of a powerfully creative kind. . . . It . . . does not generate models for utopia – they are for people to make.’190 From the perspective of Marx’s realist theory of history: social crises do not automatically facilitate social revolutions; social revolutions are not always successful; and even where they are successful, they do not invariably engender the construction of social relations, which unfetter the forces of production. But, given that the forces of production tend to develop, given that this development (in class society) is dialectical, bringing forces of production and relations of production into conflict, the historical movement of society will unavoidably engender chronic social crises and, with this, heightened class conflict and class polarization. This will generate a certain objective potential for and indeed pressure towards structural transformation (ushered in by social revolutions). Therefore, this generates too the definite objective tendential possibility, indeed impulse, that such periods of revolutionary crisis (if successful in replacing the old relations of production with newer ones) will unfetter the forces of production and restore socio-economic progress in the evolutionary typology of social systems. I conclude that Marx’s historically grounded dialectic of structure and agency is, indeed, the dialectic of human emancipation, the ‘pulse’ of freedom. As such it adds sociological flesh to Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist account of the dialectic of freedom as embodying a ‘rational directionality’ (of human consciousness) towards the embrace of more englobing or universalizing aspirations towards collective free-flourishing (which I discuss in Chapter 1). I will elaborate on the relationship between Marxian socio-historical dialectics and Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist dialectic of freedom in the conclusion of the current undertaking, particularly the issue of the benefits for critical-emancipatory theory of drawing them together. Before then, however, I will further substantiate the ‘emergentist’ materialist social ontology of the critical realist Marxism outlined and defended in this chapter. This will be done by means of a critical engagement with its chief rival in the socio-historical field (i.e. the pluralistic sociology of domination offered by Weberian and neo-Weberian theorists). This is the task of the next two chapters.

4

Stratification and power

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I wish to furnish a comprehensive review of the core theoretical concepts and methodological logics of Weberian and Weberian-influenced ‘pluralist’ social theory. Second, I wish to develop a thoroughgoing critique of these concepts and logics from the point of view of my emergentist Marxism perspective outlined in the previous chapter.1 By Weberian social theory I mean the specific theories of power and stratification offered by Max Weber. By neo-Weberian social theory I have in mind theoretical approaches in contemporary sociology which have been clearly influenced by Weber’s understanding of stratification and power-relations. Such theoretical approaches are a mixed bag. They include the historical sociologies of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens,2 and the most influential theoretical work in the sociology of ‘race’ and ethnicity and the sociology of gender. This is because these disparate approaches and disciplines all share in common the key Weberian idea that social systems are comprised of autonomous and heterogeneous, though intersecting, modes of stratification and social power, that is multiple and irreducible forms of domination.3 These crucially are constituted as often by non-material as by material determinations (i.e. stratification by class – the ‘material’ axis of domination, stratification by ‘race’ and gender – the ‘ideological’ or ‘cultural’ axes of domination, and stratification by state or party organizations – stratification by politico-military power or by ‘authorization’ or ‘command relations’).4 I have suggested (Chapter 1) that Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist account of ‘power2’ or ‘master–slave-type’ relations basically accepts and affirms this Weberian sociology of domination. This fails, I argued, because it lacks theoretical specificity in social analysis. But there are other problems with the sociology of domination. From the emergentist Marxism perspective, the central conceptual weakness of Weberian social theory, and those closely aligned sociological approaches, is their endorsement of a pluralist ontology of society and attendant method of social analysis. As stated above, these conceptual-analytical assumptions feed into an understanding of society as a depthless world of multiple and autonomous modes of power or stratification, none of which enjoy any

Stratification and power 215 kind of causal primacy over the others. This position, I contend, can be questioned on empirical and conceptual grounds. Here I wish to argue that the cultural and political structures of social systems, especially and including structures of domination that are purportedly ideologically or politically constituted (such as state relations and stratification by gender or ethnicity), must be understood as being vertically determined by underlying economic and class mechanisms. This is one of the central meanings of Marx’s famous analytical distinction between base and superstructure, which has caused unending controversy since it was originally mooted, but which I hold is defensible.5 The analysis of this chapter will be organized as follows. First, I will outline the salient elements of Weber’s pluralist sociology of domination. Second, I will explore how Weber’s concepts have become applied in contemporary stratification theory, including the work of patriarchy theorists and the new sociologists of ‘race’, and of those who have used them to try and make sense of pre-capitalist and post-capitalist societies more generally. Finally, I will outline my critique of these plural or multi-factoral models of stratification, from my emergentist Marxism perspective, showing how ideological and political power is emergent from underlying material structures of exploitation.

Weber’s theory of social stratification Weber’s methodological and ontological starting point is the abstract individual of classical liberal social thought. Society, says Weber, is the product of the interactional encounters of individuals. This abstract individualism feeds directly into Weber’s pluralistic conception of society. ‘In pursuing their economic, political, and religious or ethical interests, individuals create a range of social relationships and social organisations that provide the institutional environment within which social life takes place.’6 These relationships and organizations cannot be conflated, because they are the irreducible institutional expressions of the autonomous value-commitments and goals of individuals. Yet social relationships and social organizations, because they are energized by the competing interest-governed actions of individuals, are inherently unstable and antagonistic. For this reason Weber is insistent that ‘conflict cannot be excluded from social life’.7 On the contrary, for Weber, social relationships and social institutions necessarily involve the ‘eternal struggle between men’, and this renders history a ‘senseless hustle in the service of worthless, self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends’.8 Weber’s theory of stratification is immediately comprehensible in terms of these Nietzschean philosophical commitments. ‘Power’, for Weber, equals ‘domination’, and ‘domination’ is the fundamental organizing principle of stratification systems. This perspective informs Weber’s assertion that ‘domination . . . has played the decisive role . . . in the . . . most important social structures of the past and present’9 and will inevitably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Power, argues Weber, is essentially an expression of the will of individuals and groups to exercise control or ‘authoritarian power of command’10 over people and

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objects in order to service these irreducible and ‘mutually antagonistic’ ends. As Weber puts it: ‘In general, we understand by “power” the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’. It follows from this that power cannot be reduced to any specific mode of power, because ‘power as such’ is something that ‘may be “valued for its own sake” ’, rather than as a mere means to an end (e.g. to improve an individual’s or group’s life-chances).11 Weber famously identifies ‘three phenomena of the distribution of power’12 – class (economic stratification), status (stratification by ideology or culture) and party (stratification by politics). A key argument often offered in defence of Weber’s pluralistic model of society pertains to the alleged incapacity of Marx’s method to get to grips with the multiple nature of social stratification or ‘modes of domination’ throughout human history. The inspiration for this is doubtless Weber’s insistence that class ranking is a major form of stratification only in capitalist societies, where economic mechanisms determine to a large degree the allocation of life-chances, but not in pre-capitalist societies where access to goods and power is determined by politics and status, especially status.13 For example, Weber argues that in classical Greece and Rome, status ranking is dominant over class ranking, since here the ‘market is restricted, and the power of naked property per se, which gives its stamp to class formation, is pushed into the background’.14 But Weber does not wish to deny the importance of stratification by status and party in capitalist societies. On the contrary, the purpose of his pluralistic model of power-relations is to counter the Marxist claim that class relations are the fundamental source of political and economic power, social inequality and conflict in all stratified societies, including capitalism. Weber’s argument is that stratification by class, status and party are in capitalist societies intersecting but autonomous (and sometimes rival) modes of social domination.15 Stratification by class refers us to ‘a distribution of power which is regulated exclusively by the market. . . . Classes are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods.’16 Status is contrasted by Weber with ‘the purely economically determined “class situation” ’. Status denotes the unequal distribution of esteem or prestige among a society’s members, referring to ‘every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honour’.17 Status groups, says Weber, ‘are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special styles of life’.18 Political stratification (party domination) refers to the formation and perpetuation of organizations that exercise the power of ‘authorization’ or ‘command’ in society. As Giddens summarizes his argument: ‘The party, oriented towards the acquisition or maintenance of political leadership, represents, like the class and the status group, a major focus of social organization relevant to the distribution of power in society.’19 Weber has in mind here, obviously, political parties, which aspire to ‘rule’, but he can be legitimately interpreted as referring to state organizations or relationships more generally, which exercise domination over a

Stratification and power 217 particular territorial locale. Parties, argues Weber, ‘live in a house of power’, and their ‘action is oriented towards the acquisition of social “power” ’, by means of ‘naked violence of any sort to canvassing for votes with coarse or subtle means’.20 Party domination may be oriented towards establishing power over an existing dominion or to establishing a new one.21 Weber claims that these forms of stratification are empirically interlocking structures of domination, the powers and capacities of each of which can be transformed or translated into those of the others: Economically conditioned ‘power’ is not, of course, identical with ‘power’ as such. On the contrary, the emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued ‘for its own sake’. Very frequently, the striving for social power is also conditioned by the social ‘honour’ it entails. Not all power, however, entails social honour. . . . Quite generally, ‘mere economic power’, and especially ‘naked’ money power, is by no means a recognised basis of social honour. Indeed, social honour, or prestige, may even be the basis of political or economic power, and very frequently has been.22 Although Weber’s discussion of class and party domination is reasonably straightforward, the same cannot be said for his treatment of status inequalities. This is ambiguous and problematic. The chief analytical problem is that, on Weber’s definition, it is hard to see how status stratification can count as a mode of social domination in its own right. Yet Weber wants to say that status, party and class are all analytically distinct forms of domination. However, the fact that some groups in society are ranked higher in terms of the distribution of prestige, and this translates into specific patterns of consumption or lifestyles, does not by itself grant them power to command people or control material goods. If Weber is saying that individuals and groups are able to utilize their higher social prestige to obtain control of authoritative and allocative resources in society, he is saying no more than that status groups possess power only by virtue of transforming themselves into agents of economic and political domination, that is, by inserting themselves into privileged positions within class and state structures. But, in this case, domination as such is a function of political and economic power, not of status privileges.23 Yet, despite this analytical difficulty, Weber’s concept of status ranking has been an extraordinarily influential one in contemporary sociological theory. Indeed, in the hands of Parsons and the structural-functionalists, class became virtually reduced to the Weberian concept of status, and ‘stratification’ emerged as a broad analytical concept that explained economic and political inequalities as the outcome of how individuals and groups in the division of labour were ranked socially in terms of the shared values of society.24 To put it crudely, for Parsons, if certain role incumbents exercised greater power and commanded

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more resources than others, this was because their roles in society were valued more highly or held in higher regard by the societal community. The result was a body of stratification theory in which structural class antagonisms were dissolved, in which the notion of stratification as ‘domination’ was effaced and where residual tensions between differently ranked class agents were conceptualized as motivated by psychological states. ‘There will be certain tendencies to arrogance on the part of some winners and to resentment and to a “sour grapes” attitude on the part of some losers’,25 said Parsons, in his discussion of ‘class conflict’. ‘Modern’ societies, he claimed, had done away with the malintegrative class conflicts of earlier periods (hence invalidating Marxism), and were destined to become more cohesive still as ‘genuine standards of fair competition’ along the lines of the North American model were institutionalized in the occupational hierarchies of the western societies.26

Stratification theory in neo-Weberian sociology I have said that it is legitimate to characterize the work of sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann as part of the Weberian tradition, for the simple reason that all share Weber’s view that power-relations (or modes of domination or stratification) are multiple and autonomous of one another and that historical explanations must hence always be ‘pluralistic’ or ‘multi-factoral’. Another way of making this point is to observe that these contemporary theorists have all followed Weber’s example in arguing the case for a pluralistic model of stratification systems in societies past and present which broadly maps onto Weber’s tripartite distinction between class, party and status. Giddens, for example, points to the ‘neglect’ by Marxists of forms of oppression and domination which have a political or ideological rather than economic locus, the most important of which are ‘exploitative relations between states, . . . exploitative relations between ethnic groups . . . and exploitative relations between the sexes’.27 Elsewhere Giddens says that social systems are comprised of different modes of stratification, which for the most part have been based upon ‘caste’, ‘slavery’ and ‘estate’, various compound forms of political and status ranking.28 Giddens argues that only capitalism is a class society in the true sense of the term. This is because only in capitalism is the distribution of allocative resources determined primarily by the impersonal functions of the marketplace rather than by non-economic processes (e.g. state patronage or customary privileges established by religion or law),29 and because only in capitalism is the main form of stratification centred on ‘private ownership of property’.30 In pre-capitalist societies, by contrast, though class stratification has existed, it has tended to be subordinate to political and cultural stratification, since here ‘authoritative resources were the main basis of both political and economic power’.31 Thus, for Giddens, ‘[w]hereas Marx gave primacy to allocative resources in his materialist theory of history, I argue that in non-capitalist societies co-ordination of authoritative resources forms the determining axis of social integration and change’. Giddens’ overall point is that asymmetrical distributions of allocative resources (the

Stratification and power 219 means of production and subsistence) are in non-capitalist societies based upon the monopolization by elites of authoritative resources (the means of political domination and military power) whereas in capitalist societies they are ‘selfdetermining’ and feed into political and cultural stratification. This means that whereas capitalist societies are ‘class societies’ (i.e. societies where class is the central organizing principle of society), non-capitalist societies are merely ‘class-divided societies’ (i.e. societies in which classes exist, ‘but where class analysis does not serve as a basis for identifying the basic structural principle of society’).32 These arguments are theoretically developed by Michael Mann as well as by Giddens. For Mann, pre-capitalist class societies ‘as a rule’ involve the ‘interdependence’ of economic and politico-military structures.33 This is because relations of production and modes of class exploitation are reproduced here by means of ‘extra-economic coercion’, rather than by economic mechanisms alone. It follows from this that either politico-military relations of ‘power’ or ‘domination’ are of equal explanatory significance to economic relations of ‘exploitation’ (because mutually supportive) or are basic to these (because they provide the mechanisms which allow class exploitation to take place). Thus, according to Mann, ‘militarism’ was the dynamic force in determining societal structure and development in the ancient and feudal worlds, this showing that ‘economic forms will also have military and political preconditions’.34 By contrast, in contemporary capitalist societies, it is at least plausible to regard economic or ‘allocative’ power as having at least as fundamental importance, as Weber himself recognized.35 This general neo-Weberian argument (developed especially by Giddens and Mann) that a ‘general historical materialism’ is misconceived, on the grounds that non-capitalist modes of production are economically and politically constituted, or more radically have political and military ‘conditions of existence’, has now become extraordinarily influential amongst sociologists and social theorists of a variety of different theoretical perspectives. Indeed, an increasing number of Marxists have come to accept this Weberian argument. Jon Elster, to offer a single telling example, accepts that the ‘interpenetration’ of economy and polity in most historical societies is a decisive rebuttal of the general applicability of the materialist sociological method: Marx lived and wrote in a society in which economic and political activities were extremely dissociated. In mid-nineteenth century England they were carried out by two distinct sets of people: workers did not vote and capitalists took little interest in politics. Similarly, in ancient Athens slaves were, of course, excluded from politics, as were the foreigners who carried on trade and commerce. In such societies the base-superstructure distinction is immediately meaningful. It also makes some sense, albeit more tenuously, in societies where the same people are involved in both economics and politics, in different social roles. In modern capitalist societies, one can be a worker and also a voter, a businessman and also a member of parliament.

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Stratification and power The distinction breaks down, however, in societies where economic and political power coincides immediately. . . . Soviet Russia is a dramatic example. In this society there is no independent set of economic relations that determines the political superstructure; politics is everywhere.36

This ‘dramatic example’ of the ‘post-capitalist’ or ‘state socialist’ societies is normally seen by neo-Weberians as a particularly decisive rebuttal of sociohistorical materialism’s assertion of the explanatory primacy of economic and class mechanisms in shaping the socio-cultural relations of stratified societies generally. Lee and Newby express the rationale behind this view succinctly: The emergence of bureaucratic domination in the wake of a socialist revolution [in Russia] led Marxists outside the Soviet Union to ponder on what had gone wrong. How could a purportedly socialist revolution have produced a society in which some of the most basic tenets of socialism appeared to be overthrown? The answer to this question was made more difficult by adopting a literal interpretation of Marx’s own categories of analysis. If societies were to be understood by means of a class analysis, and if the class structure was determined by the ownership of the means of production, how then was the Soviet Union, which had abolished the private ownership of the means of production and thus eliminated social classes, to be explained without departing from a Marxist analysis?37 Not to be explained at all, or so contend Lee and Newby. Their argument is that the only thing to do when analysing the USSR and analogous ‘post-capitalist’ social formations is to ditch Marx for Weber, on the grounds that the reality of elite domination in societies based upon public ownership of allocative resources demonstrates that asymmetrical distributions of power do not necessarily have any social locus or basis in property or class relations. Instead, far from being explainable in terms of relations of production, it is clear that here social power and attendant inequalities flow from different sources, in particular from ‘rationalized’ or ‘bureaucratized’ political structures (the ‘rule of the office’ instead of the rule of property and the market).38 Giddens would doubtless accept this interpretation of ‘post-capitalist’ societies, but he also offers a further argument in defence of the idea that politico-military power is quite distinct from economic power. For him state relations and the ‘authoritative resources’ they mobilize are now becoming the key factor explaining social change in contemporary capitalist societies as well as in the now defunct ‘state socialist’ ones. This is shown by the steady growth of state involvement in economic affairs throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Political change in traditional civilisations was normally confined to elites. One aristocratic ruler, for example, would replace another as ruler, while for the majority of the population life would go on relatively unchanged. This is not true of modern political systems, in which the activities of political

Stratification and power 221 leaders and government officials constantly affect the lives of the mass of the population. . . . Governments now play a major role in stimulating (and retarding) rates of economic growth, and in all industrial societies there is a high level of state intervention in production, the government being far and away the largest employer. . . . Both externally and internally, political decision-making promotes and directs social change far more than in previous times. Political development in the last two or three centuries has certainly influenced economic change as much as economic change has influenced politics.39 The implication of this is apparently a refinement of Giddens’ earlier view of the interface between economy and polity in ‘late modernity’. This seems to suggest that the dominance of ‘allocation’ over ‘authorization’ is applicable only to the historical period of ‘classical’ unregulated laissez-faire capitalism (of the kind that existed in Britain between 1750 and 1880). For Giddens, in contemporary societies, it would seem that neither economy nor polity can be said to be ‘primary’.

The sociology of domination: a Marxian critique Weberian and neo-Weberian social theory thus stands or falls on two key propositions, which stand in contradiction to emergentist Marxism. First, that modes of domination are multiple or heterogeneous, and autonomous of modes of production or class structures. Specifically, ideological or cultural domination (i.e. stratification by status or social prestige) has no necessary anchorage or basis in modes of production or class domination. Second, that Marx’s analytical distinction between base and superstructure is undermined by the fact that in most historical societies economic and politico-military structures are intertwined and tend to ‘support each other’. Failing this, political and military structures are basic to economic structures in many historical societies, because economic exploitation is dependent on political or military domination. Now I wish to take issue with each of these positions. In doing so I will attempt to address the following issues. First, I will consider those Weberian and neo-Weberian arguments which purport to establish the autonomy and efficacy of systems of cultural stratification apart from relations of production and structures of class domination. Then I will consider whether the ‘interpenetration’ or interdependence of economy and polity in capitalist and non-capitalist societies calls into question the theoretical integrity of Marx’s base/superstructure model of structural causality in social systems. Finally, I will address whether the reality of elite domination in post-capitalist societies, and the growing power of the state system in contemporary capitalism, are empirical proofs that political stratification is real and efficacious apart from relations of production and structures of class power.

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The concept of status ranking in Weber’s sociology Weber himself gives a number of illustrations designed to prove the efficacy of stratification by status in societies old and new. The most notable of his ‘precapitalist’ examples is of course the caste system of traditional India. This was the historical product of the conquest of one ethnic group by another, and its translation into an elaborate social hierarchy comprised of asymmetrical distributions of ‘prestige’ or ‘esteem’, founded upon religious beliefs, by means of which the higher castes (the Brahman priesthood and warrior chieftains) were able to secure privileged access to economic and political resources.40 Weber also gives the example of the Junker aristocracy of nineteenth century Germany to make his point. For him the Junkers had long exerted enormous political and military influence in society, constituting the backbone of the German state, despite their relative economic weakness, in large measure because of the high level of ‘status-honour’ they commanded in society at large.41 In ‘traditional’ or semi-capitalist societies such as these, Weber appears to believe that class or economic stratification is of lesser causal significance than status ranking. ‘In the past the significance of stratification by status was far more decisive, above all for the economic structures of the societies.’42 In these cases, ‘stratification by status goes hand in hand with the monopolisation of material and ideal goods in a manner we have come to know as typical’.43 In modern capitalist societies, by contrast, Weber argues that the issue is less cut and dried. Here economic and status ranking interact or intertwine in complex ways, tend to reinforce and supplement each other, and are therefore difficult to distinguish empirically. Nonetheless status-ranking is still a fundamental source of inequalities in allocative and authoritative resources ‘in its own right’ in capitalism, not least because it ‘partly or even wholly determine[s] class status, without . . . being identical with it’.44 Weber gives a couple of examples to make his case, one ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’. First, the Calvinist bourgeois ‘burghers’ of the earliest centres of capitalist enterprise, who did not yet command either economic or political power in society, but who had a particular cultural ‘style of life’ and religious values which rendered them a powerful cohesive social force. Weber argued, of course, that this status group developed the rational orientation of working in a ‘calling’, which was the crucial factor in the subsequent development of capitalism in the Occident.45 Here, status defined by a particular ‘style of life’ organized around religious commitments became in due course translated into economic wealth and political influence. Second, the newly rich businessmen of his own day (the ‘typical American Boss’), who were highly ranked in economic or class terms but who were lacking the culture or education to command the high status and so political connections of the ‘traditional rich’.46 None of these examples are convincing. Take, first of all, Weber’s analysis of the caste system of traditional India. In what meaningful sense can it be said that this particular structure of domination was constituted by or based upon the differential allocation of prestige by the society’s members? Certainly, the histor-

Stratification and power 223 ical origin of the caste system was not to be found in this kind of ‘cultural distribution’. Nor did legally entrenched inequalities of status or prestige emerge here from the religious values or beliefs of Hindu society. Initially, of course, politico-military factors were of fundamental importance in establishing the conditions of existence of this system of social ranking, as Weber himself says. The Vedic conquerors of the Indus Valley (nomadic herders from Iran led by warrior chieftains), having colonized northern India at around 1500 BC, developed ‘a doctrine which justified the bulk of the surplus going to the warrior rulers and priests on the grounds that these were “twice born” groups, innately superior to other people’. However, ‘the full-fledged system of classical Hinduism, with its four hereditary castes, did not crystallize until there was a change in the way people gained a livelihood, and with it, a transformation of the Vedic religion into a rather different set of practices and beliefs’. The slow spread of iron technology from about 1000 BC initiated the change in the way of life. The iron axe made it possible to clear and cultivate the previously jungle-ridden Ganges region, providing the warrior rulers and their priestly helpers with a much larger surplus. These groups encouraged the spread of agriculture, but also insisted that the cultivators deliver them a portion, perhaps a third or even half, of each village’s crop as tribute. Compliance with their demands was brought about by force, and backed by the religious designation of the ordinary ‘Aryans’ as a lower caste of vaisyas (cultivators) and conquered peoples as a bottom caste of sudras (toilers). Caste arose out of a class organisation of production in the villages (although not one based on private property), and its persistence over millennia was rooted in this.47 Yet the caste system was not a static monolith, as many commentators have assumed. Over time, the Sudras ‘became the cultivators, and the Vaishyas became landowners and traders’.48 Although this basic pattern of social organization persisted over millennia, despite the rise and fall of successive kingdoms and imperial states exercising control over the region, it gradually became ever more complex, as the development of the forces of production and occupational specialization tended to encourage the fragmentation of the caste structure into a plethora of sub-castes. During this period, Hindu ideology became mobilized by the aristocratic and priestly elites (the Kshatriyas and Brahmans), not only to legitimize or sanctify their appropriation of the surplus product extorted as tax from the direct agricultural producers of the village communes, but also to sanction (in some cases) its eventual transmission into landed feudal-type estates, the extortion of tribute from the newly developing commercial classes and control of the tributary state. With the establishment of imperial states in the Indus from 600 BC, the economic exploitation of the agrarian economy was both extended and intensified. Thus, it has been estimated that up to one-sixth of the total produce of the peasant cultivators of the Indus was appropriated by the royal courts during this period.49

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The class function of Hindu ideology was precisely to legitimize these property and state relations, and it corresponded very closely with the gradations of the occupational class structure. ‘The lower one goes in the economic scale, the lower the caste in the social scale on the whole.’50 Indeed, the system of legal and religious domination of the direct agricultural producers and other subordinate groups, which gradually unfolded over the centuries, was one of the most coherent and elaborate ever assembled by a ruling elite. Rarely before or since has the political subordination and economic exploitation of the propertyless been so precisely coded in religious norms and legal statutes (i.e. the normative prohibition of any kind of productive labour being carried out by the higher castes for its own or anyone else’s benefit, this being conducted only by the ‘impure’ or ‘less pure’ for the benefit of the ‘pure’). The most significant element of Hindu ideology was, of course, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which was highly functional to the requirements of class domination. Paul N. Siegel explains: The doctrine of the transmigration of souls stated that upon death the soul entered the body of one being born. The caste into which the soul now entered was dependent on one’s conduct in previous life. Each caste had its own law of what was right that it had to observe. Naturally, the primary law of conduct for the Sudras was obedience. As is stated in the Laws of Manu, one of the sacred books of Hinduism, ‘One occupation only the lord prescribed to the sudra – to serve meekly these other three castes’. . . . The doctrine of the transmigration of souls thus provided justification for caste: the Sudra should not blame the system: he was only being punished for his transgressions in a previous life of which he had no memory. If he rebelled, he would only make it worse for himself in his next life, for there were worse things than being a Sudra: the soul could inhabit the body of an animal, even becoming a ‘worm in the intestine of a dog’, as one text graphically put it. . . . On the other hand, by performing one’s caste obligations one could ascend to a higher caste in a future life and even, as later Hindu doctrine said, become a god – for even the gods are not immortal, and undergo reincarnations. Everything is subject to change – except for the caste system, which goes on forever.51 Nonetheless, despite the important function of religious values in legitimizing the caste system, it is important not to confuse the ideology of caste with its social and material reality. As we have seen, the caste system was rooted in the military subordination of the Indus Valley to a warrior aristocracy, whose military and ideological power came to rely initially upon local forms of tributary (tax and rent) exploitation of a subsistence agrarian economy, and the later extension of these practices to secure a cut of the wealth generated by the commercial practices of the urban trading classes.52 Moreover, this structure of class domination was reproduced over the generations, not because the lower castes – the servants and labourers – accepted the religious ideology which justified it

Stratification and power 225 (i.e. their allocation to particular places in the status hierarchy of privilege in accordance with their own ‘good deeds’ in a previous life), but because they were compelled to do so by force of law backed by politico-military and economic constraint. It is difficult to imagine how the situation could have been otherwise. It really does stretch credibility to breaking point and beyond to suggest that such a vicious system of exploitation and domination, directed by a tiny minority against a large majority, and supported by ideas positively saturated with aristocratic contempt for the ‘lower orders’, could possibly have been accepted as legitimate by those who derived little or no benefit from the status quo. Siegel makes the point that Brahman ideology in the ‘age of kingdoms’ sometimes degenerated into a ‘doctrine of utter cynicism’.53 This was because, in order to legitimate the ruthless suppression of the cultivators and slaves and nomadic forest-dwellers, and in order to legitimate the internecine wars of conquest waged between the kingdoms to re-divide the fertile land of the Indus, it sanctioned a state of ‘unbridled competition in which the powerful preyed upon the weak without restraint’.54 Now it is scarcely plausible that such a system could have been characterized by social cohesion underpinned by ideological consensus. Yet this is exactly the position to which any designation of caste domination as based upon ‘statusranking’ must logically commit the analyst. For if the social system of traditional India was produced and reproduced through the mechanism of religious values, according to which power and privilege were accorded to those held in high ‘esteem’ by ‘society’, it is hard to see how the conclusion can be avoided that the bulk of its members must have been ‘happy robots’ of the kind which populate Parsonian social theory. I contend that subscribing to a view of ‘traditional’ societies as stratified by status rather than by class is tantamount to arguing (without evidence) for the existence here of some kind of ‘central value system’, where these would seem to have no reality in capitalist societies,55 which have far greater political and economic means to accomplish popular legitimacy. If anything, Weber’s more ‘modern’ illustrations of status ranking are even more suspect than his ‘caste’ example. This is clearest of all in the case of his distinction between ‘traditional wealth’ and ‘new money’ in modern capitalist societies. Of course, it is reasonable to suppose that in some situations and for some sections of society the landed propertied might be accorded higher status than newly rich businesspeople. But, as often, the reverse is likely to be true: the ‘self-made’ wealthy representing ‘dynamism’ against the ‘snobbish’ or ‘pampered’ defenders of age-old inherited privileges. In any case, subjectivist speculation aside, which is exactly what talk of status ranking lends itself to, the fundamental basis of political influence in capitalist society is always likely to be economic power. Those who have the most of it, not those who have either the more ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ forms of it, will have greater lobbying power plus the structural capacity to bend state policy to their will. Moreover, although it is undoubtedly true that cultural mechanisms of ‘social

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closure’ (e.g. select schools, elite universities, the ‘old boy’ network, ties of intermarriage and interpersonal connections, etc.) are of crucial importance in explaining the reproduction of elite economic power in capitalist societies (such as the UK), it is clear enough that these cultural mechanisms have arisen on the basis of structures of private property and class power in order to fix or stabilize them, and are thus in no real sense factors of stratification apart from relations of production. The ‘upper classes’ in Britain, for example, have reproduced their power, privileges and status primarily by means of the transfer of capital from one generation to the next, and by translating this inherited wealth into social and cultural capital.56 Weber effectively concedes this point, inasmuch as he suggests that ‘positively valued’ status positions are only translated into legal privileges by virtue of being backed up by ‘a stable distribution of economic power’. As he puts it: ‘Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extraordinary regularity’.57 Quite so, but this would indicate that systems of status ranking are for the most part rooted in property or class relations. Weber’s designation of the Junkers and medieval burghers as distinct status groups independent of class positions is equally weak, although perhaps less obviously so. These can be regarded plausibly as such, rather than as socioeconomic classes, only on the grounds of Weber’s relatively untheorized and often contradictory understanding of class relations as existing only in societies where the distribution of allocative resources and economic functions in the division of labour is governed by the mechanisms of the marketplace. From this perspective, a class grouping is best understood in terms of its specific revenue source (land, capital and labour plus the ‘market situation’ of those located in waged employment), as this is determined by its particular contribution to the production of goods and services in a society: We may speak of a ‘class’ when . . . a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as . . . this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and . . . is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labour markets. . . . Always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the ‘market’ is the decisive moment, which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate. ‘Class situation’ is . . . ultimately ‘market situation’.58 But, aside from reproducing the fetishistic logic of the ‘Trinity Formula’, which attributes to capital and landed property sources of revenue (i.e. profit and rent) apart from the surplus labour of the direct producers, surely this limits the applicability of the concept of class far too much. Marx, in contrast to Weber, defines social classes in terms of the asymmetrical distribution of the means of production, with particular classes defined in terms of their relationship to the means of production and labour-power and other class groupings within a given economic order. By this definition, both the medieval burghers and the Junker

Stratification and power 227 aristocrats were distinct class groupings. The former constituted a class by virtue of the fact its members were the possessors of new forces of production (trade and manufacture) and the ‘bearers’ of new forms of economic exploitation (unequal trade and wage-exploitation). The latter constituted a class by virtue of the fact its members monopolized a huge chunk of landed property (which was later translated into control over trade, major parts of industry and the state) and obtained their income, initially through the rent-exploitation of their landless tenants (the main source of wealth in an agrarian class society), but later additionally through the exploitation of wage-labour for profit. In both cases, of course, economic and political power was the basis of strategies of ‘social closure’, and of the ideology of high rank through ‘status right’, both of which were cultural mechanisms through which class power was actively reproduced and extended deeper into society. But why prefer Marx’s concept of class to Weber’s? There are three good reasons for doing so. First, endorsing Marx’s theory of class makes it possible to avoid the disastrous error of mistaking the ideological legitimations of elite domination for its social and material reality. For example, doubtless the Junkers felt themselves to be held in high esteem during their long period of societal dominance, but did the rest of society buy into this dominant ideology thesis? Second, Marx’s theory of class is much better suited than Weber’s to get to grips with the empirical reality of distributional patterns of allocative resources in modern capitalist societies. This is because a voluminous output of contemporary social research still indicates that the fundamental axis of social inequality and economic power in modern societies turns on the possession versus nonpossession of productive wealth.59 Finally, Marx’s theory of class allows us to grasp structural dynamics in terms of the working out of systemic contradictions in a way beyond the ken of Weber’s rival approach. As G.E.M. de Ste Croix has pointed out, in defining classes ‘naturalistically’ and ‘atomistically’ as lacking ‘any organic relationship with one another’ and as sitting ‘side by side . . . like numbers in a row’,60 Weber’s approach obscures the relational nature of class divisions. This is tantamount to papering over Marx’s fundamental insight that class structures are at root based upon modes of surplus appropriation, the economic exploitation of the propertyless majority by the propertied minority. By doing so, Weber effectively denies social conflict socio-structural roots and fragments it into a plethora of crosscutting struggles between unconnected groups (for power, status or scarce resources). Yet this strategy denies social systems any directional logic of internal development by virtue of social struggles that are over-determined by fault lines built into their structures. Social malintegration exists, for Weber, but is relatively untheorized, because unrelated to structural malintegration. By contrast, Marx’s relational concept of class relates societal malintegration to structural contradictions of the modes of production, and in so doing allows him explanatory purchase on the question of societal change and transformation.61 This, of course, is the crucial difference between a dynamic and explanatory concept of class and a merely static and descriptive one.

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The concept of status ranking in neo-Weberian sociology Enough has now been said about Weber’s own attempt to establish the explanatory relevance of the concept of ‘status honour’ for sociological and historical analysis. Clearly, he is not successful in either demonstrating the autonomy of status from class or its causal power in determining the distribution of economic and political power in society in its own right. But perhaps those who have followed his example have managed this task rather better than he. As we have seen, neo-Weberian theorists, such as Anthony Giddens, argue that where structures of domination have their locus in ‘ideal factors’, as opposed to ‘material factors’ (of political or economic power), we are justified in regarding these as systems of status differentiation. I have pointed out that Giddens offers the examples of stratification by ethnicity and gender as decisive proofs of the efficacy of status differentials in shaping the access of agents to authoritative and allocative resources. For him ‘racial’ segregation in the formerly apartheid state of South Africa is a particularly good demonstration of the fact that even in modern capitalist societies an unequal distribution of social prestige can be translated into structures of economic and political power which function to uphold it.62 By the same token, these forms of ‘ideological power’ or ‘cultural ranking’ (‘race’ and gender) are also reckoned by Giddens to be autonomous of class structure or relations of production, in the sense that the former defy explanation in terms of the latter. Again, none of these arguments are compelling. Perhaps the fundamental problem with them is their taken-for-granted assumption that structures of domination, such as those of ‘race’ and gender, are exemplars of ‘status ranking’, simply because they are culturally or sometimes legally constituted. Why does this necessarily follow? Obviously systems of status ranking, if real, have a cultural or ideological existence, in the absence of which they could not function. But, equally, material social relations of exploitation and domination are often legally entrenched and legitimated ideologically by those who benefit from them. Therefore, the fact that ‘oppression’ or ‘domination’ has a legal or ideological dimension does not mean that it must be based upon status ranking. That cultural and legal discrimination and oppression exists and is efficacious in shaping the access of agents to power and resources is of course indisputable. But such modes of domination are structures of status ranking only if they are the resultants of an asymmetrical distribution of prestige in a society and continue to exist only by virtue of this. If, on the other hand, oppressive social relations, supported by legal and cultural norms, arise on the basis of unequal distributions of material resources, and exist in order to legitimate or protect them, it is clear that these are not structures of status ranking, or autonomous dimensions of stratification apart from material relations of power and inequality. In fact, the societal distribution of prestige, in societies where property is not legally defined by the elite as a status qualification (such as in contemporary capitalism), is a notoriously poor guide to the societal distribution of power and rewards. Where the institutional link between property and status is broken, the

Stratification and power 229 latter is shown to have no independent power in shaping the life-chances of agents. It is for this reason that the concept of status ranking is sociologically uninteresting and unimportant in societies where class domination exists. Yet my purpose in making this argument is not to deny the reality of statusdifferentials in class societies past and present, only their autonomous efficacy in determining the access of agents to economic and political power. Certainly, in any society some individuals and groups will be rated higher in terms of social prestige than others, this is unavoidable. But to point out this fact throws into sharp relief the inability of the concept of status ranking to tell us anything interesting about the distribution of power and reward in contemporary capitalist societies. For it is clearly not true that those social groups who are held in highest esteem by ‘society’ are always or even mostly those who enjoy the most privileged life-chances or life-styles. On the contrary, the reverse often seems to be the case. Stockbrokers, top civil servants, politicians, PR consultants, police chiefs and corporate managers have very much more in the way of allocative and authoritative resources than the so-called ‘caring professions’ of doctors, teachers and nurses in UK society. Yet the latter seem to command much more in the way of social prestige than the former (as measured in terms of popular attitudes), in the sense that it is they who are regarded by most people as making by far the more valuable contribution to real social and human needs.63 Clearly, then, there is no determinate relationship between status, on the one hand, and life-chances or political authority, on the other hand. It seems to be the case that certain groups with high status have also great power and wealth, whereas others do not. Therefore, in order to explain the distribution of power and advantage, it is necessary for the analyst to depart company from the concept of status ranking and address economic and class issues. Some of the best work in the sociology of work and employment has followed precisely this strategy. For example, sociologists have argued that doctors and lawyers have superior life-chances to nurses and teachers, not because of their status ranking, but because of the greater success of their ‘market strategies’ in defending their living standards.64 Equally, other sociologists and social theorists have argued that professionals who occupy strategic ‘authority positions’ in capitalist societies (e.g. top managers, high court judges and police chiefs) have far superior life-chances compared to other professional groups (e.g. the ‘caring professions’), because of their specific function in the control and surveillance of subordinate class groupings for the purpose of securing the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.65 Such positions, which involve control and surveillance of subordinates, and which involve a high degree of autonomy and power, have to be filled by individuals who are trustworthy from the point of view of the employing class.66 Since these ‘command positions’ constitute an indispensable prop of class power and privilege, the loyalty of incumbents of these authority positions to the status quo has to be secured by material incentives that tie their interests to those of the propertied and corporate rich. By way of defence of my argument I will consider a couple of popular examples, cited routinely by neo-Weberian sociologists, which are supposed to

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prove the autonomous efficacy of structures of status ranking in determining the access of agents to authoritative and allocative resources. These are: 1 2

gender stratification; ‘racial’ stratification.

Certainly, the existence of stratification by ‘race’ and gender, together with the fact that these modes of stratification are obviously fundamental in determining the life-chances of agents, is seen by a majority of contemporary sociologists as demonstrating that profound social inequalities as often are determined by cultural and ideological as by material factors. For this reason it is necessary to examine critically the substance of the argument that these structures of power can legitimately be seen as systems of status ranking. This is the task of the next two subsections of this chapter. Gender stratification: an exemplar of status ranking? Can the concept of ‘status ranking’ obtain any explanatory purchase on the question of women’s oppression or subordination in either pre-modern or modern societies? Not if status ranking is defined as an asymmetrical distribution of social prestige determined by the attitudes or expectations of ‘society’ or the ‘societal community’ (Parsons’ not unreasonable interpretation of Weber). One major difficulty confronting those who would attribute female disadvantage to status ranking thus defined is that it is hard to see how they can avoid the conclusion that women’s subordination must be rooted in a cultural consensus. For if the cause of female disadvantage (in terms of restricted access to allocative and authoritative resources) is to be found in the lack of prestige or esteem of women in a whole range of different historical societies, of which they constitute roughly half of the population, it must be the case that women share some responsibility with men for this state of affairs. To put it another way, if women have a low ranking in terms of the ‘distribution of social honour’, itself the sum of the attitudes of men and women in a society, this must be because a majority of them, in common with a majority of men, do not hold themselves in high esteem, and acquiesce on this basis to their disadvantaged access to economic, political and cultural resources. What other conclusion is possible? Since this concept of status ranking refers us to commonly held inter-subjective valuations of the respective worth of individuals and groups in society (on the basis of their colour, sex or religion), it necessarily follows that women’s oppression is a function of all-embracing ‘common values’. I take it that this view renders the resistance of many women to gender stratification systems throughout history rather mysterious. Indeed, the fact that women actively seek to modify or blunt their social disadvantages is itself a refutation of any explanation of their predicament in terms of status ranking, because this shows that women’s economic and other disadvantages are not rooted in any kind of cultural or ideological consensus.

Stratification and power 231 Yet neo-Weberians (and those conflict theorists influenced by their ideas) would doubtless reject this functionalist-type understanding of status ranking. Instead they would hold that unequal distributions of social prestige more often are a function or resultant of dominant ideology, the imposition of negative definitions on certain social groups by others, in this case by men on women. But this is simply incoherent. Since many women reject and struggle against ‘male ideology’, and the structures of power which allegedly rise from it, any explanation of their continuing subordination must explain how it persists in the face of its lack of popular consensus or all-embracing ideology, given that gender inequality results from prejudiced ideas or attitudes. Yet taking this step also means that some kind of explanation must now be given of why this ‘male ideology’ is accepted by ‘men’, and how men can mobilize it to defend their privileges from one generation to the next. This, of course, requires the analyst to step outside the realm of ideology or cultural attitudes, and to refer these to the social and material circumstances of their production and reproduction. But is this not suggestive that the basis or locus of women’s subordination is other than ‘ideological’ or ‘normative’? Nonetheless, asserting the opposite is true has been the chosen conceptual strategy of most feminists who endorse patriarchy theory. Patriarchy theory is, for the most part, a system of ideas which grasps women’s subordination as a function of status inequalities imposed by men on women, which operate independently of and alongside (but also obviously within) economic and political structures. Patriarchy is thus essentially a form of ideological domination of women by men. Now this approach is the orthodox or dominant theoretical understanding of gender inequality. Thus, Juliet Mitchell, for example, speaks for most feminists and sociologists where she argues that there exists ‘two autonomous areas, the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy’ in modern societies.67 But, despite the near hegemony of patriarchy theory, it is extraordinarily problematic. The primary problem with the theory is that, divested of biological or psychological or social roots, the ‘autonomous ideological mode’ of patriarchy, held by feminists to be responsible for female subordination, is emancipated from rational explanation.68 Instead it becomes a kind of contextless ‘free floating’ cultural discourse, divested of any material basis whatsoever, magically undetermined or unconditioned by anything external or anterior to itself. Where does ‘patriarchy’ come from? How is it reproduced historically? These are questions that cannot be addressed by those who treat women’s subordination as a function of ‘maleist ideology’. Instead we are often treated to untheorized postmodernist type claims that ideologies or ‘discursive formations’ are basic to material social relations or equally untheorized empiricist assertions that there is no necessary connection between social relations and forms of discourse.69 Those feminists who are rightly not satisfied with this kind of theoretical understanding, but who nonetheless remain eager to avoid the ‘class reductionism’ of Marxism, normally find themselves forced to embrace the extremely reductive logic of psychologistic or biologistic explanations of the female

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predicament. Thus, the failing of models of gender stratification based or dependent upon status ranking has led many feminists straight into the impasse of versions of materialism that are straightforwardly naturalistic. For them, women’s oppression and inequality is a universal fact of history, a product of men’s biological or psychological nature. As Roberta Hamilton puts the argument: ‘The feminist analysis has addressed itself to patriarchal ideology, that patriarchal mode which defines the system of male domination and female subjugation in any society. But patriarchy . . . is predicated on biological differences between the sexes, giving it a historical basis of its own’.70 This claim that ‘biological difference’ gives patriarchy its historical location is rather odd, since this view precisely places it outside the structural and cultural determinations of specific societies. Thus, in order to overcome the idealism of the orthodox feminist approach, Hamilton conceives of patriarchy as a system of cultural stratification, but grants it roots outside society and history. But another way out of this impasse of cultural idealism is to root the ‘male culture’ or ‘male ideology’ responsible for women’s low status in ‘male benefits’. This kind of approach purportedly has the advantage of anchoring patriarchal ideology in material reality without crudely reducing it to biological or psychological mechanisms. This is the strategy of certain radical feminists, most notably Heidi Hartmann.71 Hartmann’s argument is that structures of patriarchy should be defined as ‘a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence or solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women’. For Hartmann, the material basis of patriarchal ideology ‘lies most fundamentally in men’s control over women’s labour power’.72 Patriarchy is, in short, a structure of sex exploitation, which predates class society, and which in modern times extends over and is rooted in all major institutions, not simply the family. In pre-capitalist society, argues Hartmann, patriarchy is based upon the productive patriarchal household; in capitalism, by contrast, it is based upon the division of labour between home and work.73 In capitalism, argues Hartmann, ‘[i]n denying women access to . . . economically productive resources, men form an alliance with capital’.74 Hartmann cites trade union demands for protective legislation and the family wage in the early part of nineteenth century, which were ceded by the state and capital, as evidence for the existence of this alliance of all men of whatever social class against all women.75 Her argument is that the purpose of these ‘reforms’ was to exclude women from access to an independent source of economic subsistence apart from their men folk, so as to force them into a relationship of material dependence upon their husbands or fathers. This ‘alliance’ of men and capitalism is said by Hartmann to have ‘benefited’ both parties. On the one hand, capitalists secured the reproduction of labour power relatively cheaply, as Marxists argue. On the other hand, men were given ‘a higher standard of living than women in terms of luxury consumption, leisure time and personalized services’.76 My contention is that explanations of women’s subordination in terms of either ‘male nature’ or ‘male benefits’ are inadequate. The former approach is

Stratification and power 233 particularly unsuccessful, simply because crude biological and psychological reductionism is no more acceptable here than in any other area of social analysis. For a start, this kind of analytical strategy cannot explain why many men are not oppressors or exploiters of women in societies old and new. Faced with this problem, radical feminists tend to pretend it does not exist, by asserting without evidence that there are no men who do not exploit and oppress women.77 Further, this kind of understanding is confounded by new anthropological knowledge of pre-class hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies, which has undermined the ‘myth of ubiquitous male power’.78 Nor can the ‘male nature’ position make its appeal to any kind of neurophysiological evidence or evolutionary mechanism to explain the facts of gender stratification. First, microbiology has not revealed any fundamental differences in the genetic makeup of men and women, which could explain ‘patriarchal culture’, or the psychological ‘need’ of the former to oppress or exploit the latter. Second, evolutionary ecology cannot specify any good ‘selection’ reasons why this alleged trait of ‘male nature’ might have arisen. Indeed, good selection reasons can be given as to why the ‘anti-social domineering male’ would not constitute a useful adaptive mechanism of biological evolution in our species.79 On the face of it, Hartmann’s ‘materialist’ reconstruction of patriarchy as a theory of ‘male benefits’ is more sophisticated than those of feminists who attribute women’s subordination to biological or cultural factors. This, after all, can explain male domination in terms of the material advantages that accrue to men, by virtue of the exploitation and oppression of women in all historical societies. But major problems remain. First, Hartmann’s analysis cannot explain satisfactorily why men did not exercise domination over women in a range of pre-class social formations, past and present, yet much anthropological work has suggested that this was the case,80 and again Hartmann’s strategy here is to simply deny the possibility that women historically have ever been the equals of men. Perhaps Hartmann would want to say that men exploited and oppressed women at some point in the first historical societies because of the pressure of ‘scarcity’ leading to competition between the sexes. But, again, much recent anthropological work (cited in the endnote reference above) would seem to suggest otherwise. This has indicated that it was precisely in those pre-class societies, which have constituted 90 per cent of human history, and where patriarchal domination arguably did not exist, that men and women have tended to settle for very simple consumptive wants. Second, Hartmann’s claim that the protective legislation and ‘family wage’ of the nineteenth century evidences a ‘male conspiracy’ of workers and capitalists against women has virtually no empirical support. As Lindsey German rightly points out: some of the most important areas from which women were excluded were ones where the unions were weak or non-existent and in no position to exclude anyone. The legislative exclusion of women from certain industries was carried on by bourgeois parliaments because the conditions in these

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Yet certain capitalist employers of women (and children) were bitterly opposed to attempts by the state and the unions to reform their industries, and for reasons entirely explainable in terms of their immediate vested class interest in the maximum exploitation of wage-labour. This was imposed on them by the state, though with the support of many unions and under pressure from other major sections of capital. By contrast, working class men and women, for the most part, were prepared to accept, often support, protective legislation regulating the number of hours worked by women in most trades, and excluding them from certain industries in exchange for a ‘family wage’.82 Again, their reasons for doing so were entirely explainable in terms of common class interests. The working class family, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was on the point of collapse. High rates of infant mortality among working class women (caused by poor living conditions and overwork in the factories, mines and mills) were actually threatening the physical reproduction of the proletariat. In particular, in the absence of socialized childcare facilities, which were beyond the affordability of workers and fledgling capitalist employers,83 the employment of husbands and wives outside the home was undermining the health and well-being of their children. This being the case, it is hardly surprising that male and female workers mostly acquiesced to the construction of the new gendered division of labour. Individual male workers could at least prevent their wages and conditions of work being further undermined by the substitution of cheaper female and child labour by unscrupulous employers; females could be released from the factories and mines to look after their spouses and children. Nonetheless, the family wage ‘was generally considerably less than the joint family income that would have been received had [the husband’s] . . . wife and children also been working’. Consequently, this did not function to provide ‘male benefits’ by raising the living standards of the male worker – who was in any case subject to the powerful influence of normative and judicial norms which demanded that he devote it to the consumption of his wife and children, and not simply his own consumption.84 The fact that it was women who assumed domestic responsibilities rather than men had little to do with ‘male power’ or the dominance of ‘male ideology’. On the contrary, this was due to the fact that men could command higher wages than women in the labour market. Hartmann’s claim that ‘instead of fighting for equal wages for men and women, male workers sought the “family wage”, wanting to retain their wives’ services at home’,85 this evidencing the alliance between capital and male workers, is not compelling. Most male workers were at this time non-unionized and lacking the confidence and organi-

Stratification and power 235 zational capacities to follow through this utopian strategy.86 Even unionized workers were not fighting for elementary industrial rights during this period. This meant that working class and union input into protective legislation was minimal. Finally, Hartmann’s substantive underlying theoretical point, her attempt to demonstrate the existence of uniform ‘male benefits’ that support patriarchy as a structure of gender oppression and inequality, is also of doubtful validity. In effect, Hartmann’s patriarchy theory depends on the adequacy of her strong claim that males (irrespective of their social class positioning in capitalist relations of production) are unified in sustaining women’s subordination, by virtue of the ‘material benefits’ they derive from the subordination of women. But the fact that women have primary responsibility for childcare and housework, and men for paid employment outside the home, does not necessarily mean that men benefit from this state of affairs. The first point to make is that inequalities between men and women in the home are actually rather marginal, and certainly are not sufficient to grant men a ‘stake’ in the gendered division of labour. In fact, men do not benefit substantially from ‘personal services’ in the home.87 The bulk of housework is devoted not to the upkeep of the husband, but to childcare and socialization duties, and of course as many children are female as male.88 Moreover, it is also true that men have taken on more domestic responsibilities in recent years, in response to growing female employment outside the home. So men today in Britain, according to a large-scale study conducted in the 1980s, have on average just 75 minutes more leisure time a day than women, hardly the stuff of major sectoral advantages.89 The second point to make is that the sexual division of labour is debilitating and oppressive for men as well as women. This is because it denies men and women a fuller participation in the life of society, pressurizing the members of both sexes to adopt narrow ‘productive’ (instrumental) and ‘reproductive’ (nurturing-expressive) roles, which are in fact oppressive and alienating in different and incommensurable ways.90 Thus, the role of oppressed housewife is no better or worse than the role of being an exploited wage labourer. Home-workers suffer the oppression of atomization and exclusion from the public sphere of social production. They also suffer from the burden of a domestic drudgery, which is not valued by society as ‘real work’ (because it does not produce commodities for sale and generate value at the point of production and realize profit at the point of distribution), and a variety of psychological ailments and insecurities which stem from this form of social exclusion. It is true that home-workers tend to work longer hours than market workers, and so it is also true that men tend to have more leisure time than women, though the extent of this is often exaggerated. But wage workers suffer from the oppression of collective class exploitation: of ‘flexibility’, of speed up, of intensive and structured work of a routine kind for a period of time (indeed they tend to work more intensively under factory conditions than home-workers), of subordination to bullying bosses and hierarchical systems of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and from the variety of occupational diseases and disabilities

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which result from alienated work.91 This being the case, the female predicament in modern capitalist society is not that men subordinate women for material benefits, but rather that the ideology of women’s proper place, and its partial negation in practice in the context of the growing feminization of the labour force, ensures that women have to bear the ‘double bind’ of combining the major part of housework with paid work outside the home. The final point to make is that both men and women have an objective material interest in the abolition of the existing sexual division of labour, not its maintenance. The reason for this is, being materially disadvantaged by the system of privatized familial reproduction under capitalism, both would derive substantial material benefits from the socialization of childcare and other domestic responsibilities under socialism. This means that it is quite wrong to locate women’s oppression in the antagonistic interpersonal relations or conflicts of material interest between men and women.92 Incidentally, this is why most women do not buy into the radical feminist thesis of the irreconcilability of the sexes, of the system of ‘sex exploitation’ by which men oppress and subordinate women, of ‘sex-class divisions’ between men and women. On the contrary, since the root of women’s subordination in modern society lies in the structured division of labour between the domestic and productive spheres, between the household and the public workplace, it is hardly surprising that most women do not regard themselves as ‘sleeping with the enemy’. I have now said enough about the specific weaknesses of the different versions of idealist and materialist patriarchy theory. Yet, notwithstanding these, it is clear they all share many of the same problems in common. A brief summary of these is now necessary. First, they suffer from what Ralph Miliband has called a ‘damaging abstractionism’. The reason for this is that attempts to explain women’s oppression in terms of the doings or attitudes or interests of ‘men’ (an undifferentiated biological or cultural mass) ignores the fact that not all men are the occupants of positions in social relations whose practices are efficacious in enforcing women’s subordination on a society-wide scale. Thus, it is not the sexism of the male factory worker that restricts the career opportunities of middle class women, that locates working class women in lowpaid casualized employment, or that is responsible for the gendered division of labour, which underpins these realities. On the contrary, ‘it is men as employers (and also, it may be added, the small minority of women who are also employers)’,93 as well as men and women as top state officials and policy-makers, who are responsible for the persistence of this state of affairs. Nor are working class males responsible for the commodification of women’s sexuality under capitalism, which has given rise to prostitution, pornography and a host of other cultural deformations. Again, these are structural properties of capitalism, reproduced by the social practices of those elite groupings that control authoritative and allocative resources. Working class men simply do not have the structural capacities to reproduce the system of female subordination. This is not to say that proletarian men are all opponents of sexism. Some are, others are not. But sexism was not the creation of those workers who are sexist,

Stratification and power 237 or of their forebears. Moreover, the cultural reproduction of proletarian sexism is certainly partly explainable in terms of economic-class mechanisms. This is because it has, to a certain degree, been fostered historically as a rationalization of those trade union exclusionary practices designed to protect the wages and working conditions of male workers from the perceived threat (and often reality) posed by the employment of cheaper female labour outside the home.94 This has since assumed a cultural life of its own, not least because the gendered division of labour and labour market inequalities feed into and reinforce the chauvinistic attitudes and discriminatory practices of male trade union officials (women, from this point of view, are denying men their ‘traditional’ role, as well as undercutting their earnings and working conditions, by working more flexibly for less and entering male-dominated employment). Naturally I am not saying that working class or trade union sexism is entirely explainable in terms of economic-class mechanisms. Nonetheless it is still attributable to socio-structural mechanisms rather than the alleged facts of ‘male nature’ or ‘male culture’. As Miliband rightly points out: A different explanation is required, and must be sought, I would argue, in traditional ideological prejudices and positions, nurtured over many generations, and reinforced by the multiple alienations, frustrations and anxieties generated by societies whose dynamic is ruthless competition and frantic acquisition, and whose ethos constitutes a permanent denial, in practice, of co-operation, fellowship and solidarity. Such societies provide a fertile ground for the festering of the ‘injuries of class’ and for the development of pathological deformations: mechanisms of legitimation for these deformations readily come into play and designate victims as themselves responsible for the sufferings inflicted upon them, and for diverse social ills.95 Certainly, the worst aspect of women’s oppression – male sexual violence and rape against women – is hardly explainable in terms of ‘the patriarchy’. The same is probably true of male sexual abuse of children, including the sexual abuse of daughters by fathers. Rather, these are largely attributable to the ‘way in which capitalism produces changes in the nature of sexuality, the family and the socialisation of men and women into different class and gender roles’,96 and the particular ways this impacts on a minority of men. The norms and values of the capitalist marketplace are based on materialism and competitive self-interest and involve the reification of human subjects as service-providers and other objects of utility or exploitation. Capitalist social relations transform human relations into relations between mutually disinterested competitors for moneysuccess and material possessions and hedonistic consumption. At the same time, since the 1960s, the rise of the women’s movement and attendant demands for sexual liberation for men and women has resulted in a situation where members of both sexes are culturally expected to value and seek out sexual experiences and relationships for their own sake (not simply for purposes of procreation within the framework of traditional family life).

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Outside the context of capitalist social relations, this development would be an unqualified good. However, under capitalism, it has proven a double-edged sword. For it has meant that sex and women’s bodies have become objectified as commodities (and thus detached from human relationships). But this has created a situation where ‘sex’ can be ‘stolen’ like any other commodity or object.97 This occurs in the domestic sphere, where husbands regard their wives as ‘contractually obliged’ to provide sexual services in return for the family income, or where fathers exploit the dependent status of children to transform them into objects of sexual utility. But this also occurs in cases of ‘stranger rape’ and serial sex crime (including serial murder). The former (stranger rape) is perpetrated by delinquent men, often from poor, unstable family backgrounds, burdened with low self-esteem and poor social skills, whose psychological defects have been forged by the ‘hidden injuries of class’.98 Such individuals have been shown by numerous studies to be suffering from personality disorders of various kinds (insecurity, dependency, psychological immaturity, depression, low impulse and frustration control and so on).99 In the context of the market society, for these males whose own personal and familial circumstances have not equipped them with the cultural socialization or experiences that would allow them a measure of resistance to the egoistic and instrumental values of the market, they are especially prone to viewing other people as mere objects of consumption rather than subjects or people in their own right. The latter (serial murder) is correlated causally with the ideology of ‘superheated sex’, itself a nineteenth century innovation of the commodity culture (the incitement and cultivation of erotica as ‘forbidden’ desire via the bourgeoning pornography industry). This has meant the massive popular expansion of the erotic imagination, and therefore of the morbid dimension of sexual fantasy (sex as violence). For a minority of men (normally those of low status, invariably those with virtually zero self-esteem and often those whose sense of self-worth has been undermined by loveless family relations or by a history of childhood sexual abuse), mere morbid sexual fantasy conjoined with the practice of conventional sex is insufficient to sate their desires. These men, lacking internal impulse-controls, are slaves to the ideology of ‘superheated sex’, which is internalized as the obsessive imperative for self-affirmation by means of sadistic sex.100 Modern capitalism is implicated in other ways in the phenomenon of domestic and sexual violence. For it is a feature of gender socialization under capitalism that men are supposed to be instrumental whereas women are supposed to be expressive. But, if this is so, it is not surprising that a minority of men extend the egoism, instrumentalism, reification and commodity fetishism of the marketplace into their own families and households. This explains how it is possible for wives, female partners and even female children to be transformed into mere sexual commodities. Or, alternatively, it explains how they may be transformed into objects for the gratification of other repressed emotions or needs – such as the need of men to compensate for their powerlessness in the

Stratification and power 239 world of work by attempting to assert power at home. However, this need of powerless men to assert power in the home, as psychic and symbolic compensation for their feelings of status-deprivation in the wider society, can also be overstated. In the case of domestic violence and child physical abuse, which is often assumed to be explainable in terms of men’s patriarchal need to dominate their families, there is a body of compelling sociological work which indicates that this is a very long way from being simply a male problem,101 and is explainable to a large degree by a range of structural and cultural factors other than gendered inequalities, relations and ideologies.102 Particularly important factors cited by such studies include the often suffocating and intense emotional obligations, commitments and dependencies exerted on men, women and children by the structure of the nuclear family in particular and privatized familial relations in general. The nuclear family is represented as the idealized domain of interpersonal relations, a self-sufficient and insular world, where members are expected to fulfil their individual needs exclusively in the context of the family group (without recourse to wider social networks), and where individual and collective needs are supposed to be harmonized. This is utopia. The privatized nature of the family institutionalizes power inequalities between parents and children that may be exercised arbitrarily, and often fosters asymmetric relations of financial dependence or of mutual emotional involvement which can be psychologically debilitating. The privatized nuclear family also subordinates individuality to group interests (often those defined by the dominant personalities), which can suppress the development of self and sponsor passive rule-following. The insularity of the family can generate a fear and suspicion of the world beyond and thus render escape (whether physical or emotional) from such relations notoriously difficult.103 (Indeed, it is the privatized nature of familial relationships under capitalism that hides the ‘mutual combat’ or ‘reciprocal violence’ of domestic life away from public scrutiny or control, and which hence allows it to grow and fester unchallenged.)104 One factor of family life correlated with domestic violence includes those conflicts generated by the mismatch between ideologies of domestic living (the nuclear family ideology) and the actuality of family life, since these generate disappointed expectations by members, which can lead to mutual bitterness and recriminations.105 These expectations and thus tensions are experienced particularly acutely by working class persons, since alienated from the world of work (which provides little in the way of status or financial rewards), they particularly idealize the family as a potential refuge from capitalism and its state.106 Family pressures of this kind are also correlated with mental illness amongst primary carers (nearly always mothers), which is a major contributor towards child abuse.107 The nuclear family ideology also erodes the quality of human relations outside the family, since these are reserved for instrumental and strategic action,108 and so adds to the idealized sociality that is expected of the family (as ‘haven in a heartless world’), which can only be frustrated by experience.109 Another important factor explaining familial violence is the cultural prescription of certain ‘legitimate’ forms of violence within the family – notably

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physical punishment inflicted by parents on children, which socializes children into accepting that it is ‘normal’ or acceptable for the powerful to hit the less powerful and to achieve goals by hitting those you love).110 Other relevant variables include the domestic tensions and stresses placed on the household by the manifold ‘injuries of class’. These ‘injuries’ include: unemployment; poverty; attendant overcrowded and substandard housing; and the ill-health and diseases connected with poverty and economic inequality.111 They also include: powerlessness at work and in society at large; the mismatch between material deprivation and cultural expectations of ‘money success’; and attendant low self-esteem and alienation (both for men who are traditionally expected to ‘support’ their families and achieve ‘success’ in the world of work, and for women who are traditionally expected to be content with the drudgery and isolation of the ‘homemaker’ role).112 These are all factors correlated with membership of the manual working class. But these class-variables are also correlated with domestic tension and violence,113 including the abuse of children.114 Of course, making these observations should not be taken to imply that gender roles, identities and ideologies are not also causally implicated in the major forms of domestic and sexual violence. Traditional gendered ideologies undoubtedly contribute to male violence against women and dependent children. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the ideology of ‘separate spheres’, based on the sexual division of labour between the labour market (or occupational sphere more generally) and domestic work, has historically socialized men into ‘masculinities’ that are organized around values functional to their formal role in paid employment under capitalism (instrumentalism, materialism, independence, detachment, competitiveness, aggression, assertive self-interest). Such cultural norms and values are generated by capitalism, but because the gendered division of labour historically situated men rather than women in the labour market, they have become tied to traditional notions of ‘masculinity’. A common error of feminist-inspired sociology is to miss this simple point. The simple confusion of bourgeois cultural attitudes with those of ‘masculinity’ is a depressing feature of recent work in gender studies and has led to the most amazing reductionism in social analysis (such as the claim by one author that ‘male criminality’ in all its forms – petty theft, burglary, mugging, white collar and corporate crime, and sexual violence – should all be explained as an attempt to assert ‘hegemonic masculinity’).115 Moreover, capitalist modernity is politically structured into competing nation states. Indeed, the threat and exercise of state military power has always been an indispensable mechanism for consolidating and extending the global reach of each competing national bloc of capital.116 Now specific values associated with traditional masculinity (toughness, machismo, aggression, sexism, authoritarianism, moral conservatism) are entirely functional to such a system of class power, and they arise historically and causally from the insertion of men into militarized role-positions within the state. By the same token, such assertive masculinities are also functional to the systems of punitive social control and criminal justice internal to capitalist societies. For example, research data has shown that such

Stratification and power 241 attitudes associated with such masculinities are integral to the occupational culture of the modern police (where these are also correlated with extreme classism, racism and homophobia), and comparative research suggests that these attitudes are grossly over-represented in the police vis-à-vis other occupational groups.117 However, the internalization of such assertive ‘masculinities’ will, under certain circumstances, translate into domineering domestic behaviour, which can spill over into violence. By contrast, the traditional role of women in the sexual division of labour (reproducing labour power), and their socialization into attendant ‘femininities’ organized around nurturing and caring and co-operative values, is likely to offer them a greater measure of internal psychic resistance to engaging in deviant/criminal behaviour,118 including aggressive behaviour directed against spouses or children. This remains true today, since women are still expected to assume primary responsibility for the domestic sphere, as well as contributing to the family income through paid work in the labour market. However, the fact that women are the primary child-carers ensures that most incidences of physical violence (including serious violence) against children in the family are perpetrated by mothers, especially by unemployed mothers or full-time housewives, or mothers who lack wider supportive networks which would give them respite from childrearing responsibilities.119 Second, gendered relationships generate significant power inequalities between men and women in the family, particularly in the working class family. Because, under the family breadwinner system, men (as wage-workers) earn the bulk of the family income, upon which the subsistence of dependent members of the household depends, this relative economic power generates the ‘patriarchal’ ideology that men are naturally superior to women, and thus have the moral right and duty to command the household. Sexist ideology here, then, has its basis partially in the fact that women (as wives and mothers) have been traditionally dependent for their subsistence on male earnings. Thus, faced with the multiple pressures of modern living, particularly the structural impact of market forces on the lower working class family, the uncritical ingestion by such men of this breadwinner ideology is obviously likely to generate a greater likelihood of them adopting authoritarian masculinities in the domestic sphere, which in certain circumstances can license domestic violence against wives and partners and children. This is particularly the case where the security of this traditional masculine role and the gender identities invested in it become threatened by unemployment or under-employment or by low-status work that provides insufficient wages to support the family. But this can also occur where the breadwinner role of such men is challenged by the assertion of financial independence by wives or female partners (through paid work), or where male authority within the family is contested by financial dependents. Finally, as previously observed, the subordination of working class men to capitalist employers and managers in the labour market, and along with this their subordination to the fragmented division of labour and hierarchical bureaucratic structure of control characteristic of work under capitalism, generates in male

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workers feelings of low self-esteem and insecurity and powerlessness. In these circumstances, the family unit of dependent wife and children can become the space where power denied a legitimate outlet in society at large can be exercised against those with even less power (because excluded from an independent subsistence). So gender inequality in the family, which is particularly pronounced in the working class family (legitimated by the breadwinner ideology), makes possible there the exercise of male self-assertion in an oppressive or authoritarian form.120 This provides the male worker with psychological compensation for his subordinated status in the world of work, but at the heavy cost of hurting the ones nearest and dearest to him. For such power is not only unjust but can lead to conflict and violence. This may occur where the authoritarian male faces a real or imagined challenge from those for whom he has (from his own perspective) toiled long and hard to provide, and from whom he expects ‘respect’ (i.e. deference) in return. The male worker may feel that he is chained to mundane, monotonous, low paid, low status work, because he is expected by society (and his dependents) to perform the breadwinner role. His wife and children may indeed view him as a ‘failure’ in the world of work (inasmuch as he is unemployed, casually employed, or earns insufficient wages to support a family), which further undermines his self-respect. This can lead to virtual civil war within families. The male worker may feel trapped by his family responsibilities (under the auspices of traditional masculine values) to surrendering his life-blood in otherwise pointless alienating labour. So, instead of directing his anger and frustration against the system, he may displace or project it onto his loved ones, in effect making them scapegoats.121 Conceding this point that the male breadwinner system and the ideology of separate spheres is an important causal factor in explaining male domestic violence does not imply endorsement of the radical feminist thesis that such violence is an integral part of a patriarchal system of power and domination that is (they say) designed to keep women in their place. The fact that sex-role differentiation has not generated an ideology of functional equivalence between paid work and domestic work is not the result of a male conspiracy or of collective male interests. On the contrary, it reflects the devaluation of domestic labour under capitalism (as unpaid work that does not generate surplus value), and the corresponding fetishization of ‘productive’ work (wage-labour that generates monetary profit for the capitalist owners of the means of production). This is capitalist ideology. Male domestic violence is an unintended consequence of the historical structuration of gender roles and identities under capitalist modernity, under pressure from specific social and economic circumstances. These roles and identities are not authored by men or women, and are not organized around the defence of male power. Rather, they constitute emergent social and ideological structures, with a different historical locus, into which both men and women have been traditionally socialized in the context of the nuclear family. It is especially problematic to see male interpersonal violence as a mechanism or expression of male power and domination. Feminists of all hues

Stratification and power 243 (excepting some exponents of ‘difference’ or postmodern feminism) assert that diverse forms of oppressive male conduct – especially domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse of children – are attempts by ‘men’ (supported by everyday ideologies, legal norms and criminal justice procedures) to preserve a patriarchal system of sex domination or exploitation.122 But this is conspiracy theory gone berserk.123 Rapists and sexual abusers are a minority of men,124 and rape and sexual abuse and domestic violence is seen by the overwhelming majority of men as disreputable, even reprehensible, conduct.125 Far from acting to preserve masculine power and authority, such abuse and violence is likely to reduce the power and autonomy of those men who resort to it, both in the family and society at large, as wives and children abandon them, and as state authorities criminalize them. In any case, these men are not powerholders, acting to maintain their grip on power, but are often the most socially powerless and psychologically damaged individuals. As we have seen, these men often suffer the frustrations of status-deprivation, and resort to sexual and domestic violence to make them feel a little more ‘in command’ of their lives.126 Many studies by feminist and other social researchers have substantiated the link between low-status/low-income men and domestic/sexual violence, but the theoretical reliance on the concept of patriarchy has ensured that the obvious conclusions are not drawn by feminist writers. Instead of concluding that male violence is a symptom of power-deprivation and power-compensation, it is asserted instead that it is about preserving a masculine power (which in reality does not exist). The fact that the institutions and ideologies of sex-role stereotyping are not functional for male power is revealed by the profound psychological distress and guilt experienced by violent men who have surrendered self-control and injured their wives, partners and children. More often than not, these are men moved by motives and pressures (sociopsychological, cultural and structural) they cannot control and do not fully understand, and which they experience as debilitating. These men have poor self-esteem as well as low impulse-control. They react to imagined or real slights to their stereotypical views of gender roles and responsibilities (e.g. the ‘lazy’ wife who fails to make tea on time for the weary and perhaps stressed returning breadwinner) or to challenges to their authority (e.g. the ‘disrespectful’ child who does not realize the sacrifices that are being made by the breadwinner on his or her behalf). They regret their violent actions later and promise to do better. Often they themselves were the victims of authoritarian abusive fathers, who were themselves victims of their own bullying fathers. It cannot be assumed that the need of such men for ‘power’, ‘autonomy’, ‘status’ and ‘authority’ is inherently disreputable, a symptom of an exploitative culture of ‘masculinity’. After all, the purpose of the women’s movement was to achieve these things for women – to give women the equality of opportunity to achieve self-empowerment in society at large. The problem is that sex-role socialization under capitalism ensures that the pursuit of these needs and interests by men (which are objective human needs) often leads them into oppressive conduct and attitudes towards women. Almost as much as the women and

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children who are their victims, these men (and indeed all men) would benefit from being liberated from the stereotyped gender roles and patriarchal masculinities they have been saddled with by virtue of experience and enculturation. As I intend to demonstrate, the real beneficiary of sex-role stereotyping and patriarchal ideologies, despite the inequalities between men and women they help sustain, and despite the oppressive behaviour of certain males they help encourage, is not ‘men’, but rather the capitalist system itself and its superordinate class of interlocking political and economic elites. Before adding some flesh to the bones of this assertion, however, it is worth addressing one additional problem of patriarchy theory. The chief problem with this attempt to attribute female subordination to ‘male power’ or ‘male culture’ is that it leads into a political impasse from which there is no obvious escape. This is because if ‘the patriarchy’ is ‘natural’ and ‘universal’, it is not clear how it can be done away with. After all, women do not constitute a clear cut majority in any society vis-à-vis men. Moreover, most women as women do not possess much in the way of political or economic power. And, unlike the working class, women as a group do not possess the collective potential (derived from their key positioning in relations of production) to challenge or overturn the structures which maintain their own oppression. Finally, women are internally divided by ‘race’ and class. As a result, they cannot make strategic alliances with ‘progressive males’, since all (or at least the vast majority of) men are (according to patriarchy theorists) by definition instinctual exploiters of women, and cannot therefore be reliable opponents of sexism. This is why certain radical feminists are committed to ‘lifestyle separatism’ in place of political mobilizations against ‘male institutions’ – i.e. the recommendation that women stop ‘sleeping with the enemy’ and embrace political lesbianism, even setting up women-only communes apart from ‘male society’.127 But this kind of politics represents a flight from, not a challenge to, gender inequality. For this reason many socialist and post-structuralist feminists reject it, without recognizing that it is a strategy entirely consistent with patriarchy theory (which they too endorse), with its representation of gender inequality as ‘sex-class domination’. (Superordinate classes, which benefit materially from oppressive and exploitative practices, cannot be convinced by deconstructive academic discourses to see the error of their ways, and nor will they allow their power to be ‘reformed away’ by professional women in ‘responsible’ professions or a more general feminization of employment.) Moreover, this kind of radical feminist politics also runs counter to the basic sociality or solidarity of human beings as a ‘natural kind’. Thus, it is hard to imagine that many women would be prepared to sever contact with male kin altogether. Finally, the separatist solution is likely to be feasible only to middle class women with independent means, and so is inherently elitist. In any case, such women are hardly likely to want to give up privileged class positions in society for an uncertain future elsewhere. So radical feminist politics suffer the double bind of elitism and utopianism. I conclude that the failings of patriarchy theory indicate the need to embrace an emergentist materialist understanding of gender inequality. This is necessary

Stratification and power 245 to avoid the pitfalls of both cultural idealism (appeals to the autonomous system of status ranking to explain the female predicament) and vulgar materialism (the attempt to overcome the limitations of an idealist understanding of women’s oppression in terms of status differentials by placing these on naturalistic or unhistorical foundations). Now it just so happens that Marxism can provide such an explanation. An early statement of this kind of approach is to be found in Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.128 Engels’ purpose here was to explain the historical origin of female subordination and disadvantage in terms of the emergence of class society and attendant politico-military relations of state power. His argument is threefold. First, women were not subordinate to men until the consolidation of class relations by means of state power. Second, men came to dominate women in the first class societies, because their control or effective possession over certain of the means of production, which generated a surplus product over the community’s reproduction essentials, inevitably allowed them to assume ownership rights over this surplus product. Finally, the first ‘dominant males’ necessarily passed ownership rights and controls over the surplus product to their sons, rather than their daughters or relatives on their wives’ side, thus transmitting patriarchal power forward in time over the generations.129 My contention that Engels’ analysis, as stated in the simplest terms above, is fundamental to explaining the basis of gender stratification, is one that most sociologists and anthropologists would dismiss out of hand.130 Certainly, Engels’ analysis made significant mistakes. He was wrong to postulate a historical period before class began in which sexual relations were characterized by ‘primordial promiscuity’. He was wrong to argue that systematic warfare was a feature of pre-class societies. He was wrong to postulate the existence of a historical period where ‘matriarchy’ prevailed. And, of course, he was wrong on many other anthropological details besides (and inevitably so given the state of historical evidence and research of his day). Nonetheless, Engels’ core argument (as outlined above) has not been invalidated. Indeed, the first part of his account has been vindicated by at least some contemporary developments in anthropology by researchers (such as Leacock, Friedl, Lee and Sacks), which have challenged the orthodox feminist view that sexual inequality between men and women (with men always dominant and women subordinate) has always characterized human society. As Harman points out: ‘The evidence, meticulously put together by . . . Leacock and others, is that there was no male domination of men over women among the nomadic hunter-gatherers European settlers encountered in the 17th to 19th centuries’.131 Instead, on the basis of a sexual division of economic labour (in which men did most of the hunting and scavenging, and women did most of the gathering of plant foods), there was an egalitarian distribution of food for all and joint decision-making by men and women.132 Basing their conclusions on this research and the pioneering archaeological work of Glynn Isaac, much the same conclusions have been drawn by the anthropologist Richard Lee

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and the palaeo-anthropologist Richard Leakey.133 It seems that male–female equality, in terms of access to economic resources and political power, was also true, until comparatively recently, of twentieth century hunter-gatherer societies, such as Montagnais-Naskapi, the !Kung and the Mbuti.134 Such pre-class societies were, by and large, free from interpersonal violence (of men against women and adults against children) and sexist ideology.135 Moreover, Harman cites research work by Christine Gailey and Karen Sacks,136 which has shown that even in horticultural societies, where there is to be found the earliest examples of social stratification (in terms of the distribution of status) between lineages and households, there is still no significant gap between men and women in terms of access to political and economic resources.137 Although cultural norms which determine who can marry came into being in such societies, these are not controlled simply by ‘patriarchal men’, but by ‘kin corporate lineages’, in which older women as well as men have the decisive influence.138 This was, of course, mostly obviously true of ‘matrilineal’ and ‘matrilocal’ societies,139 the former of which were reckoned by Leacock to have once been universal.140 But even in those horticultural societies which were ‘patrilineal’ (i.e. where inheritance was through the male line), and which were also ‘patrilocal’ (i.e. where residence after wedlock was with the husband’s family), women continued to exercise decision-making power within their own lineages, through which they could also obtain independent access to consumptive goods and productive means.141 Leacock and Gailey and Ruby Rohrlich142 trace the historical origins of sexual inequality to the rise of city-states in the ancient world, the ruling class elites of which transformed the old kinship structures simultaneously into mechanisms of surplus-extraction and means of control over the reproductive decisions of women. Engels’ second argument – that the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’143 was attributable to the simple fact that men came to possess the means of production which generated the first surplus beyond the reproduction needs of society – is not adequately spelled out by him. The same is true of his third argument: that men wanted to pass property to their sons rather than daughters or the relatives of their wives. In both cases, Engels fails to show why events unfolded as they did.144 Why was it that men came to control the more productive surplusyielding means of production? Why was it that men suddenly acquired the desire to transmit ownership of productive means down the male line whereas previously in many, perhaps all, previous societies their closest relations were with their sisters’ children, and productive means were as often passed down to female relatives? Luckily, the contemporary work of anthropologists, most notably of Gordon Childe and Ernestine Friedl, allow us to overcome this omission in Engels’ own account. The starting point of both their analyses is their recognition that the relative power and social standing of men and women in pre-class horticultural societies crucially hinged upon the relative strategic importance of their respective roles in the social economy.145 Childe argues that at the start of Neolithic period women played a major role in the economy: whereas men looked after

Stratification and power 247 the livestock, women assumed responsibility for a diverse range of economic activities, including the cultivation and reaping of plants, the construction and repair of tools for tilling the soil, the storing of crops and their conversion into food, pot making and the manufacture of clothes.146 Here, ‘owing to the role of women’s contribution to the collective economy, kinship is naturally reckoned in the female line and the system of “mother right” prevails’.147 Childe shows that once the plough became the major means of production in the horticultural societies of the Old World, supplanting the hoe and digging stick which had been a tool utilized primarily by women workers, this divested women of monopoly control over the cereal crops from which their high social standing was derived.148 Elsewhere, in the New World, the emergence of other forms of heavy agriculture before the introduction of the plough, based upon irrigation works, brought about the same kind of result, as Gailey and Leacock have demonstrated.149 Friedl points out that this occurred because the earliest agriculturalists depended for their survival on a high birth rate, which could only be guaranteed if women were excluded from those social practices that compromised their fertility.150 Like soldiering and long-distance trade, ploughing was high-risk toil (because especially back-breaking), since this placed women in unnecessary danger of abortion, infertility and death, and for this reason also became the preserve of the men.151 But this meant that women became excluded from those forms of social labour, associated with heavy agriculture and the urban revolution, which were precisely responsible for the surplus upon which class power and state power came to rest. Furthermore, with the increasing use of military power to appropriate surplus from the direct producers of other societies, and with the development of trade for the same purpose, women were also excluded from control of other major means of wealth-creation and economic-class exploitation.152 Such explains the origins of women’s oppression. But what explains the specific forms which it has taken in modern industrial capitalist societies? Engels believed that the development of capitalist production in Britain would destroy the old patriarchal family of the peasant cultivators and newly emerging proletariat. Initially, of course, this was a reasonable enough assumption: The development of capitalism in Britain had the effect of destroying domestic production and of forcing women and children, as well as men, into the new factory system. This had a devastating effect on the reproduction of the working class. Infant mortality reached horrific levels, due . . . to mothers working long hours away from home. Children were left with slightly older children, or minders who often neglected them or kept them quiet with gin or laudanum. When they grew old enough to work machinery they too were pulled into factory production.153 In these circumstances, of course, there was no ‘domestic bliss’ for the proletariat. But what Engels did not anticipate was that far-sighted members of the

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capitalist bourgeoisie and state elite would recognize that allowing the total collapse of the working class family would stoke up social unrest and would endanger the reproduction of labour power upon which the new profit system depended. This meant that steps had to be taken to ensure that the workers were sufficiently replenished for further intensive work in the mills and factories and that future generations of workers were brought up to perform the same role in due course.154 As we have seen, in practice, in the absence of the resources or technology to provide for socialized reproduction, this meant the recreation of a modified form of the family structure, and its buttressing by means of the ‘family wage’ and protective legislation (to prevent employers forcing families into destitution by lowering the wages of male workers through the employment of cheaper female and child labourers).155 As noted earlier, these policies were supported by many, if not most, workers, male and female, since they offered the prospect of an end to child exploitation and improved living standards for workers, plus the prospect of some kind of human domestic existence for men and women.156 Thus, supported by workers and those far-sighted capitalists who recognized the need for a healthier and better-educated workforce, those liberal reformers who were genuinely horrified by the appalling conditions to which women and children were exposed in the mines were able to push effectively for such reforms. The ideal was to model the new family on the patriarchal family of the propertied, inherited by the bourgeoisie from the old aristocracy for reasons of custom and economic advantage. So was born the ‘nuclear family’ of husband, wife and children, and with this a basic sexual division of labour between domestic work (conducted by women) and paid employment (conducted by men), which remains with us to this day.157 It is the persistence of this basic gendered division of labour between ‘domestic work’ and ‘market work’, albeit greatly modified and partially negated over the course of the past 30 or so years by the feminization of employment,158 which explains the specific social form of women’s subordination today. Female disadvantage and oppression in contemporary society is quite simply a function or by-product of the economic exploitation of labour by capital, which has become an emergent structure of sex inequality in its own right. How does this work? The sexual division of labour confronts individuals as an emergent material structure, existing apart from and prior to their own existence. It functions to apportion individuals to specific gender roles independently of their will (men as ‘principal breadwinners’ in the labour market and women as ‘principal carers’ in the ‘family’). Such a structure provides substantial economic benefits for capital, because it allows the reproduction costs of labour power to be ‘privatized’ (i.e. conducted by women without monetary recompense in the domestic sphere),159 and it provides employers with an ideological resource (sexism) to rationalize a horizontally and vertically segregated labour market, the casualization of female labour and the payment of especially low wages to women in sweated industries, on the grounds that these are supplementary to the ‘family wage’ earned by their partners.160

Stratification and power 249 It is unlikely that this ideology of women’s proper place was ever accepted uncritically by all people, not even in the latter part of the nineteenth century where it corresponded better to the empirical reality of the division of labour than it does today. Nonetheless it shaped and shapes still the perceptions of many, and remains causally efficacious in shaping the life-chances of women, not least because it feeds into discriminatory practices in the occupational sphere, and sometimes into oppressive or exploitative behaviour by individual males in the home. In particular, contextualized as it is within capitalist relations of production, the ideology that women are the subordinates of men, existing to service male needs, inevitably translates into the commodification of women as passive sex objects and to various other forms of sexual exploitation and domination (both inside and outside the family).161 Today sexist ideology is reproduced only by virtue of the fact it has roots in the material reality of the bourgeois family and sexual division of labour. This emergent structure exerts directional pressure upon interactants of both sexes to accept it as a fact of life, and to act in ways that ensure its persistence from one generation to the next. One important reason for this is that interactants are immersed from birth in family units in which women do most of the housework and childrearing and men the greater part of the work outside the home. This is part and parcel of the ‘social environment’, which by virtue of its causal powers of constraint and enablement, exerts directional pressure on agents to act in particular ways. Thus, men and women are socialized to see this division of labour as the ‘normal’ state of affairs, even if some partially or totally break with this ideology. But, of equal importance is the simple fact that these same interactants later encounter a labour market, which objectively offers higher rewards for men than for women for doing the same jobs, and which segregates lower-paid women’s occupations from higher-paid men’s occupations. This makes it rational for men and women to stick to their ‘traditional’ roles, whether they accept them as legitimate or not. And this is especially the case for working class men and women whose market situation does not allow them the luxury of swapping gender roles at the expense of incurring poorer life-chances for themselves and their children. Here, therefore, social structures (in this case the labour market environment) exerts directional pressure on agents to act in ways which reproduce both gender disadvantages at work and in the family, by virtue of the ‘opportunity costs’ which they attach to social conduct challenging traditional gender roles. The strength of this Marxist (and critical realist) understanding of women’s subordination is, to say it again, that it is both sociological and historically rooted. This is its advantage over theories of women’s oppression which root it in an ubiquitous male ‘culture’ or ‘ideology’, that is, in a system of ‘status ranking’ imposed by men on women. My argument shows that these collapse into reductive materialism where they do not collapse into empiricism or idealism.

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‘Racial’ stratification: an exemplar of status ranking? Neo-Weberians (and those influenced by their ideas) appear to be on no surer ground where they argue that the domination and oppression of ‘non-whites’ by ‘whites’ can plausibly be seen as evidencing the existence of systems of status ranking or ideological domination which are causally efficacious in restricting the access of certain ‘out groups’ to political power and economic and cultural goods.162 This is because a typical (though not universal) feature of ‘racial’ or ethnic domination in capitalist societies is that it is perpetrated against immigrant minority populations. The significance of this is that in such circumstances it is reasonable to postulate ideological or cultural mechanisms as being the fundamental locus or cause of ethnic disadvantages. This is on the grounds that the racist attitudes of the majority host population (certain of whose members are entrenched in positions of economic and political power) can function to sustain practices which marginalize recently arrived ‘outsider groups’ who from the outset obviously have no access to positions of power or influence. In other words, the multiple disadvantages and oppressions of non-white groupings in modern capitalist societies can be better explained in terms of status ranking, i.e. the apportioning of low social rank on the basis of perceived inferiority, where those responsible for this oppression and subordination form a substantial majority of a society’s population. For, in these circumstances, the fact that the members of ethnic minorities do not share the racist ‘ideology’ of the host population cannot stand as a refutation of the possibility that this might indeed be the basis of their disadvantages. But there are profound difficulties with this kind of interpretation of ‘racial’ inequality. The first of these is the problem posed to Weberian theory by the simple fact that the disadvantaged economic position of ethnic populations, especially blacks, in Britain for example has worsened over the past 20 or so years, whereas racist attitudes and assumptions in the general population have sharply declined and the rate of mixed-‘race’ relationships and marriages has significantly increased since the 1960s.163 Naturally, of course, if ‘racial’ or ethnic oppression and disadvantage were to be explained in terms of the low esteem in which the ‘white community’ holds non-white minorities, one would expect a gradual weakening of ‘racial’ inequalities in recent years in response to a significant ‘liberalization’ of public attitudes. That this has not occurred must then count against any understanding or ‘race’ domination, in the UK and similar western capitalist societies, as based upon status ranking. Social theory must treat institutional or structural racism as distinct from attitudinal or popular racism. Weberians might object to my argument on the grounds that structures of status ranking do not have to be based upon any kind of ‘central value system’ or ‘dominant ideology’ internalized by all or most. Instead these can be imposed by minorities on majority groups against the will of the latter, in order to enhance or preserve the vested interests of the former. So, even if many, perhaps

Stratification and power 251 even a majority of, whites are not racist (in the sense of endorsing ideologies of white superiority and black inferiority and perpetrating discrimination against members of minority ethnicities), it does not follow that ‘race’ subordination is other than a function of the racist attitudes or values of some whites. But this is simply incoherent. How can systems of inter-subjective beliefs be efficacious in determining access to political and economic power and rewards where these have few takers and so little moral force? Why do the bigoted ‘hard’ racist attitudes of a white minority translate into economic and political domination whereas the (by and large) non-racist or ‘soft’ racist attitudes of non-whites and most whites do not? We can hardly argue that unequal distributions of ‘social prestige’ bring about political and economic inequalities if most members of a society do not accept these as real or valid. And we can hardly explain the capacity of racist ideas to translate into structures of ‘racial’ subordination unless we recognize that certain of the minority of ‘racist whites’ already possess the structural power to put these ideas into practice in a way which is detrimental to the lifechances of non-white minorities. So racist ideologies become efficacious in situating ethnic minorities in subordinate positions in social relations only by virtue of the fact that white racists control authoritative and allocative resources denied to their victims. But this means that ‘racial’ oppression and disadvantage in capitalist society is explainable in terms of ‘status disadvantages’ only if some kind of central value system or dominant ideology, itself independent of structures of economic and political power, can be posited as residing at its root, which as we have seen is scarcely plausible. Logically, then, stratification by ‘race’ or ethnicity must have non-ideological social foundations. These considerations bring me on to the main theoretical defect of Weberian explanations of ‘racial’ stratification systems. This is the incapacity of any understanding of ‘race’ subordination in terms of uneven distributions of status honour to explain from where these ‘cultural’ structures have originated and why they persist over time. If, as neo-Weberians claim, the ‘basis’ of ‘racial’ stratification in modern capitalist societies is the existence and persistence of ‘racist attitudes’ (which are then translated into discriminatory practices), how are we to explain the ‘racist attitudes’ that are responsible for them? Surely racist ideas, like all ideas, have to be referred to the particular set of social and material circumstances or mechanisms that render them comprehensible? But this means that the Weberian explanation of ‘racial’ domination is not a ‘rock bottom’ explanation at all, but is in need of a further explanation. Marxist analyses of racism do not suffer from this conceptual difficulty. As we shall soon see, racist attitudes are explained by Marxism by referring them to structures of ‘racial’ domination, the latter of which are explained in terms of capitalist relations of economic exploitation. Weberians, by contrast, if they are not to leave racist ideology unexplained, must treat it as reducible to human nature, or make their appeal to ‘white benefits’ to explain its appeal and persistence. How plausible are these alternative kinds of materialist explanation? The first conceptual strategy leads directly to socio-biology’s understanding of racism,

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which is the most influential, because it purports to speak with the authority of modern science. There are three elements to this. First, the less individuals share the same genes the more likely are they to distrust, fear, dislike and withhold cooperation from one another. Second, since the best indicator of gene relatedness is physical appearance, those individuals or groups which least resemble each other physically will be most susceptible to mutual distrust or hostility. Finally, where particular ethnic or ‘racial’ groups constitute a minority of a community, it follows that distrust or hostility between the members of these groups and members of the ‘host’ society will inevitably translate into their marginalization from the ‘societal community’ by means of discriminatory practices, and sometimes into ‘racial’ violence as well. Thus, from this point of view, ‘racial’ oppression (and hence stratification) flows inexorably from genetically programmed prejudice towards ‘out groups’.164 But this type of analysis is immediately confronted with two major difficulties. First, it flies in the face of what we know about the social behaviour of non-human primates. Thus, gorillas and chimpanzees do not, on the whole, appear to perceive less closely related members of their natural communities as any more hostile than those that are more closely related. This is just as well, for failing this, it is not at all clear how the genetic ‘reproductive fitness’ of these (and other animal) species could be safeguarded by means of adaptive biological selective mechanisms in response to environmental pressures. Second, despite appeals to ‘research findings’, it is simply not the case that socio-biologists have demonstrated satisfactorily that prejudice and discriminatory behaviour in human affairs is directed disproportionately towards genetic ‘out groups’ or that social stratification along ethnic lines flows naturally or inevitably from this. On the contrary, quite the opposite is true. On the one hand, modern microbiology has exposed as fraudulent the very idea of biologically distinct ‘races’: Of all human genetic variation known for enzymes and other proteins, where it has been possible to actually count up the frequencies of different forms of the genes and so get an objective measurement of genetic variation, 85 percent turns out to be between individuals within the same local population, tribe or nation; a further 8 percent is between tribes or nations within a major ‘race’; and the remaining 7 percent is between major ‘races’. This means that the genetic variation between one Spaniard and another, or between one Masai and another, is 85 percent of all human genetic variation, while only 15 percent is accounted for by breaking people up into groups . . . [This means that any] . . . use of racial categories must take its justifications from some other source than biology. The remarkable feature of human evolution and history has been the very small degree of convergence between geographical populations as compared with genetic variations between individuals.165 On the other hand, there is absolutely no empirical data which is indicative that negative stereotyping of ‘foreigners’ is always at its most extreme where it is

Stratification and power 253 applied to groups which possess those superficial characteristics (e.g. skin colour) which are falsely regarded by naive naturalists as suggestive of major genetic differences between ethnic populations. In fact, often the reverse appears to be true. In England, for example, negative stereotyping has traditionally been directed much more against Irish people than against many other immigrant populations from further afield with more pronounced religious and cultural (and sometimes physical) differences, such as people from Latin America or Eastern Europe. From a socio-biological point of view, one would expect exactly the opposite state of affairs: the greater the geographical dispersion and isolation of human communities, and the more marked the environmental and climatic differences which have impinged upon them, the greater is the genetic variability between their populations, and the more intense the ‘out group’ prejudice from the members of one towards the members of another. Yet neo-Weberian sociologists do not make their appeal to biological human nature to explain racist ideology and attendant status ranking, despite Weber’s own endorsement of Nietzsche’s naturalistic metaphysic of domination. Doubtless this is a function of the obvious defects of most attempts to place racism on a naturalistic foundation. But this leaves the Weberians with the problem of articulating a materialistic account of racism that does not simply reduce to the use of Marxist concepts. One solution is to combine elements of the Black Nationalist theoretical approach (which sees racism as a mode of cultural domination rooted in white material benefits) with traditional Marxist class analysis to get to grips with the real situation of black people in modern capitalist society. Failing this, there is no option but to follow Peter Fryer’s strategy of explaining racism in terms of ‘dead ideas’, which arose originally to legitimate the slave trade and colonialism, but which no longer represent anything real, and so mysteriously refuse to ‘lie down’.166 The key theoretical argument of those who follow this conceptual strategy has a similar logic to that materialist version of patriarchy theory developed by Hartmann and her followers. This is that racism and ‘racial’ inequality, like sexism and gender inequality, is an autonomous ideology and mode of social stratification apart from relations of production and structures of class inequality, which is reproduced by virtue of the economic and other tangible benefits which whites obtain from the subordination of non-whites (normally immigrant minorities). Robert Allen famously summarizes this position as follows: If racism was simply a device used by the capitalist ruling class to divide the workers, then it followed that workers have no material stake in the maintenance of racism. Once appraised of their true interests the workers could be expected to join the forces opposing racism. Such has not been the case, as the history of the labour movement amply illustrates. Yet Communist writers insisted upon regarding the working class as the bearers of true enlightenment and fraternity; at the very minimum they contended that if only the workers would accept Marxism-Leninism then racial antagonisms

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Stratification and power would fade away. These contentions ignored the ideological impact of the very real advantages that have accrued to white workers as a result of racial discrimination at home and racist imperialism abroad.167

In some versions of this ‘dual approach’ of ‘race and class’, particularly influenced by Weberian ideas,168 notably that of Paul Gilroy and Ron Ramdin, the historical origins of black oppression is firmly located in capitalist development.169 But, echoing the argument of Robert Allen, for them racism and ‘race’ inequality is nonetheless seen to have subsequently acquired a dynamic of its own by virtue of the fact that ‘the exploitation and degradation of the colonial working class was an indispensable requirement in maintaining the standard of living of the British [and western] working class’.170 This is also Sivanandan’s position, for whom ‘the black man, by virtue of his particular oppression, is closer to his bourgeois brother (by colour) than his white comrade. Indeed his white comrade is party to his oppression. He too benefits from the exploitation of the black man’.171 In other versions of the approach, such as that of Cedric Robinson, racism and the exploitation of black by white is seen as an eternal feature or ‘recurring idea’ of ‘western civilization’, which has given rise to a tradition of black resistance and identity spanning many centuries and cultures.172 In every version of the theory, however, the reality and efficacy of ‘white benefits’ ensures that white westerners (irrespective of class positioning) are for the most part hopelessly committed to racist ideas. Or failing this cannot be reliable opponents of racism. Therefore, it is argued, non-whites share in common objective interests in combating racist institutions and ideas which cut across class lines. This means, according to this Black Nationalism, it is both possible and necessary for blacks of whatever social class to self-organize against racism and white capitalist institutions of ‘racial’ domination. For this reason, Gilroy opposes the idea that there is ‘a complete discontinuity . . . between the interests of the black “petit bourgeois” and working class black settlers on the basis of their objectively contradictory class position’, on the grounds that this kind of understanding disregards ‘the construction of the Black Community as a complex and inclusive collectivity with a distinctive political language’.173 Similarly, Ramdin asserts that ‘black working class autonomous organization is today’s reality, necessitated and conditioned by institutionalized racism’.174 Cedric Robinson even goes so far as to argue that the ‘experimentation with Western political inventories of change, specifically nationalism and class struggle, is coming to a close. Black radicalism is transcending those traditions in order to adhere to its own authority.’175 This means, from Robinson’s point of view, that the ‘negation’ of capitalist society is not ‘the European proletariat and its allies’, but ‘the persistent and continuously evolving resistance of African peoples to oppression’, a resistance informed by a ‘single historical identity’ forged by the ‘systemic privations of racial capitalism’.176 This argument that ordinary whites in contemporary capitalist societies have objective material interests in the systematic subordination of blacks (whether in the host society or elsewhere in the ‘Third World’) is theoretically deficient and

Stratification and power 255 lacking in empirical credentials. On the domestic front, it cannot be said that ‘host’ whites benefit from the fact that ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to be located in low-paid employment or poor housing. This is because there is no evidence that greater numbers of working class whites would be forced into poorer housing or lower paid jobs currently occupied by working class blacks if the latter were to overcome their sectoral disadvantages. On the contrary, this would require a successful campaign by capital to boost profitability at the expense of working class living standards generally. The reverse is also true. White workers are not thrown out of work or denied decent jobs or access to public or private housing because they are faced with competition from immigrant workers for scarce resources. Black workers have traditionally been situated in jobs that most white workers are reluctant to fill, for reasons of low status and poor wages, and which would not be filled at all were it not for the presence of minority ethnic populations.177 And black people are today still located disproportionately in lower grade, poorly paid employment compared to whites and are more vulnerable to unemployment and poverty.178 Moreover, black workers and their families (in common with other oppressed minorities such as unmarried single mothers and asylum seekers) have privileged access to social housing only in the imagination of right-wing bigots.179 Conversely, of course, the idea that black proletarians are denied access to decent affordable homes by white proletarians simply because more white proletarians are to be found in decent affordable homes than black proletarians is nonsense, because an abstraction from the reality of the artificial scarcities generated by the asymmetrical distribution of wealth under capitalism. It should go without saying that homelessness and overpriced slums are a function not of an absolute shortage of good quality homes, but of the misallocation of the existing housing stock under capitalism and attendant drive to house people on the cheap for maximum profitability.180 In fact, far from racist divisions providing white workers with tangible material benefits, the reverse is often true. Albert Szymanski, for example, in his study of the relative earnings of black and white workers across 50 states of the contemporary USA, concluded: The higher black earnings relative to white, the higher white earnings relative to other whites. . . . The greater the discrimination against ‘Third World’ people, the higher the inequality among whites. . . . In those states with more than 12 per cent ‘Third World’ people, or the more ‘Third World’ people relative to whites, the lower white earnings. . . . The higher the proportion of ‘Third World’ people in a state’s population, the more inequality there is among whites, [and] . . . the relatively poor whites lose disproportionately from discrimination against ‘Third World’ people compared to the better paid whites. It is clear that white working class people do not gain economically by economic discrimination against ‘Third World’ people. . . . White workers appear to actually lose economically from ‘racial’ discrimination.181

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These are also the conclusions of a number of other important studies of the interface between class and ‘racial’ stratification in the USA. For example, ‘Michael Reich found a correlation between the degree of income inequality between whites and blacks and the degree of income inequality between whites. In those areas where the white/black income differential was greatest, the percentage share of white income received by the top 1 per cent was greatest.’182 Despite the continued gross discrimination against black skilled craftsmen in the North, the ‘privileged’ southern whites earned 4 per cent less than they did. Southern male white operatives averaged . . . 18 per cent less than northern black male operatives. And southern white service workers earned . . . 14 per cent less than northern black male service workers.183 A survey conducted by Martin Glaberman, to offer another example, found that the ‘existence of a segregated Black workforce with inferior status limited, rather than enhanced, the ability of white workers to improve their wages and working conditions. In fact, employers were often willing to use, or threaten to use, Black workers as strike breakers or simply replacements, to keep white workers in line.’ Glaberman also makes the point that ‘it would be difficult to understand why employers followed racist hiring patterns if it enhanced the power of the overwhelming majority of the working class’.184 The theoretical point to be derived from the empirical evidence is simply that racist divisions in the workforce and community, by driving a wedge between blacks and whites, and fostering competition between them, allows the wages and hence life-chances of both to be held down in the interests of capitalist profitability. Thus, ‘the more intense “racial” discrimination is, the lower are the white earnings because . . . working-class solidarity’ is undermined,185 and ‘the somewhat better jobs and wages of white workers are not enough to make up for what they lose because of the lack of solidarity with black workers’.186 Moreover, precisely because racism forestalls effective working class resistance to capitalist exploitation, hence deepening the economic subordination of both white and black workers, it also functions to reinforce their political and cultural subordination to the rule of capital, by acting as a barrier to the acquisition of a collective anti-capitalist or socialist consciousness and to those modes of class struggle which allow its articulation and development and its translation into a political struggle against the system itself. I have said that the idea that the white western working class as a whole benefits from the existence of racist ideology and ‘racial’ subordination also has an international dimension. As Alex Callinicos points out: ‘Denying that white workers have an interest in fighting racism is often justified by resorting to the idea that they form a privileged labour aristocracy benefiting from imperialist super-profits extracted from “Third World” toilers.’187 The chief empirical problem with this view is that if super profits are being extracted from the ‘Third World’, which are then consumed by western shareholders and workers alike,

Stratification and power 257 one would expect ‘a constant flow of capital from the rich to the poor countries in search of the higher profits to be gained in the latter’.188 But, in fact, this is not happening and seems unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. So, far from being explainable in terms of neo-imperialist super exploitation, the impoverishment of ‘Third World’ countries seems to be a function of chronic under-investment by the western governments and multinational corporations that control most of the world’s economic resources, a function of the uneven and combined development of globalizing capitalism, which ensures that the overwhelming bulk of corporate assets and investments and trade flows are still located in the advanced capitalist countries.189 The predicament of the underdeveloped societies is not that they are systematically plundered for the benefit of the western societies and peoples of whatever social class, but that they are effectively bypassed by the networks of production and exchange relations that constitute the global marketplace.190 The theoretical problem with such theories of ‘unequal exchange’ between North and South is twofold. First, the higher wage levels commanded by western workers vis-à-vis their ‘Third World’ counterparts does not necessarily indicate that ‘Third World’ workers are super-exploited whereas western workers are not. Indeed, the reverse is more likely to be true: How exploited a worker is depends, not on his or her absolute standard of living, but on how much surplus value he or she produces relative to his or her wages. A highly paid worker may well be more exploited than a low paid worker because the former produces, relative to his wages, a larger amount of surplus value than the latter does. There is indeed reason to believe that the generally higher wages paid to Western workers reflect the greater costs of their reproduction; but the expenditure in particular on education and training which forms part of these costs creates a more highly skilled workforce which is therefore more productive and more exploited than its ‘Third World’ counterparts.191 Second, it is rather odd to assume that because western capital purportedly benefits from the super exploitation of ‘Third World’ labour, it must automatically follow that white western workers benefit also. Such an understanding fails because it does not grasp there is no objective relationship of exploitation and subordination between workers in the West and workers anywhere else. The argument is also flawed because it is an abstraction from the antagonistic relationship between capital and wage-labour. As such it cannot grasp the obvious point that no capitalist enterprise ever converts higher profits into higher wages for workers unless forced to do so by industrial struggle. Higher profits from ‘colonial exploitation’, assuming for the sake of argument these exist, might conceivably translate into higher living standards for western workers, but only after the workers have fought for and won them from capital. This does not change the fact that such profits are extracted by capital for the benefit of capital and not for the benefit of workers anywhere.

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Nor does the alleged existence of ‘super profits’ derived from colonial exploitation mean that workers do not or cannot secure equivalent wages in their absence. The monetary income of the working class is determined by the balance of power between capital and labour, the strength, confidence and leadership of opposing class forces, not simply by the objective economic resources available to capital. Therefore, far from having contradictory interests, workers in the ‘Third World’ and in the advanced capitalist societies share a common interest in abolishing capitalism and replacing it with socialism, not least because workers everywhere are the victims of economic exploitation. This means that a blow against capitalism by workers anywhere in the world is a victory for workers everywhere, for a successful struggle by workers against capital in any part of the global set-up for improved life-chances provides encouragement for working class struggle and resistance elsewhere. I have said that Marxism provides an altogether more satisfactory theory of ‘racial’ subordination than approaches influenced by concepts of status ranking. It is now time to add some flesh to the bare bones of this assertion. Marxist accounts of ‘racial’ stratification do not suffer from the conceptual difficulty of Weberian ideologism or its crude antithesis of abstract naturalism. The starting point of the Marxist analysis is the recognition that racism is not a universal fact of human affairs, and cannot therefore be seen as stemming from biological factors or from a ‘Eurocentric’ cultural tradition spanning pre-modernity and modernity: What is striking about the slave and feudal societies of pre-capitalist Europe is . . . the absence of ideologies and practices which excluded and subordinated a particular group on the grounds of their inherent inferiority. . . . Medieval Europe conceived of itself as Christendom, from which Jews, Muslims and pagans were excluded by their religious beliefs, not their race. Similarly, the slave societies of classical antiquity do not seem to have relied on racism to justify the wholesale use of chattel slaves to provide the ruling class with its surplus product. . . . The most striking instance of the absence of racism based on colour or biological inheritance in classical antiquity is provided by the case of Septimius Severus, Roman emperor from AD 193 to 211, who was almost certainly black. One of the main characteristics of Roman rule was the effort to incorporate local aristocracies into an imperial ruling class, sharing a culture which fused the Greek and Roman traditions.192 So where does racism and ‘racial’ stratification come from? ‘Racism as we know it today developed during a key phase in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale – the establishment during the 17th and 18th centuries of colonial plantations in the New World using slave labour imported from Africa to produce consumer goods such as tobacco and sugar and industrial inputs such as cotton for the world market.’193 Racism was the ideology of plantation owners and slave traders who wished to legitimize the

Stratification and power 259 super-exploitation of black people by deeming them members of an inferior, subhuman ‘race’.194 Thus race prejudice may be thought of as having its genesis in the propagandistic and legal contrivances of the white ruling class for securing mass support of its interest. It is an attitude of distance and estrangement mingled with repugnance which seeks to conceptualise as brutes the human objects of exploitation.195 This being the case, racism is not to be conflated with the multiple forms of oppression and discrimination that existed in pre-capitalist class societies, including and especially those used to justify the institution of slavery. As Ahmed Shawki rightly points out: Slavery was not new, it was common in different societies – from ancient Greece and Rome to 16th century Africa. But unlike modern slavery none of these slave systems were racially based. Nor did any of these societies produce an ideology which justified enslavement because of inherent inferiority. Prejudice against strangers and distinctions between ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilised’ existed, but are not comparable to modern racism.196 ‘Stranger prejudice’ of the kind which afflicted the ancient and feudal worlds (due to the simple fact that pre-capitalist peasant communities were relatively isolated from each other by virtue of poor communications and the virtual absence of travel even between immediately neighbouring locales) was not comparable to racism. This was because it was not based on the belief that those subject to oppression were inferior by virtue of their possession of inherited characteristics deemed natural or innate in them as a group.197 Such prejudices did not ‘suppose a relationship of superior to inferior’ but rather of suspicion ‘to something which is merely different, although possibly unusual or even incomprehensible’.198 These were, in short, the petty prejudices fostered by profound ignorance and parochial suspicion of the ‘outsider’ who only occasionally crossed the path of the local villager.199 Nor were ‘stranger prejudices’ particularly directed against people with a different colour skin. On the contrary, these were aimed at ‘outsiders in general’.200 It is true, of course, that the ‘colour symbolism’ that was part and parcel of the popular culture of pre-modern societies equated blackness with evil and whiteness with goodness. But there is no evidence that these symbols translated into systematic racial stereotyping,201 or at least not until they became refashioned as part of the racial ideology of the capitalist slave traders.202 Such colour symbolism was to be found in a rich variety of pre-modern cultures, both those populated by light- and dark-skinned people, and sometimes in an inverted form, without giving rise to the idea that some ethnicities were racially superior to others. The ancient distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’, for instance, was a cultural rather than ‘racial’ distinction.203 The same was true of

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persecution on the grounds of religion, such as that directed against the European Jews in the medieval and late pre-modern period.204 Such modes of discrimination or oppression could be overcome by means of simple acquaintance with strangers or by religious conversion or cultural education. For example, the European Jews of pre-modernity were sometimes able (until the onset of racism itself) to escape persecution by converting from Judaism to Christianity. Equally, in the classical antiquity, a ‘barbarian could become civilized by the process of, for instance, learning the Greek language and obtaining a Greek education. By these means Blacks were able to rise to positions of great importance in the ancient Greek and Roman world’.205 This is instructive. For although not one black person has been elected head of state in any of the liberal democracies of Europe and North America since the abolition of slavery, at least one Roman emperor (Septimius Severus) was black.206 Racism and its consequences cannot be dispensed with so easily. This is because the idea of ‘race’ is that of inescapable fate given by nature or biological inheritance. As Giddens puts it: ‘Racism means falsely attributing inherited characteristics of personality or behaviour to individuals of a particular physical appearance. A racist is someone who believes that a biological explanation can be given for characteristics of superiority or inferiority supposedly possessed by people of a given physical stock’.207 But this raises the issue of why the ‘plutocracy’ of plantation owners in the New World and slave traders of Europe needed racist ideology (or indeed any specific form of coherent ideology) to legitimate slavery at all.208 Now, as Callinicos points out, it may seem rather peculiar to even raise this kind of issue as a matter requiring critical scrutiny, but this is because we are accustomed to the existence of racist ideology and discrimination in modern capitalist societies, and it seems a matter of common sense that anything as brutal as slavery must require an ideological rationale such as that provided by racism, and which could scarcely be done as well by anything other than racism. Yet in all pre-capitalist societies where slavery has existed there was no systematic attempt made to justify this form of economic exploitation by those elite groupings which practised it or benefited from it, with resort to either biological or cultural factors.209 This renders the question of why slavery required racism (or some other ideological form that would do the same work) in these specific social and historical circumstances one worthy of serious consideration. In fact, the answer to this question is to be found in the interplay of the specific cultural and political forms emergent from capitalist relations of production at a particular stage of their development. In order to see this it is necessary to understand the reasons for the absence of racism in the ancient and feudal worlds. Why did the ruling elites of pre-capitalist class societies not justify slavery in terms of racism? First, the elites and subject peoples of ‘traditional’ imperial states tended to be ethnically diverse. So there was no real reason why either slavery or imperialism should be justified in ‘racial’ terms. Second, racist ideology was a non-starter in pre-modern Europe, even during the period of its long conflict with Islam and during its first contacts with the Chinese Empire.

Stratification and power 261 This was because notions of white superiority were absurd during a historical epoch where these Asiatic civilizations were technologically, militarily, culturally and economically in advance of the ‘white’ societies of the Occident. In these circumstances, white racist justifications for colonialism and slavery only became thinkable once the growth of capitalism in the north-west European societies granted their elites the economic and technological means to embark upon successful imperial incursions in Asia, and the higher cultural level to rationalize these as evidence of white superiority and non-white inferiority. Prior to this, the legitimations of Europe’s imperial wars for strategic and economic advantage in Asia and south-west Africa were couched in terms of religion. The Islamic Empire, for example, had to be driven out of the Holy Land, not because its rulers were members of an inferior ‘race’, but because they were heathens.210 Finally, and most importantly, since pre-capitalist relations of production have been politically and legally constituted (because rooted in ‘unfree’ labour, the forcible appropriation of surplus product or surplus labour from the direct producers by means of ‘extra-economic coercion’), taking the form of a rigid pecking order of unequal castes or estates, there was simply no reason why any specific ideology justifying slavery was necessary. In societies where class exploitation generally depended on force, where unfree labour was the norm (i.e. where exploiters and exploited were not equals before the law and where the latter were not at liberty to enter freely into economic relations with the former), slavery was simply one form of inequality among many others, and as such required no special attention or consideration.211 In fact, where slavery was not seen as a fact of life by pre-capitalist elites (not worthy of philosophical reflection) it tended to be seen as ‘unnatural’ and upheld simply on the grounds of its utility.212 But this situation changed under capitalism. In this form of society and economy, the relations of production centre on free labour, of legal equality between exploiters and exploited, and are reproduced mostly by economic pressures (the propertyless status of the workers) rather than by politico-military mechanisms (military force backed by law). Thus, capitalism was (and is) legitimized by the bourgeoisie in terms of the language of ‘human rights’, of ‘freedom, liberty and equality’, and in terms of the rejection of arbitrary or autocratic authority. The bourgeoisie, in their drive to change the world in pursuit of profit, were also the champions of science and rational knowledge (where it suited them), and the enemies of tradition, superstition and inherited privileges. Therefore, under the domination of the ‘rational ethos’ of the bourgeois epoch, nothing could be accepted without justifiable or reasonable cause or ‘scientific’ explanation. This meant that the systematic exercise of extra-economic coercion in the expanding capitalist economy, including and especially the enslavement of people for economic advantage, now urgently required an ideological rationale. Religion would not do, because slavery could be escaped by conversion to Christianity. Racist ideology, by contrast, fitted the bill much better. This was because the ‘unalienable rights of human beings’, which rendered the enslavement of free Europeans on the plantations of the New World problematic, did

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not apply to blacks, on the grounds that blacks and other brown-skinned peoples, who were already victims of the slave trade, were (from the point of view of the agents of slavery) less than human, little more than animals in fact.213 But once racism was culturally institutionalized (as a means of legitimating and rationalizing the institution of slavery) it then became possible to use it to explain and justify other forms of social oppression and domination within the developing capitalist countries themselves. The ideology of Enlightenment was that of universal egalitarianism. The promise of modernity, from this perspective, was that it would eliminate ascription in favour of achievement as the basis of stratification and would bring about full rights of citizenship in politics and law. Unfortunately, the ideology of Enlightenment was simply incompatible with the inner structure of capitalism, which rested then as now on chronically reproduced economic class and other inequalities, which could not plausibly be understood as the random effects of freely competing individuals. If, in theory, everyone was equal, in the sense of having the same competitive opportunities for status and money success, there should be plenty of social mobility, whereas in fact there was none. So, either Enlightenment had to accommodate to capitalism, or capitalism had to be replaced with an economic system which was capable of delivering meaningful equality of opportunity. The realities of structurally based power ensured this conflict could have only one outcome. Racism, which started off as the ideology of slavery, now offered a means of resolving the contradiction between the egalitarian universalism of the Enlightenment and the unegalitarian particularism of capitalist property and class relations. Mired in desperate squalor in ever-growing numbers in the rapidly expanding urban slums of eighteenth century Britain (and other developing capitalist countries), and devoid of educational opportunities, the new proletariat appeared to the propertied elite as almost subhuman, as an anonymous mass prone to ‘riotous assembly’. The socio-economic and cultural reproduction of working-class poverty and inequality, which kept its shape across the generations, could now be interpreted (in racist terms) as the natural effect of biological or physiological inheritance. White racism was born, which was applied in an especially virulent form to Irish immigrants, often viewed as ‘white monkeys’.214 This meant that Enlightenment values and goals could not be applied to the workers, any more than they could be applied to black plantation slaves. Inclusive rights of citizenship (such as the right to vote or form trade unions or strike or demonstrate, which might have endangered the rights of property to accumulate more property) could be withheld on the grounds that such rights should apply only to fully human beings. Moreover, this racism of social distinctions could also be deployed to justify highly repressive domestic criminal justice policies (hangings, deportations, and later workhouses and prisons)215 to deal with the growing social problems of vagrancy, pauperization, begging and petty theft generated by capitalist expansion.216 This stretching of racial ideology to cover social as well as colour distinctions provides part of the explanation of how racism and attendant ‘racial’ inequality

Stratification and power 263 and oppression survived the abolition of the slave trade. But there was another fundamental reason. As Callinicos rightly argues: ‘This reflected the fact that the anomaly which had given rise to racism in the first place continued to exist in another form, the domination of the world by a handful of European (or, in the case of the US and Russia, Europeanized) powers’.217 What had originally been the racism of slave traders and plantation owners and their political and other allies became the racism of empire, the ideological rationale for the colonial carve-up of the globe, in particular the exercise of European rule over the peoples of Africa and Asia. This ideology reached its zenith in the nineteenth century; and, because it was the creature of a changed set of material and socio-political circumstances or relations, its form and content was modified to fit with its new role. Reinforced by the Darwinian revolution in evolutionary biology, which became vulgarized as the rule that the strong and superior had the obligation to subordinate the weak and inferior to protect the genetic inheritance of the species, the new racism justified European global domination on the grounds that non-white peoples were incapable of self-government.218 As Benjamin Disraeli succinctly put it: ‘Race implies difference and difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance’.219 The racism of empire saw itself as paternalism. Asians and blacks were no longer simply savages or devils, but were either ‘sullen children’ or ‘attractive children’ (this depending on whether they were resistant or subservient to colonial rule),220 who had not developed into adults, and who were in need of adult guidance. This meant they had, from the point of view of the colonialists, to be ruled and of course disciplined ‘for their own good’. Today the persistence of racist ideology and ‘racial’ stratification in modern societies is often seen by neo-Weberians as a cultural leftover from the colonial past. Certainly, there is an element of truth to this: the persistence of racism today is obviously a testament to the way in which ideas (once institutionalized) become permanent occupants of the cultural system, in this case awaiting activation by right-wing opportunists for political purposes during times of social crisis. But it is nonetheless mistaken to assume that the dissolution of slavery and colonialism has divested racism of any material or social basis whatsoever. The material foundations of racism and attendant ‘racial’ inequality today are to be found in the functioning and organization of international capitalism in the post-colonial context. This racism is no longer explicit crude biological racism (though this is still alive and well), but is often based upon the idea of the incommensurability of ethnicities, whose differences are such they cannot coexist without mutual suspicion and antagonism, meaning ‘native culture’ must be insulated from ‘alien culture’ (i.e. the cultures of non-white peoples).221 Of course, this cultural racism is actually rooted still in the old biological racism, which is swept under the carpet, because ‘cultural difference’ is simply a code for notions of cultural superiority and inferiority, and the explanation of cultural superiority or inferiority ultimately turns out to be the hereditary one (and, of course, is meaningful only by virtue of appeals to heritage).

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Such ideas live on in the advanced western societies for a number of reasons. First, they survive and remain efficacious because they articulate a ‘common sense’ understanding of the structured inequalities between the ‘developed’ and ‘under-developed’ parts of the global system. Thus black and Asian people, it can be said, on the basis of a kind of superficial interpretation of the meaning of global inequalities, cannot manage their affairs, and so are condemned to poverty and reliance on western aid. This position is, of course, implicit, and sometimes even explicit, in media coverage of ‘ “Third World” problems’,222 and is in any case reinforced by the constant negative references to ‘Third World’ societies by western governments and organizations.223 Second, they survive and remain efficacious because they articulate also a defensive though self-defeating reaction to the artificial scarcities (of housing, jobs, welfare, etc.) generated by the capitalist economy and pro-capitalist policies (flexibility, laissez-faire, welfare retrenchment) of government, and to the dynamic of market competition and restructuring which is forced on workers to gain access to these scarce resources.224 This is particularly the case where the everyday systematic privations of capitalism are exacerbated by economic crises and attendant rising unemployment and enhanced job insecurity. Thus, ‘natives’ can be encouraged to see immigrants as competitors who lower wages and deprive them of other means of consumption (such as welfare goods), hence compromising their life-chances, precisely because such crises do generate intensifying competition between workers to access a contracting employment market and draw from a dwindling wage fund, and competition between workers does breed suspicion and antagonism among them. This is obviously especially true where physical or cultural differences between ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’ can become a visible focus of suspicion and antagonism, even though immigrants do not, of course, deprive ‘natives’ of their livelihood or welfare or access to resources generally. Third, racism survives and prospers because of certain effects of the dynamic pattern of post-war immigration into the developed heartlands of the system from the underdeveloped post-colonial periphery. This has tended to slot minority ethnicities into the base of the western class structure and into low status employment particularly vulnerable to casualization and insecurity, resulting in higher levels of social deprivation and attendant problems of unemployment, criminality and low educational achievement for blacks and some Asian ethnic groups.225 This allows bigots to rationalize and empirically justify their argument that blackand brown-skinned people are lazy, criminal and stupid by nature. Moreover, because this gives the racist stereotyping of bigots a veneer of plausibility, especially amongst those who are denied easy access to deeper or better-informed interpretations of the meaning of these problems of social deprivation faced by minority ethnicities, this can stir up popular attitudinal racism, and in so doing feed into discriminatory practices which help reproduce and deepen black disadvantage, and of course all the multiple ills that flow from disadvantage.226 Fourth, racist ideas survive and prosper because capitalists and their political allies in state and government often deliberately foster racism, in order to scape-

Stratification and power 265 goat vulnerable minorities for the defects of the system, and to drive a wedge between the black and white working class (divide and rule), so as to force down wages across the board and forestall unified resistance to elite domination in general and pro-capitalist policies in particular.227 For example, it is a routinely recurring theme of British politics in recent years that asylum seekers from outside ‘Fortress Europe’ are portrayed as a ‘burden’ on ‘scarce’ resources, as ‘bogus migrants’ attracted by the generosity of the benefits system. This has legitimated anti-immigration and anti-asylum racism as state policy.228 Few would doubt that this has strengthened racist attitudes and divisions in society in the immediate term (particularly amongst those who are struggling to make ends meet) and redirected working class discontent away from the classic problems posed by capitalism in the era of ‘globalization’ (welfare retrenchment, retrogressive taxation, the erosion of civil liberties, labour market rationalization – i.e. flexibility and downsizing – and privatization). Finally, as W.E.B. du Bois has argued, racism survives and remains a force to be reckoned with because racism, like nationalism, offers those who are themselves downtrodden a certain psychological compensation for their disadvantaged social situation. This it does by allowing them to feel part of a privileged and superior group (a ‘ruling nation’) unified by culture or ethnicity.229 As Callinicos points out, racism not only ‘offers white workers the comfort of believing themselves part of the dominant group’, but in doing so binds them ideologically to ‘white capitalists’. By doing so, it provides the agents of capitalism with an outlet for discharging their discontent with the defects of capitalism onto a visible ‘enemy within’.230 This draws to a close my analysis of racism and theories of racism. This also wraps up my analysis of materialist versus cultural theories of social stratification. The upshot of the preceding is that Weberian and Weberian-influenced sociologists of domination have been unable to establish the causal efficacy of systems of status ranking in shaping access to power and resources, or their autonomy from relations of production or class structures. On closer critical inspection, either structures of subordination cited by Weberians as exemplars of status ranking are shown to be directly structures of class power, or they are revealed as forms of domination other than unequal distributions of social honour or prestige. But if modes of social domination, most notably stratification by ‘race’ and gender, are real and have causal powers and real world effects of their own (e.g. in shaping the distribution of authoritative and allocative resources in capitalist societies), it is a necessary task of a materialist sociology of power to offer an adequate understanding of them. Such an understanding must avoid the errors of Weberian ideologism, without collapsing into the reductive materialism of psychologism or biologism (or abstract appeals to ‘male’ and/or ‘white’ benefits). Only a critical realist Marxism is equal to this task, as I have tried to demonstrate.

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The concept of political stratification in neo-Weberian sociology Enough has now been said about the problems of the concept of status ranking (cultural stratification). Let us now address the issue of the extent to which political structures or relations – i.e. ‘authority relations’ or ‘command positions’ (the Weberian concept of stratification by ‘party’) – can be said to be independent of or even fundamental to economic or class structures. I have said that neo-Weberian sociologists argue that Marx’s base/superstructure model cannot cope with the fact that economic and political relations in most historical societies are intertwined and ‘support each other’, this indicating that the ‘economic’ cannot be basic to or enjoy primacy over the ‘political’. But one major difficulty with this kind of view is that it does not fit in with what Marxism actually has to say about the relationship between politics and economics. Ralph Miliband explains: On the most general plane, Marxism begins with an insistence that the separation between the political, economic, social and cultural parts of the social whole is artificial and arbitrary, so that, for instance, the notion of economics as free from politics is an ideological abstraction and distortion. There is no such thing as ‘economics’ – only ‘political economy’, in which the political element is an ever-present component. . . . On this view, politics is the pervasive and ubiquitous articulation of social conflict and particularly of class conflict, and enters into all social relations, however these may be designated. . . . Politics . . . [is] the ways and means whereby social conflict and notably class conflict is manifested.231 For Marxists, then, politics refers most commonly to the process of social conflict, especially class conflict, as this is shaped by and within an emergent social structure. This is a sociological understanding of politics, having little in common with the ‘institutional focus’ of orthodox political science, which directs its energies towards the analysis of state and government organizations, especially their mechanisms of decision-making, in abstraction from the wider social and economic structures of society. The Marxist understanding of politics, in contrast to this approach, sees it as integral to ongoing practices of economic production and class exploitation. Politics is defined as the processes or practices of social conflict between exploiting and exploited classes, as this is energized and fixed by the socio-economic base of society. Incidentally, it is precisely this understanding of politics that informs Lenin’s definition of it as ‘condensed economics’, not any belief on his part in the dependent status of politics vis-à-vis economics. Doubtless some would object to this formulation on the grounds that it provides no criteria by means of which the political can be distinguished analytically from the economic in everyday interaction. Whatever the intention, this identification of politics with the articulation of social and class conflicts, emer-

Stratification and power 267 gent from relations of production, must facilitate the agglomeration of the economic and political aspects of social being. This argument has little going for it. To say that in everyday social interaction the political and the economic are often interwoven does not mean that they are indistinguishable. There is social production and economic exploitation (economics) and there is class struggle over control of the labour process and the distribution of its products (politics). Sometimes the political and economic aspects of social interaction are not even interwoven. There can be economic action without politics, because class exploitation does not always facilitate class struggle. So the analytical distinction between economics and politics is entirely defensible on the terrain of Marxist theory. Yet it is undoubtedly correct to say that economic practices more often than not have a political aspect, for the simple reason that class exploitation does tend to engender class conflict. This is why the classical Marxists insisted that their theoretical project was to construct a ‘political economy’ of capitalist relations of production, not simply to address the movement of commodities in the marketplace ‘on the basis of supply and demand curves’ (the approach of orthodox economic theory).232 A more serious objection to this Marxist understanding of politics would be to say that it is too narrow or restrictive. There are other forms of politics other than those which express class or other social struggles. But there is simply no question of treating politics as simply the articulation of social or class conflict. This is simply one form of politics that has a fundamental significance, indeed the fundamental significance, in class-divided societies. Marx and Engels were well aware that politics has a structural as well as a processual or activist dimension, though they did not theorize the interface between structures and practices or the distinction between them (not least because lacking a worked out emergentist-realist ontology, they did not have the theoretical resources to do so). Nonetheless, for them, politics obviously pertains not only to practices of class conflict but also to structural relations of politico-military power (normally the institutions of the state) exercised by one class or its representatives over another. Since such structures do not always or everywhere require the active or ongoing exercise of force for their social and material reproduction, and nor are they always undone by class resistance, it follows that they have a relative autonomy from the daily struggles of class agents. Political versus class stratification in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies The neo-Weberian argument that Marxism cannot account for the fact that relations of production in pre-capitalist societies tend to be economically and politically constituted is obviously a refinement of their general assertion that economic and political structures are ‘as a rule’ interpenetrated and mutually supporting, this undermining the Marxist base/superstructure analytical distinction that purportedly holds that economics are basic to politics. The idea that political power tends to underpin and support economic power in many if not

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most historical societies prior to capitalism, this refuting a general ‘historical materialism’, has been particularly well developed by Giddens and Mann. For example, although Mann argues formally that sometimes in the historical record economic power enjoys predominance over political and military power, his overall preoccupation with state power and its role in facilitating economic development supports a more radical notion whereby ‘domination’ and ‘authorization’ rather than ‘exploitation’ and ‘allocation’ are the key elements of social structure in pre-capitalist societies. This kind of understanding of pre-modern societies is developed rather more explicitly and confidently by Giddens. Both would certainly endorse Weber’s view that in non-capitalist societies ‘command situations’ are more important than ‘class situations’ in explaining social structures. But how successful is this Weberian theorization of the relationship between allocative and authoritative power in both capitalist and pre-capitalist societies? Not successful at all, or so I would contend. Now in order to see why this is the case it is necessary to recall that relations of production are, for Marx and Engels, modes of economic exploitation – that is, social relations governing the appropriation of surplus labour or surplus product by a non-productive propertied class from a class of propertyless direct producers. Since economic exploitation more often than not entails ‘domination’ (the exercise or threat of force by the propertied to safeguard their access to the surplus), it follows that it normally has a ‘political’ or even ‘military’ dimension. This is why pre-capitalist modes of production have normally been reproduced by means of ‘extra-economic coercion’ (politico-military force). Marx and Engels were thus fully alive to the fact that most pre-capitalist systems of class exploitation have been anchored in both authoritative and allocative distributions of social power. But this does not compromise the theoretical integrity of their distinction between base and superstructure. This is because the base/ superstructure model is not intended to draw a contrast between the ‘purely’ political and economic ‘parts’ or power centres of a social structure. Rather it is intended to distinguish between relations of production and relations of class exploitation, on the one side, and those social, political and cultural relations that are not directly integrated into economic production and class exploitation, on the other. Nonetheless the ‘allocative’ dimension of the modes of production remains the key to explaining the structural relationship between economics and politics in all class societies, as Marx insists: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself . . . it is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers . . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis, of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.233

Stratification and power 269 Allocation determines authorization, because it is the distribution of the means of production that determines whether or not ‘extra-economic coercion’ is integral to the dynamic restructuring of relations of production and the socio-cultural systems based upon them. Far from being discomfited by the fact that in most non-capitalist societies the political elements are linked with the economic and often assume a dominant role in social reproduction, Marx makes the claim that it is the allocative or economic dimension of the relations of production ‘which explains why . . . politics . . . [has often] played the chief part’.234 On a superficial view of the role of ‘command relations’ in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, by contrast, one would conclude that since the economic rewards of those role incumbents in charge of an institution (such as the state or even a business enterprise) are derived from the fact they exercise authority to command the labour of others, it must follow that ‘authorization’ is an autonomous dimension or source of social power apart from class power or ‘allocation’. But, in fact, the power of authorization exercised by elites in organizations is largely inexplicable outside a class frame of reference, since ‘command positions’ exist precisely in order to ensure that relations of class exploitation are reproduced. Failing this, one would have to conclude that ‘domination’ is explainable in terms of a thirst for ‘power’ for its own sake, or else is simply functional to the requirements of social order (respectively, the Nietzschean and Parsonian stereotypes). But how does the distribution of allocative resources (the means of production) determine ‘the political form of sovereignty and dependence’ in class societies old and new? This is best explained by examining the economic structure of relations of production in different historical modes of society. In capitalist society, for example, the total separation of the direct producers from the means of production, and hence the monopoly control enjoyed by the capitalists over the labour process and its objects, ensures that exploitation is secured routinely for the most part by economic mechanisms alone. Workers must yield to wageexploitation by virtue of the fact that they have no independent access to the means of wealth creation or subsistence (land, factories, plant, money, consumer goods, etc.). This allows a formal separation of economic and political structures in capitalism, which does not exist in pre-capitalist societies where politicomilitary and economic power are combined in unitary structures of class domination (the tributary state or the feudal manor). In pre-capitalist society, by contrast, the partial control which the direct producers exercise over the means of production (i.e. their effective possession of certain land rights, oxen, the light plough and other tools and goods) ensures that propertied elites are able to secure their class power (based upon rent or tax exploitation in feudal and tributary society respectively) only through the continual threat of military intervention in the agrarian economy. This argument is economically summarized by Marx: In all forms in which the direct labourer remains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of

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Stratification and power his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship. The direct producer . . . is found here in possession of his own means of production, the necessary material labour conditions required for the realisation of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence. He conducts his agricultural activity and the rural home industries connected with it independently. . . . Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted by other than economic means.235

This means that whereas in capitalism the political form is essentially an appendage of production and class relations (albeit a functionally indispensable one), in the feudal and tributary modes it is precisely constitutive of production and class relations. Thus, Marx is right to claim that ‘allocation’ (economics) has explanatory primacy over ‘authorization’ (politics) in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies. This is why for him modes of production are at root economic structures. Yet it is important to reiterate that such an understanding of structural causality in society does not prevent Marx from grasping that pre-capitalist relations of production are reproduced by political as well as economic mechanisms, or that these effectively ‘support each other’. No doubt much of the confusion that envelops the neo-Weberian critique of socio-historical materialism is a function of its authors’ tendency to misread Marx’s analysis of the specific relationship between economy and polity in capitalism as one with a broader historical application. As Jon Elster points out, the base/superstructure model corresponds immediately to the interface between separate economic and political institutions in capitalism, but not in most noncapitalist societies, where the economic and the political are institutionally intertwined.236 But, despite Elster, this does not mean that the base/superstructure distinction is meaningless outside capitalism. On the contrary, this means simply that the model in non-capitalist societies pertains to a mechanism of structural causality whereby the relations of production and modes of class exploitation of a society determine those social and cultural structures that are not directly aspects of its political economy. The fact that most of Marx’s writings relate specifically to capitalism, and thus articulate base/superstructure as a straightforward distinction between state and capital, has perhaps misled the less perceptive of his critics. But the failure of neo-Weberians to mount an effective critique of Marx’s structural sociology is also explainable in terms of their own inadequate definition of class relations and their tendency to attribute their own erroneous view of class to Marx and Marxism. Giddens, for example, endorses and attributes to Marx an understanding of class and classes as existing only where the means of production are owned as legal private property by individuals.237 Since Giddens cannot find evidence of the dominance of private property

Stratification and power 271 in most non-capitalist societies, he has little difficulty in concluding that the general claims of socio-historical materialism pertaining to the primacy of class must be mistaken. But Marx and Engels do not define class relations merely as the relations of private ownership, contrary to the orthodox view. For them, class relations are simply relations of production involving an uneven distribution of the means of production. An unequal distribution of the means of production enables one section of the societal community (the propertied class) to extort surplus labour or surplus product from the remainder of the societal community (the subordinate propertyless class or classes). Class relations are thus relations of production that embody economic exploitation. Or, to put it more precisely, class relations are relations of power and domination, whereby a group of non-producing exploiters appropriates without recompense a portion of the economic wealth of society from a larger group of exploited producers. There is absolutely nothing about this formulation that indicates that class relations (i.e. relations of economic exploitation) must involve or entail the legal ownership of the means of production by either private individuals or public institutions. It does not rule out the possibility that economic exploitation (i.e. the appropriation of surplus labour by a class of non-producers from a class of direct producers) might just as readily be secured in the absence of the legaljuridical form of private property (e.g. by means of the ‘ownership’ of state property). Nor does it rule out the possibility that class exploitation might conceivably be secured in the absence of the legal forms of either state property or private property. Though it is perfectly true that Marx and Engels consistently refer to relations of production and relations of class domination as ‘property relations’ (or ‘the relations of bourgeois property’), it would nonetheless be mistaken to assume that for them ‘property relations’ are synonymous with judicial ‘property rights’. In fact, the tendency of both Marx and Engels to refer to relations of production as private property is possibly attributable to the simple fact that in capitalist society (the focus of their critique of political economy) property relations are always expressed in the legal form of private property. Precisely because relations of production involving the exploitation of the direct producers by a class who control allocative resources as state property have been (until recently) much less known than those centred upon private property, this perhaps encouraged Marx and Engels to over-generalize the historical salience of the latter. Nonetheless, it is defensible to distinguish analytically between legal property rights and relations of production. An exploiting class can organize its power through the medium of private property or state property; it can exploit either individually or collectively. However, the legal forms in which relations of production are expressed (the ‘ownership rights’ or rights of control or possession which the state power or private individuals exercise over allocative resources) are not the same thing as class relations or property relations. Theoretically there is no reason why class-based relations of production, defined as they are by an asymmetrical distribution of the means of production and

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conditions of labour, cannot exist without any corresponding juridical property form (though they are likely to be highly unstable, and hence are always likely to be ‘shored up’ by legal norms). The fact that all historical modes of class domination have indeed involved some or other form of legal property is simply indicative that exploiting classes generally do perceive the need to formalize or legitimize (in their own eyes at least) their disproportionate control of the instruments and objects of wealthcreation. Such is also indicative that legal norms are usually necessary to allow the reproduction of relations of possession and dispossession in the longer run. But this should not obscure the reality that the basis of legal ownership resides not in the judicial forms themselves but in social relations determining the distribution of allocative resources. As G.A. Cohen has argued, relations of production may be defined legitimately as either private ownership of productive assets or as ‘relations presupposing such relations’, that is relations of ‘effective control’ or ‘possession of productive forces’.238 This overall point is well summarized by John Scott: Marx tended to describe these relations of possession in legal terms, as being relations of ‘property’ or of ‘ownership’, but it is clear that he did not mean to see these relations as exclusively legal in character. He was concerned with the actual social relations that structure production, and he recognised that these were only partly defined by institutionalised legal norms and their associated rights and obligations. Relations of possession are relations of effective control over the productive powers of a society. The virtue of using the word ‘possession’, rather than ‘ownership’, is that, despite its legal connotations, it strongly emphasises the factual rather than normative nature of these relations. Legal norms operate alongside political, economic and other social forms as necessary conditions for the actual ‘underlying’ relations of possession, which remain distinct from their ‘surface’ conditions.239 But is there any textual evidence for accepting that Marx and Engels endorse this view of property relations? Yes, there is. First, there is Engels’ scornful rebuttal of the idea that private production and planlessness is necessarily definitional of capitalism; and there is his corresponding rejection of the idea that state ownership of the means of production is a sufficient condition of socialism, the basis of his critique of Bismarck’s economic reforms.240 Engels’ point is that state ownership of the economy (partial or otherwise) cannot be socialism or a negation of class society if the state is controlled by social forces other than the working class, who act as surrogate capitalists. Here the legal form of ‘socialized production’ or ‘public property’ masks the reality of the vested social interests that effectively possess it and use it as a vehicle of class domination. Second, there is also the fact that Marx devotes considerable space to criticizing Proudhon for endorsing precisely this ‘juridical fiction’ of conflating relations of production with legal property forms:

Stratification and power 273 In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing less than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart – an abstract and eternal idea – can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence.241 Marx’s argument is that such an approach is a denial of a genuinely materialist understanding of society precisely because it places legal categories prior to material relations of power. But this is exactly what the critics accuse Marx of doing! In sharp contrast to this kind of understanding of property relations, Marx explicitly endorses the view of Hobbes that ‘might [is] the basis of right’ and that law is merely ‘the expression of other relations upon which state power rests’.242 Incidentally, it is interesting to note that Weber himself, though for reasons undoubtedly rooted in his Nietzschean metaphysic of domination, was quite happy to endorse Marx’s view that legal property relations rested in the ‘final instance’ on actual possession of property, on the effective control which the propertied could secure over material resources.243 But what is the warranty for endorsing Marx’s own position on this matter? In fact, his argument is defensible on both empirical-historical and logical grounds. First, recent work into the genesis of the feudal mode of production in Western Europe confirms it had a twofold origin – the conversion by elements of the old Roman aristocracy of their landholdings into self-sufficient manorial estates, and the appropriation of imperial territory by ‘barbarian’ chieftains who promptly did the same.244 In both these cases, although the reproduction of feudal relations of production demanded that the new exploiting class find an ‘economic base’ for their politico-military adventures in the appropriation of surplus product from the peasant economy, the historical origin of the new system of society lay in the immediate ability of former Roman state administrators and landowners and barbarian chieftains to mobilize sufficient military force to protect or seize landed property and to seal it off from the outside world. The effective possession of landed estates thus presupposed (and enabled) the definition of it as legal private or corporate (i.e. church) feudal property. Only by exercising a measure of control over certain kinds of allocative resources (means of production and serf labour) was it possible for the new feudal ruling class to sustain the economic and political power to codify its new social domination in legal statutes. Second, the historical genesis of capitalism in Britain (and to a lesser extent in Western Europe) confirms the dependent status of legal property forms upon relations of production. Unlike in feudalism, the origins of capitalism here are less to be found in processes of politico-military competition, and more in the gradual development of commodity production in town and countryside in the ‘womb’ of the old feudal societies, though state building undoubtedly provided a framework for the gradual marketization of economic life to occur. The accumulation of economic power by the rising bourgeoisie (based upon trade, finance

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and petty commodity production) allowed the gradual undermining of the old subsistence economy, as feudal ground rent was increasingly subordinated to market rent, and subversion of the absolutist state structures into a partial defence of or accommodation with petty capitalist and later capitalist interests against landlords and peasants and the embryonic working class. In Britain these molecular changes in the feudal social structure, together with the deepening crises of the subsistence agrarian economy, granted the agrarian capitalists (and the landlords from which they leased land and premises) the power base to expel the peasantry from the land and enclose it into farms employing wage-labour. This process certainly got started in many regions long before the state intervened by legal means (the Enclosures) to facilitate the development of commercial agriculture and establish its nationwide dominance.245 Moreover, in order to explain why the English monarchy subsequently took upon itself the role of facilitating and accelerating the appropriation of the peasantry (via legal statute backed by military force) one has to recognize that the prior possession of certain kinds of allocative assets by the rising bourgeoisie (commodity capital, money capital, certain means of production) precisely enabled it to pressurize the state power to fall in behind the defence of capitalist interests. So, although state legal power was certainly efficacious in bringing about the domination of bourgeois private property, in the absence of which it would probably not have been accomplished, this power nonetheless rested upon other foundations, in the effective control by the bourgeoisie of certain revolutionary forms of wealth creation and exploitation. Here, once again, it is difficult to see how events could have unfolded differently. It seems hard to see how a class can possess legal property rights prior to actual property, since no community of direct producers will accept the legal appropriation of its means of life by a minority of its members unless legal statutes supporting the private appropriation of property are backed up by material relations of power. Returning to our example, unless it is conceded that the social relations of petty capitalism were already an economic power to be reckoned with in England from at least the sixteenth century, exerting a strong influence on state policy-making from this point onwards, it is hard to see why the English monarchy saw fit to introduce legal measures to ‘oil the wheels’ of capitalist enterprise. This being the case, I conclude that law, right, etc., must be based upon uneven distributions of allocative (and authoritative) resources. To suggest otherwise is, ultimately, to abstract power from any kind of anchorage in structural social relations, in effect to endorse the Nietzschean metaphysic of ‘domination’ as a transhistorical feature of human social existence. Political versus class stratification in ‘post-capitalist’ societies I have said that Weberian sociologists argue that the Marxian theory of social structure cannot account for elite domination in the former ‘communist’ societies of the USSR and Eastern Europe. The idea here is that the existence and persistence of social stratification in these societies, despite their eradication of

Stratification and power 275 class relations centred on private ownership, shows that inequalities of power and reward can be rooted in authoritative rather than allocative resources, in politics rather than class. But, since class relations are, for Marx, relations of production based upon the economic exploitation of those who do not own or possess the means of production and subsistence by those who do, it is obvious that the absence of private property in ‘state socialist’ societies does not rule out here a class analysis of the distribution of power and reward. Further, if class is to be understood not simply in terms of private property, but in terms of property relations in the broader sense of social relations of effective control of the means of production, it is also abundantly clear that elite domination and stratification in the ‘post-capitalist’ world does not have to be grasped in terms of ‘political ranking’. But how might a class analysis of the former ‘communist’ regimes of the Eastern bloc proceed? Relations of production here express a specific distribution of property whereby a class of direct producers is excluded from effective control of productive means by an elite stratum that possesses these productive means. The legal expression of relations of production in ‘state socialism’ is public ownership. This masks the reality of class domination: the effective possession of the state by an unelected elite, which therefore controls the means of production as state property. Economic exploitation here is not dissimilar to economic exploitation under capitalism. In capitalism, the socially dominant class own or possess all the major means of production; the workers own or possess only their own labourpower. Under ‘state socialism’, the same state of affairs tends to prevail: the partystate elite controls all the means of production, and so the workers are forced to sell their labour power in the marketplace in return for a wage. Thus, the mechanism of surplus-extraction under ‘state socialism’, as under capitalism, is precisely unpaid labour time, as this is masked by the illusions of the wage-form.246 There is, indeed, a good argument in favour of seeing such class societies as a variant of the capitalist mode of production, not a radical departure from it. This is because the class exploitation of the propertyless labourers here was enforced not by the whims of the top bureaucrats but by the pressure of economic and military competition with the western powers. This has generated a dynamic of ‘rationalized exploitation’, and the attendant subordination of popular consumption to capital accumulation, to production for the sake of production, as surely in ‘communism’ as in western capitalism.247 Consequently, the mere fact that the ‘post-capitalist’ regimes tended to be highly stratified, and based upon state property instead of private property, does not invalidate an application of Marx’s base/superstructure model of structural causality in this context. A materialist analysis of power-relations remains defensible. For, contrary to the views of the neo-Weberians, and of those of Marxists (such as Jon Elster), it is possible here to distinguish analytically between relations of production and relations of class exploitation and the wider social and cultural relations that correspond to these, and to attribute explanatory primacy to the former. Such an analytical strategy has considerable explanatory reach on the question of structural reproduction in the former Eastern bloc. How,

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for example, did the Soviet regime persist for as long as it did in the absence of popular legitimacy, and despite its economic pathologies and political authoritarianism, without having to face revolutionary challenges from the workers which necessitated the exercise of military force? The answer is given by the structural configuration of relations of production in this societal type. Here the complete separation of the workers from the means of production, and their resultant compulsion to alienate their labour in return for a wage, ensured that the dull weight of economic necessity was for the most part sufficient to ensure their subordination to the agents of class exploitation. Therefore, in ‘actually existing socialism’, as in western private capitalism, class power has rested rather more on allocation than on authorization. Now it makes no difference, from the point of view of this analysis, whether the historical genesis of this system of ‘state socialism’ (state capitalism) was rooted in ‘economic’ or ‘political’ processes. In reality, of course, political, economic and ideological mechanisms were all involved, as they always and inevitably are in every epochal transformation of social relations. Nonetheless, as a matter of historical fact, the construction of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the former USSR cannot be grasped outside a class frame of analysis.248 But, leaving this aside, the important point to make is that, irrespective of its historical origin, class power in state capitalism could be reproduced only by finding for itself an anchorage or basis in relations of production centred on a particular distributional pattern of the means of production. Only by appropriating surplus product from the direct producers, only by engaging in practices of class exploitation, was it possible for the ‘political’ elites of these societies to systematically generate and mobilize the resources to maintain and build up those coercive bureaucratic apparatuses of party and state (i.e. army, police, rationalized administration, means of destruction, cultural institutions, not to mention the infrastructure of industrial goods production) indispensable for their continued domination of society. Indeed, it was only after the burden of supporting the massive non-economic ‘superstructure’ (particularly the growing weight of the arms sector) brought about a gradual slowdown and eventual stagnation of forces of production from the 1970s onward, that the relations of state property were put under pressure, and eventually undermined by class struggle from below at the close of the 1980s.249 But why prefer this Marxist account of ‘state socialism’ to Weberian alternatives? Why develop a class analysis instead of one couched in terms of ‘politics’ or ‘party’ or ‘bureaucracy’? I have already given one good reason for doing so. This is that the analytical concepts of modes of production and class relations allow the theorist to obtain an explanatory purchase on both the logic of development of ‘actually existing socialism’ and those internal contradictions that brought about its decline and collapse. Lacking this, no account can be given of why such societies for a period of time economically and militarily outperformed the advanced western powers, achieving full industrialization within a few decades, only to subsequently lag further and further behind their competitors, eventually grinding to a virtual standstill.250

Stratification and power 277 Thus, Weberian accounts of ‘socialist’ development note the expansion of the investment goods sector of the economy relative to the consumptive goods sector, and identify this as a defect of bureaucratic party rule, but can offer only a weak explanation of this in terms of ‘the tendency of the bureaucracy to place as large a proportion as possible of the national product under its own control’.251 Obviously this tendency existed. But why should this generate economic problems only after more than 40 years of dynamic economic growth? And why did this tendency lead to the relentless drive to accumulate means of production rather than simply the misallocation of consumer goods? Weberian theory can provide answers to neither of these questions, because its core concept of ‘party bureaucratic domination’ provides no explanatory purchase on the question of the systemic dynamic of ‘actually existing socialism’. This leads me on to the second important reason for preferring this Marxist understanding to Weberian analyses of ‘state socialism’. This is simply that efforts by sociologists to explicate such societies with resort to Weberian concepts have not been a conspicuous success. Typically, such attempts have sought to grasp political stratification here as a function of bureaucratic legitimacy. Two examples will have to suffice – namely: the work of George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi252 and Vajda.253 Konrad and Szelenyi account for social stratification in the former Soviet Union in terms of the bureaucratic knowledge and expertise possessed by the party elite by virtue of its role as ‘rational redistributors’ of the social product. As David Lee and Howard Newby summarize their argument: ‘Konrad and Szelenyi consider that in what they call modern rational redistributive systems those who are able to formulate the goals and objectives of the society are also able to control the disposal of the social product’.254 Vajda disagrees with this kind of interpretation of ‘state socialism’. For him, the power of the party elite in this mode of society was indeed rooted in its bureaucratic legal-rational legitimacy, but its legitimacy is based upon its claim to represent the interests of the workers. Konrad and Szelenyi’s understanding of social power in ‘state socialism’ fails because it is tautologous. The ‘bureaucratic knowledge and expertise’ possessed by the ‘political intelligentsia’ cannot explain social stratification here, since the possession of these cultural resources by the elite was itself a function of their sectoral advantages within the social hierarchy, including and especially their privileged access to educational goods denied to the rest of the population.255 Further, it is clear enough that ‘rational knowledge’ of administration and planning can be derived only from the practice of bureaucratic-scientific management, hence presupposing the power-relations that are supposed to be explained in terms of this ‘bureaucratic expertise’ monopolized by the elite. In fact, the power of the party hierarchy to dispose of the social product was simply a function of its control of the objects and instruments of its production. By attributing the power of the party-state bureaucracy to its ‘rational knowledge’ of production and administration, Konrad and Szelenyi’s theory is also a species of apologetics where it is not guilty of ideologism. This is the chief problem also with Vajda’s alternative. Note the relegation of

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issues or questions of exploitation and oppression from the forefront of social analysis. There is no account of structurally based power or inequality, because this is tantamount to a materialist analysis. Since stratification is not a form of class exploitation and domination, and not reproduced by authoritative power derived from control of allocative resources, so the power of the party elite (i.e. its control of authoritative and allocative resources) is seen instead as a function of its legitimacy, derived either from its functional roles, or from its success in somehow hoodwinking the workers. Yet it beggars belief that the ruling Communist Party of the USSR enjoyed much in the way of positive popular support from the mid-1920s onwards (and especially in the 1930s and 1950s). This is because the wholesale forced collectivization of the peasants (88 per cent or so of the population), and drive towards full industrialization, involved the radical suppression of general living standards, and attendant massive state repression, including the slaughter and incarceration of millions, and withdrawal of effective legal and trade union rights from the workers.256 This must surely contradict any account of political domination here as based upon bureaucratic or legalrational legitimacy of whatever kind.

Conclusion I have said that Weberian social theory is committed to two core theses. First, that Marxist sociology is inadequate, because the ‘economic’ is not basic to politics and the military, but rather that these different structures of power or domination are either interwoven and mutually supporting, or that politico-military structures predominate over economic structures. Second, that forms of social stratification (such as those determined by culture and politics) are autonomous of the material structures of social systems, in the sense that these defy explanation in terms of economic distributions and class relations, and manifest causal powers and real-world effects which are self-sustaining and self-determining, or failing this are rooted in material factors which lie outside society and history. In challenging both of these key positions, I have developed the following arguments. First, I have shown that Weberian sociologists have failed to demonstrate either that structures of cultural stratification (such as gender and ethnicity) are autonomous of modes of production and class relations, or that their causal powers and real-world effects would necessarily persist in the absence of their roots in material production and class exploitation. On the contrary, my argument is that modes of cultural domination are far better analysed and explained by drawing upon the concepts of classical Marxism (understood here as a particular form of realist social theory). For, unless this is done, the sociological understanding of ‘racial’ and female subordination (to offer the obvious examples) inevitably degenerates into crude naturalism where it does not collapse into idealism. Second, I have shown that the interpenetration or interdependence of economic and politico-military structures in non-capitalist societies does not, in fact, compromise the theoretical integrity of Marx’s famous analytical couplet of

Stratification and power 279 base and superstructure or its explanatory reach (which Weberians claim is the case). This is because Marxism, unlike Weberianism, is capable of obtaining an explanatory purchase on the question of why non-capitalist modes of social power tend to be economically and politically constituted. Indeed, Marx’s base/superstructure model of structural causation allows the theorist to grasp why in non-capitalist societies economic or class exploitation is dependent on politics and the military for its social reproduction, since it is precisely the primacy of allocation or economics (the manner of distribution of the means of production) over authorization or politics here which explains this dependence of class exploitation on mechanisms of extra-economic coercion. I conclude that Marx’s sociology still provides the social analyst with indispensable theoretical tools for explaining and exploring the variegated structures of stratification characteristic of both modern and pre-modern societies.

5

Marx versus Weber on the dialectics of history

Introduction Traditionally, for ‘conflict’ and ‘critical’ sociologists, the basic choice has been between Marxian- or Weberian-inspired research programmes. In all kinds of ways, these rival traditions define the basic cleavages of social theory. First, there is, of course, Marx’s materialism versus Weber’s pluralism. Second, there is Marx’s systemic focus on society and history as fractured totality (‘dialectical structuralism’) versus Weber’s understanding of society and history as ‘heterogeneous continuum’ (energized by open-ended patterns of social action embodying the irreducibility of value-orientations and ends). Third, there is Marx’s naturalistic humanism versus Weber’s Nietzschean individualism. Fourth, there is Marx’s realism (epistemological materialism) versus Weber’s relativistic perspectivism. Finally, and related to this, there is Marx’s temperate naturalism (scientific realism) versus Weber’s anti-naturalism (neo-Kantian cultural constructivism). In certain respects, too, these rival traditions define some of the fundamental dualisms of modern political thought. First, there is Marx’s revolutionary optimism concerning the future of modernity (socialist eudaimonia ushering in the terminus of modes of exploitation and domination and bringing about the free flourishing of each and all) versus Weber’s almost depressive pessimism (the ‘iron cage’ and ‘polar darkness’ of rationalization and bureaucratization into which humanity is doomed to dwell by virtue of the technical benefits and exigencies of instrumental reason). Second, there is Marx’s anti-capitalism (informed by his view of capitalism as a specific mode of class exploitation) versus Weber’s cautious endorsement of capitalism (informed by his view of capitalism as embodying the highest conceivable formal economic rationality). Finally, there is Marx’s anti-imperialism and internationalism (informed by his belief that socialism was feasible only as a global system and his understanding of national chauvinism as the simple means of strengthening the domination of capital over workers everywhere) versus Weber’s imperialistic nationalism (informed by his understanding of imperial politics as the only conceivable way for Germany and other powers to assert their national interests within the competitive order of nation states).

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Now, in Chapter 4, I examined the opposition between Marxism and Weberianism in terms of their basic understandings of social structure. The difference can be summarized as follows. For Marxists, specific forms of society have to be analysed in terms of their modes of production, specifically with regard to the interface between the forces of production and relations of production, because the level of development of material production, and the manner in which production is organized and productive assets are distributed amongst a society’s members, provide the analyst with the key to understanding the wider social and cultural relations of society. In this specific sense, then, Marxism outlines a materialist understanding of social systems: forces of production and relations of production (including and especially property and class relations) enjoy causal primacy in explaining the constitution and dynamics of social systems. For Weberians, on the other hand, the issue is rather more complex. For them, neither production nor property relations can be straightforwardly grasped as the main organizing principle of stratification systems. Social structures are always pluralistic, comprised of multiple and irreducible modes of stratification, none of which can be legitimately privileged as ‘ultimate’ in an explanatory or analytical sense. This difference between Marxism’s materialism and Weberianism’s pluralism is a function of their different understandings of power or domination in social life. For Marxists, domination is historically specific to class-divided societies, emerging only in societies where the forces of production are sufficiently developed to support an asymmetrical distribution of productive and consumptive goods. Domination is thus essentially an appendage and mechanism of class exploitation. In other words, according to Marxists, domination has social and historical causes – the economic exploitation of the direct producers by an unproductive stratum of non-productive ‘owners’ of material production – and can therefore be done away with by means of the eradication of class-divided relations of production. For Weberians, in sharp contrast to this view, domination is not historically or culturally specific to particular forms of society, but is rather an omnipresent feature of human social relationships. It follows from this that domination cannot be reduced in an explanatory sense to relations of class exploitation. Rather, domination is a universal property of society, and finds expression in a multiplicity of different forms – economic, cultural and political. These forms of domination (identified by Weber as stratification by class, status and party) are always co-existent, and all are equally fundamental in human relationships, precisely because they are simply forms of the distribution of power. These modes of domination nonetheless interact in complex and varied ways, and the powerrelations between them are constantly shifting, with different modes of domination assuming a greater or lesser importance in different historical societies. I have argued (Chapter 4) that the Marxist understanding of social structure has rather more explanatory weight than its Weberian competitor. Here I have sought to show that the Marxian analytical distinction between base and superstructure offers the analyst indispensable theoretical and methodological tools

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for exploring a rich variety of social systems, capitalist and non-capitalist. That is to say, I have tried to substantiate the thesis that Marx’s materialist sociology allows the theorist to account for the different forms of structured relationships that exist between ideological, economic and politico-military power centres in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies in a way beyond the reach of Weberian concepts. Moreover, I have tried to demonstrate that the Weberian tripartite model of stratification (party, status and class) is undermined by fundamental conceptual problems. These include: (1) the inherent and arbitrary psychologism of the concept of status ranking, and the difficulty of attributing to status stratification the independent causal power to invest in agents political and economic power; (2) the narrowly economistic identification of class with ‘market situation’; and (3) the failure to plausibly detach ‘authorization’ or ‘command relations’ from modes of production or relations of class exploitation (drawing on the examples of pre-capitalist and postcapitalist societies). Before that (Chapter 3), I have shown how Marx’s socio-historical materialism (recast as an anti-reductive critical realist social theory) sustains an account of socio-historical dynamics as productive force evolutionism and as structural transformations of modes of production and hence social systems more generally. This socio-historical materialism, I have tried to demonstrate, grasps sociohistorical processes not as mere random changes, but as possessing a progressive directionality. This is by virtue of the expanded opportunities for human freedoms which are opened up by economic development and by class struggle over the material and cultural benefits opened up by economic development. Now my intention in this chapter is to build on the analysis contained in these earlier chapters. Here I want to further substantiate the analytical merits of Marx’s socio-historical materialism by means of a critical engagement with Weber’s historical sociology and neo-Weberian theories of social history outlined by Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann. My argument is that the conception of society (shared by these authors) as a depthless world of autonomous yet intersecting modes of power or stratification, none of which enjoy any kind of causal primacy over the others, ought to feed into an understanding of history as shaped by the flux of competitive interactions between them. Logically, this should sustain an account of history as simply indeterminate and directionless, a chaotic collision of wills, an ‘encyclopaedia of accidents’.1 Yet neither Weber, nor Giddens, nor Mann has been consistent on this fundamental issue. Indeed, it is possible to detect an evolutionary account of social change in some of Weber’s own historical work; and this tendency is pushed further in the historical theories of Giddens and Mann, despite the fact that all explicitly reject evolutionary models of social change. This opens up a profound conceptual tension at the heart of their work. In this chapter I will explore this conceptual tension and argue, following Marx, that historical processes do have an epochal evolutionary directionality from less advanced to more advanced (thus enabling or empowering) societal forms, by virtue of the interface between forces of production and relations of production,

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which Weberian historical sociology simply lacks the conceptual tool kit to theorize effectively. In fact, as I will argue, Weberian sociology places itself in the unfortunate position of outlining an unacknowledged evolutionary theory of macroscopic social change without the conceptual apparatus to support or sustain it. I propose to organize the work as follows. First, I wish to briefly summarize my argument (of Chapter 3) that Marxism is unequivocally a defensible theory of geo-historical directionality, and of how this constitutes an impulse towards greater human freedom. But here I wish to apply Marx’s theory more specifically to the dynamics of captialism and the potential this creates for human emancipation. Second, I intend to outline the salient elements of Weber’s alternative pluralist historical method, before exploring how this has been utilized by those contemporary sociologists (most notably Giddens and Mann), who have ambitiously sought to develop an overall sociological theory of historical trajectories, as an alternative to Marx’s approach. Finally, I will attempt to demonstrate that neither Weber’s historical sociology, nor the highly sophisticated alternatives developed by Giddens and Mann, can match the explanatory power of Marx’s own historical method. On the contrary, I will argue that these historical sociologies founder on the inherently problematic nature of historically or conceptually detaching ideological, military and political power from economic power, and squaring a consistent conceptual-methodological pluralism in historical analysis with the reality of tendential progressive directionality in the historical development of social systems.

Marx’s theory of history revisited I have argued that, according to socio-historical materialism, history is societal evolution, a directional process which has a tendential impulse leading from less developed to more developed social systems. This means that socio-historical materialism is a theory of progress, not in the moral sense, but in the sense that ‘each successive social form represents an increase in some property common to all kinds of society’,2 and that this increasing common property allows the possibility of enhancing the life-chances (or self-autonomy) of its members. Yet, as noted beforehand, there is much more to Marx’s theory of history than the concept of evolutionary development. As Callinicos rightly argues, Marx’s theory of history has two additional elements other than a theory of progress – a theory of structure and a theory of transformation.3 I have outlined already Marx’s understanding of structure, and so I will have nothing to add here. But it is clear that ‘a theory of history must contain some account of the mechanism or mechanisms responsible both for the changes that take place within a particular society and, more importantly, for the transformation of a society, that is, for the process through which it ceases to embody one particular structure, and comes instead to embody another’.4 For emergentist Marxism, as I have explained it (Chapter 3), history as both evolutionary development and as structural transformation is rooted foursquare in the same mechanisms – namely the interface

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between forces of production/relations of production and base/superstructure (as emergent structures), on the one hand, and constitutive social labour and the processes of class struggle (as emergent forms of agency), on the other. How does this work? History as societal evolution is energized by the cumulative development of the forces of production across successive forms of society. Agents, by virtue of the properties and powers invested in them by their membership of a particular ‘natural kind’ (sociality, consciousness, selfconsciousness, collaborative labour), and by virtue of their fairly straightforward rational interests in increasing the output of their social labour (either to increase their livelihood or to free a greater part of their time from the burden of productive toil for subsistence), will tend to develop the material forces of production of the societies they inhabit. But, this having been said, agents have to work and labour in a social environment ‘already made’, which places definite structural limitations (as well as enablements) on their ability to safeguard or improve or sustain their livelihood. History as structural transformation is energized by the fact that in developing their forces of production up to a certain point, human agents encounter fetters on their capacity to continue to do so indefinitely, which may even threaten to reduce or otherwise restrict their livelihood or life-chances. These fetters are precisely a function of class-divided relations of production – i.e. the division of historical societies into classes which possess or control the means of wealth creation and those which do not – and the superstructural forms (dominant ideologies, the coercive machinery of the state, etc.) which act to legitimize and reproduce these class relations. In other words, Marx identified two central conflicts or contraditions of classdivided social systems, which generate systemic pressures or impulses for or towards their own negation or ‘absenting’, and hence towards the progressive transformation of social systems, by those agents with the interests in and opportunities to do so. First of all, he identified a property of structural malintegration – namely the fettering of the forces of production by the relations of production.5 Second, he identified a property of social malintegration – namely the social struggles of subordinate class agents against the propertied to overturn the relations of production (or relations of class exploitation) and attendant politicoideological superstructures that are holding back the development of social production and curtailing their life-chances.6 The coincidence of both forms of societal malintegration provide the mechanisms that lead to the periodic restructuring of social relations, this leading to the restoration of economic progress, at least up to a point, in the historical development of social systems. In class-divided societies, the relations of production restrict the development of the forces of production beyond a certain point, by virtue of the vested interests of the propertied in preserving a particular pattern of ownership and wealth creation and organization of the labour process. Yet these unfolding systemic contradictions are not experienced directly by class agents; instead class agents experience those objective features of their involuntary placement in social relations that are mediated by systemic

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contradictions. In other words, class agents are confronted directly not by the ‘system’ (of class relations) but by those empirical effects of the system that impinge adversely on their lives by threatening their life-chances (e.g. under capitalism: devalued currency, raging inflation, wage freezes and cuts, redundancies, dwindling welfare resources, etc.). Nonetheless, because systemic contradictions translate generically into objective situations in which subordinate class agents especially find their livelihoods and freedoms under threat or even curtailed, it is uncontentious that they undergo systematic directional guidance to diagnose the nature of the structural defects responsible for the worsening objective situations confronting them, and to identify their collective interests with a political and ideological struggle against prevailing social relations to achieve a better, i.e. freer, society. Marx makes the point that it is only ‘classes with radical chains’7 which have interests in rationally unravelling the ideological mystifications that envelop prevailing class relations, in objectively grasping the ‘inner essence’ of the social structures and mechanisms to which they are subject (because this is indispensable to revolutionary praxis aimed at changing society). Marx also argues that it is only the agents of subordinate classes who undergo systematic structural pressure (as a consequence of the experience and effects of class exploitation, particularly in the context of a systemic crisis) to challenge the status quo through the unification of emancipatory critique and practice as revolutionary politics.8 As Marx puts it: ‘The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class’.9 I have shown that this is a defensible argument. Thus, especially in the circumstances of a systemic crisis of social relations, structural conditioning works through the mediation of the punitive ‘opportunity costs’ which attach to subordinate class agents who fail to rationally appraise and act in accordance with their needs and interests, first by diagnosing their objective situations, then by engaging in the kinds of agential practices they consider likely to improve their objective situations.10 Where the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production has developed to the point in which a generalized economic crisis is threatening the livelihood of the subordinate classes en masse, the only solutions likely to yield results will be radical ones that address the underlying structural fault-lines of the system. Moreover, since the empirical forms of the crisis experienced directly by agents will tend to throw into sharper relief the systemic contradictions of the modes of production, there will be a stronger likelihood for class agents with vested interests in progressive societal change to endorse radical (i.e. structural) solutions to society’s ills. In short, there will be objective directional guidance on subordinate class agents to appraise, endorse and engage in collective political projects in response to society’s problems that are geared towards bringing about a thoroughgoing reform or transformation of its structure and institutions. But it is important to grasp that, for Marx, it is the propertyless class agents of capitalism who especially occupy the objective position in class society that enables them to successfully ‘universalize’ or ‘totalize’ their experience and

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interests, so that they have the potential to represent or even become humanity as a whole. This is not simply because the propertyless producers are alone responsible for the material production and reproduction of human and social life under modern industrial conditions. After all, it was the surplus labour of the slaves and serfs that supported the social structures of antiquity and feudalism respectively, but neither of these was for Marx a ‘universal’ class. Marx’s additional point is that the modern proletariat is, by virtue of its enormous productive power, the only exploited class in human history capable of abolishing class society. Since the labouring activity of the modern proletariat is capable of producing wealth on a scale sufficient to ensure that the material and cultural needs of the whole global populace is more than adequately met,11 so ending generalized want (the basis of competitive struggles over allocation),12 it follows that the proletariat is the only historical class that requires neither a class of exploiters to rule over it nor a class of the exploited to rule over.13 This abstract potential for universalization of consciousness and struggle is objectively augmented by the logic of capitalist development. This is because the defining structural properties of the capitalist mode – generalized commodity production and the separation of the workers from the means of production – render it simultaneously the most dynamic productive system and radical form of class exploitation in history. Under capitalism, the propertyless workers are forced to transform their labour power into a commodity, which they must sell in the marketplace to the owners or controllers of the means of production, in order to meet their subsistence needs. At the same time, the propertied employing class is internally fractured into rival units of capital, which are placed under systematic pressure by the competitive structure of the marketplace to accumulate rather than consume capital and reinvest profits in continually expanded and increasingly rationalized production.14 As Marx puts it: ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets. . . . Therefore, save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value, or surplus product, into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake’.15 This is the key difference between capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production, for in the latter (where the law of value does not prevail) surplus labour or surplus product was mostly consumed unproductively by the elite rather than reinvested in the production process. Not only do these structural emergents of the capitalist mode make it the most dynamic or productivity-enhancing economic system in human history, they also generate systematic pressure for class exploitation (the appropriation of surplus labour from the direct producers by the employing class) to be relentlessly intensified. Moreover, they provide the exploiting class with the institutional capacities to ensure that this does indeed occur as part of the normal functioning of the system. Capitalists are able to increase the rate of exploitation because they possess all the major means of production, including obviously the workplace. This means that workers under capitalism are necessarily subject to a level of hierarchical control and surveillance at the point of production that simply did not exist in pre-capitalist systems of class domination, where workers

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tended to exercise some control over their conditions of labour (e.g. by owning or possessing their own plots of land and certain tools).16 This grants capitalists the causal powers to directly organize, quantify and rationalize class exploitation, in a way quite beyond the capacities of pre-capitalist propertied class agents. In turn, increased class exploitation at the point of production is practically accomplished by employers primarily by means of capital investments into the labour process that improve the productivity of the workforce, and by quantitatively developing the forces of production (hence expanding the supply of exploitable labour). However, this is also accomplished by forcing workers to work longer or harder without improving their wages, or even introducing absolute reductions in wages. These structural properties of the capitalist mode of production generate tendential dynamics of development that dominate societies under its sway. The most important of these ‘laws’ (as Marx called them) is the impulse of capitalism to expand and centralize and concentrate the collective worker on a hitherto unimagined scale at strategic points throughout the system (particularly in towns and cities). When Marx was writing, the ‘classical’ industrial proletariat was scarcely developed. Even in Britain, the most advanced capitalist country of the time, the majority of workers were employed in domestic service.17 Globally, the proletariat (as both service and industrial workforce)18 was a negligible force compared to the peasantry at the close of the nineteenth century. But, in the 150 years or so since Marx’s death, the size of the proletariat has massively and rapidly expanded (absolutely and relative to other class groupings), in both the westernized ‘core’ and semi-industrialized ‘periphery’ of the world economy. A mere 100 years after Marx’s death, the ‘fraction of the active population composed of sellers of labour power’ in the advanced capitalist countries had risen to ‘85–90 percent, topping 90 percent already in the USA, Britain and Sweden’.19 Today, international studies suggest that for the first time the proletariat is poised to become the majority of the global workforce. Deon Filmer’s magisterial survey, for example, estimates that the overall number of people who are employed throughout the world in services, industry and commercial agriculture is approximately 880 million (700 million of whom are undoubtedly proletarians on the Marxian definition). On the face of it, this is significantly less than the total number of mostly peasant workers (1,000 million) who still obtain a living from their own petty smallholdings. But appearances can be deceptive. At least half the world’s peasantry are located in China and South Asia, and large numbers of these peasants have now been forced into wage-labour to supplement their domestic agricultural production.20 On one estimate, between 15–25 per cent of the workforce in China fall into this category.21 Together, proletarians and their dependents now constitute somewhere between 1.5 and two billion of the global population. If one adds to the total those semi-proletarians who engage in wage-work as well as in subsistence production, the proletariat today numbers somewhere in the region of 3.5–4 billion, or between 40–50 per cent of the world’s population.22 Alongside this massive development of the global proletariat over the past

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150 years has proceeded an equally massive process of urban development. This, despite fashionable postmodernist claims that industrialization and urbanization are waning forces, has accelerated over the past 50 years. According to the UN Human Development Report of 1998, between 1970 and 1995 the proportion of the global population living in towns rose from 37 per cent to 45 per cent (from 25–37 per cent in all developing countries and from 13–23 per cent in the least developed countries). The report estimates that 49 per cent of the population of developing societies and 55 per cent of the population of the whole world will be urbanized by 2015.23 The impetus for urbanization is, of course, the relentless expansion of the forces of production and marketplace under capitalism, which is pulling millions of rural peasants into waged employment (in both service and manufacturing industries) in the towns and cities. These developments have massive political significance. Not only do the dynamics of productive force development under capitalist relations of production grant the workers decisive strategic power at the workplace to disrupt the circuits of commodity production and distribution upon which the profit system rests, but they also render transparent at the point of production the essential interdependence of worker roles in the division of labour, which are often translated into the moral virtues of solidarity and joint support.24 The capitalist labour process provides the workers with practical schooling in and normative commitments to co-operative labour, plus a keen awareness of their common interests in collective struggles to improve or defend their life-chances. The proletarians of modern capitalism are also historically unique and privileged agents of progressive social change, in the sense that the reality of their propertyless status and interdependent economic functions in the division of labour ensure that their objective interests in freedom from class exploitation can be achieved only by replacing capitalism with socialism. For, obviously, it makes no sense for the collective worker of modern globalizing capitalism to divide up the forces of production of the system as private property, but only to exploit these benefits as common property. These structural capacities for, and vested interests in, progressive change possessed by the modern proletariat grant its members the rich potential to overthrow capitalism and class society and replace these with a classless socialist society. Moreover, the developmental logic of the capitalist mode of production, which constantly brings forces of production and relations of production into collision, resulting in convulsive crises of overproduction and attendant underconsumption of the workers, exerts systematic directional guidance on proletarian class agents to engage periodically in collective class struggles that challenge the basis of the system. But, since the capitalist class is necessarily and absolutely dependent on the proletariat to survive as a class, whereas the proletariat (as the source of wealth and basis of property in capitalist society) would flourish as universal humanity in the absence of the bourgeoisie, it follows that the proletariat only needs to defeat the bourgeoisie once in the world-historical sense, whereas the bourgeoisie must win endless ultimately indecisive battles against the proletariat to

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preserve its rule. This makes the eventual demise of capitalism and triumph of socialism a real objective possibility, indeed perhaps world historical probability, of the structurally conditioned class struggle under capitalism. However, the triumph of socialism is by no means an inevitable result, because every revolutionary class struggle passes through critical phases where the endresult hangs in the balance, since it is dependent on a specific configuration of indeterminate subjective as well as objective factors wherever it occurs – such as the leadership, organization, ideology, confidence, strategy and tactics of the contending class forces in the pinch of the crisis.25 But, more generally, the dialectic of class struggle in pre-capitalist as well as capitalist societies is tantamount to a tendential dialectic of universalization, in both practical and ethical interests, since agents who have interests in challenging modes of class power will struggle to totalize their experiences of oppression in ideational and practical struggles, and solidarize with each other on the basis of their common interests in freedom from class power constraints and ills, albeit within the social and material constraints generated by the social systems they occupy. Since these structurally conditioned directional pressures of classdivided social relations will only be resolved once a particular mode of production and attendant politico-ideological ‘superstructure’ has been replaced by another, which has the capacity to allow renewed economic development to take place, there is a real long-run historical tendency across successive socioeconomic systems for ‘upwards directionality’ or ‘social evolution’ (in a word, progress) to occur, rather than for mere random change to take place. In these sorts of ways, then, Marx’s theory of history supports and sustains a general geo-historical tendential impulse in the direction of greater human freedom, under-girded by the development of the forces of production and the unfolding structural contradictions intrinsic to class-divided relations of production. This is conceived both as developing historical knowledge of universal human needs by the direct producers and their allies, and as the attendant historical revolutionary fabrication of modes of production that allow in practice an expanding element of freedom or self-autonomy of agents within the hiatus of freedomwithin-unfreedom comprised by the ensemble of social and natural relations.

Max Weber’s sociology of domination It is a commonplace of sociological commentary that Max Weber’s thought has been shaped crucially by its ‘dispute with the ghost of Marx’.26 As Gerth and Mills put it: ‘Throughout his life, Max Weber was engaged in a fruitful battle with historical materialism. In his last course of lectures in Munich at the time of the [German] Revolution [of 1918], he presented his course under the title, “A Positive Critique of Historical Materialism” ’.27 There is, of course, a grain of truth to this interpretation. Weber did regard his sociology as providing a positive alternative to Marxism, and time and again he lambasted contemporary exponents of socio-historical materialism for their alleged historical reductionism. Nonetheless, it would be quite wrong to see Weber’s sociology as forged

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solely, or even mostly, by virtue of this engagement with (and critique of) Marxism. Certainly, it was not in any real sense a meaningful engagement with the Marxism of Marx or Engels, though doubtless its author intended it to be. As R.J. Antonio (rather diplomatically) observes: ‘Weber’s critique of Marx was not exegetical. Weber tended to attack lesser representatives of intellectual traditions, rather than address the major figures directly or textually. He did not dissect Marx’s own position carefully, although he portrayed it as the ultimate source of his epigones’ vulgar materialism’.28 To make the point rather more bluntly than Antonio, Weber was content to offer a root and branch dismissal of socio-historical materialism as a general or ‘totalizing’ theory, despite not having himself read any of Marx or Engels’ substantive theoretical texts. Far from being engaged in a ‘fruitful battle’ with Marxism, Weber’s method of critique was, unfortunately, a rather self-indulgent exercise in selective point scoring against the mechanical materialism of Second International Marxism. But, of course, accepting that Weber was not an insightful or charitable critic of Marxism does not diminish the radical distance between the social thought of Weber and Marx. The fashionable argument that Weber was concerned to develop and complement rather than undermine Marx, to rescue Marx’s work from vulgar metaphysicians, does not hold water. Nonetheless, the positive elements of Weber’s social thought were not developed especially by means of his critique of ‘vulgar materialism’. On the contrary, Weber’s sociology is much better understood as being informed by his positive attempt to reconcile the competing claims of idealism and materialism in philosophy and the social sciences, rather than by straightforward anti-Marxism. Weber attempted to accomplish this by synthesizing neo-Kantianism constructivism, Nietzschean individualism and the naturalistic economism of ‘marginalist’ (neo-classical) political economy. First, from the neo-Kantians, Weber took the thesis of the cultural or ideological construction of social reality, and with this the idea that there must be a radical break between the methods deployed by the social sciences and those deployed by the natural sciences (though he saw the objectivity of social science being secured by its specific methodology). Second, from Nietzsche, Weber took the idea that ‘domination has played the decisive role . . . in the . . . most important structures of the past and present’.29 Finally, from the neo-classical political economists, Weber took the idea that capitalist economic relations are the very epitome of technical efficiency in relating means to ends, and are hence the yardstick of rational social action. Overall, then, Weber’s purpose was less to refute Marx and more to overcome the limitations of these ‘warring gods’ (ideal interests versus material interests) by synthesizing them into a unified perspective.30 This explains his failure to develop a charitable or serious critique of Marx’s work.

Weber’s historical method I will not dwell on the fairly complex question of the relationship between Weber’s methodological writings and his more substantive comparative and

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historical researches. Instead I will address the analytical logic of his substantive historical sociology. Here Weber is unambiguous, at least on a rhetorical level. His argument is that specifying systemic ‘laws’ or even ‘macroscopic tendencies’ of societal development, or specifying ‘stages’ in the evolutionary development of social systems, is a disreputable and pointless enterprise, on the grounds that history is ‘a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, . . . selfcontradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends’.31 The ‘infinite multiplicity’ and ‘chaotic flux’ of the world-process ensures that the historian or social analyst can appropriate only a slice of reality (‘worthy of being known’).32 In other words, because social reality is both endlessly malleable and infinitely diverse, it is impossible for the researcher to grasp it as ‘totality’ or identify its fundamental properties or dynamics. Instead the researcher has to settle for selecting as objects of research those aspects of society and history he or she is interested in by virtue of his or her value-preferences. Claims by historical materialists to have ‘discovered’ such fundamental developmental laws or underlying structural properties of social systems, or to have identified necessary ascending stages in the evolutionary movement of society, are said by Weber to be unwarranted impositions of a preconceived speculative schema upon history in accordance with the dictates of a political or religious ethic. Deep structures and ‘laws of motion’ of society are simply metaphysical fictions. Indeed, to postulate a determinate mechanism of social development is to resort to ‘evolutionary dogmatism’, whereby agents are reduced to ‘instances of realisation of a metaphysical concept’.33 For Weber, by contrast, the fluid kaleidoscopic nature of socio-cultural reality (the ever-shifting ‘interpenetration’ of economic, political and cultural factors, or of multiple modes of domination) rules out the possibility of either a unitary philosophy or sociological theory of history.34 Weber’s contrary view is that historical analysis has to settle for an ideographic approach. This proceeds by examining each society or historical period ‘in its own terms’, tracing the specific chance combination of events (causal chains) which have brought about a particular societal or historical outcome. It follows that Marx’s base/superstructure model cannot represent an ‘ontological truth’ about society, not least because power-relations and ‘factors’ of societal change are irreducibly plural, not based upon economic structures or processes of class conflict. Weber is absolutely unequivocal about this. ‘The common materialist view of history, that the “economic” is in some sense an “ultimate” in the chain of causation, is in my estimation totally worthless as a scientific statement’.35 Weber’s chief objection to socio-historical materialism (as he saw it) can be summarized thus: ‘The so-called “materialistic conception of history”, with the crude element of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in The Communist Manifesto, [which] prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes’,36 is false because it crudely specifies ‘the unequivocal dependence of “historical” processes on the respective type of acquisition and utilisation of material, that is economic commodities, and especially the unequivocal determination of “historical” acts of men by “material”, that is economic interests’.37

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In sharp contrast to this kind of ‘vulgar materialism’, Weber makes the point that ‘explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive . . . in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the economic sphere itself ’.38 Now I will not dwell on the adequacy or otherwise of Weber’s interpretation of Marx, not least because I have demonstrated at length elsewhere (and in a rather more limited way in this chapter) that Marx’s socio-historical materialism is very far from being a species of economic reductionism,39 and I have already made the point that Weber’s critique was based on ‘intuitive’ knowledge of primary sources that he had either failed to consult or had consulted overhastily. Nonetheless, even with a steadier grasp of Marxism (i.e. one which did not attribute to Marx the peculiar idea that everything in society and culture is directly attributable to economic causes alone), it is clear that Weber would have dissented from any imaginable form of socio-historical materialism, reductive or non-reductive, deterministic or non-deterministic. Yet it is important to grasp that Weber does not simply reject all of the explanatory goals of Marx’s materialism. He is quite happy to accept the idea that social and cultural forms can be materially or economically conditioned or even constituted. Instead Weber recommends that Marx’s ‘economic focus’ be reconstituted as an ‘ideal typical’ abstraction away from reality, a useful conceptual tool by means of which the analyst can trace the causal influence of ‘economy’ on ‘society’: Liberated as we are from the antiquated belief that all cultural phenomena can be deduced as a product or function of the constellation of ‘material’ interests, we believe nonetheless that the analysis of social and cultural phenomena with specific reference to their economic conditioning and ramifications was a scientific principle of creative fruitfulness, and if applied carefully and free from dogmatic prescriptions, will remain so for some time to come.40 Weber thus distinguishes between ‘analytical materialism’ (which is a good thing) and ‘philosophical materialism’ (which is a bad thing).41 The ‘materialist conception of history’ must be abandoned, but a ‘materialist interpretation of history’ should be preserved, because it generates a valuable focus for research and field of specialized study in historical investigations.42 Philosophical materialism fails as historical theory, says Weber, because it is perfectly possible and acceptable to analyse economic structures in terms of their ‘ethical infrastructures’ (though, again, only as ideal types).43 To support his case, Weber cites the example of the United States of America of his own day, where he believed the ‘capitalist spirit’ (Protestantism) existed prior to the development of capitalism. Here, argues Weber, it was manifestly the case that the economic ‘base’ of society had ideological causes or conditions of existence – an ‘ethical infrastructure’. ‘In this case, the causal relationship is just the reverse of what would be postulated from a “materialist” standpoint’.44 Weber’s general point, of course, is a familiar one – namely that both ‘idealist’ and

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‘materialist’ theories of history are inadequate because one-sided, this necessitating a pluralistic ontology of society and method of social analysis.

The historical sociology of Giddens and Mann Now it is a commonplace that most neo-Weberian scholars share Weber’s hostility to the idea of ‘societal evolution’. One major reason for this, of course, is the tension that exists between the idea of evolutionary directionality in social systems and the Weberian notion of history as ‘meaningless multiplicity’. But there are more specific reasons. Giddens rejects evolutionary theory because he falsely believes it to be necessarily functionalist and teleological, since it is analogous to the mechanism of biological adaptation to the physical environment.45 He dismisses socio-historical materialism as evolutionist in these terms, because societies do not ‘adapt’ to their material circumstances, and because he rejects the idea that the forces of production have a general tendency to develop throughout history. In fact, Giddens is wrong on both counts. Socio-historical materialism is not, of course, a theory of ‘adaptation’. And, of course, the forces of production can be shown to have developed consistently if unevenly across the full range of historical social systems (though not all or even most actual societies).46 Mann rejects evolutionary theory because he mistakenly thinks that it must be based on the idea that developmental processes are linear, occur in necessary stages and are always ‘organic’ or self-determining processes internal to society.47 Mann regards this kind of endogenous development as a myth, although his own analysis of ancient Egypt appears to reveal an endogenous pattern at work, i.e. the development of class relations and state relations from horticultural relations as a result of internal mechanisms or dynamics. Again, socio-historical materialism is seen as ‘evolutionist’ in these terms, and so is regarded as irredeemably teleological. This is despite the fact that Marx explicitly rejected historical teleology as method, and despite the fact that his substantive sociological theory articulates a developmental model of historical process that is unambiguously anti-teleological.48 Yet this rejection by Giddens and Mann of the concept of social evolution, and especially of Marx’s version of it, is paradoxical. For, despite their disavowals, they end up counterposing to it an unacknowledged ‘evolutionism’ of their own. Giddens, for example, has attempted to grasp historical process as a dynamic of ‘time–space-distanciation’. This is treated as a process which has progressively ‘stretched’ time and space, culminating in the emergence of the modern world system.49 From this perspective, agents in social relations draw routinely upon media of signification, legitimation and domination, and in so doing extend their interactions further and further afield in space and time, leading over time to a development or expansion of their capacity to control allocative and authoritative resources. Historical process is thus grasped by Giddens as ‘a trend of . . . outcomes . . . which can be compared in some degree in abstraction from definable contexts’,50 and as ‘processes of social change that

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have definite direction and form . . . and in which definite structural transformations occur’.51 This historical trend is said to ascend from societal modes which are characterized by high ‘presence-availability’ or face-to-face interaction, together with a corresponding fusion of social and system integration (because both dependent on interpersonal contacts and kinship networks), to those which are characterized by lower presence-availability or increasing abstract interaction ‘at a distance’, together with a prising apart of social and system integration (because class-divided social relations, unlike economic relations, depend for their reproduction now upon the coercive apparatus of the state). Giddens says that the process of ‘time–space-distanciation’ is specific to each systemic or societal form. However, his own analysis reveals a pattern of increasing time–space-distanciation spanning successive forms of society: classdivided societies have more reach in space and time than pre-class societies and capitalist society more reach than non-capitalist societies. But this dynamic is surely explainable only on the assumption that agents who control authoritative resources generally have an interest in expanding or at least maintaining these, and that once attained a given level of development of authorization (and the control over people and things this gives) is more likely to persist than decline.52 The point is well made by Erik Olin Wright: Because of the link between conflict, power, resources and distanciation, there will be at least some impulse for increasing time–space-distanciation throughout history. Again, this is not equivalent to claiming that there will be universal progress, a universal tendency for all societies to actually increase time–space-distanciation; it is simply a claim that there is a universal, if often weak, impulse towards such increase, and thus a positive probability for such increases to occur.53 In any case, Giddens’ emphasis on the developmental logic internal to each mode of society, and implicit account of a trans-societal movement in the direction of greater time–space-distanciation, does not seem to square with his ‘rejection of the idea that historical change has an epochal directionality’, as Wright et al. have pointed out.54 Yet a defensible form of evolutionary theory requires only this basic premise that ‘there is some process, however weak and sporadic, which imparts a directionality to movements from one [social] form to another’.55 Given that Giddens’ historical sociology is in fact evolutionist in all but name, i.e. an unacknowledged evolutionary theory, and given that his critique of this aspect of Marx’s theory is thus a red herring, we are entitled to ask what its real function is. In fact, it does seem legitimate to interpret the core function of Giddens’ theory of ‘time–space-distanciation’ as refuting and presenting an effective alternative ‘developmental model’ to Marx’s socio-historical materialism. As Giddens himself summarizes the purpose of his historical sociology: ‘In the theory of structuration, transformation/mediation relations, as embodied in concrete social practices and definite forms of society, take the place of the

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concept of “labour” as traditionally invoked in many versions of “historical materialism”’.56 This perspective informs Giddens’ rejection of the idea that property relations are primarily responsible for determining the distribution of power and ‘command situations’ in pre-capitalist societies. Giddens wants to say that ‘authorization’ or ‘authority relations’ (i.e. the political and military capacities of elites) constituted the organizing structural principle of pre-capitalist societies, in the sense of being primarily responsible for regulating the distribution of status and reward. Yet Giddens also wants to say that this situation is reversed in at least some forms of capitalist society, where the domination of the marketplace means that uneven distributions of ‘allocative resources’ determine uneven distributions of ‘authoritative resources’. Nonetheless his general point is that a general ‘historical materialism’ fails because ‘allocation’ (economic-class relations) have been, for the most part, subordinate to ‘authorization’ (state-political relations) in most historical social systems. For this reason, Giddens sees no transformative role for struggles over allocation in pre-capitalist societies. Thus, he is utterly dismissive of peasant rebellions in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, claiming these were ‘sporadic and rare’.57 One of Giddens’ central substantive arguments against socio-historical materialism is his contention that the consolidation of ‘authoritative resources’ (politico-military power), which was itself dependent upon the rise of the city and attendant new forms of ‘information storage’ (i.e. writing – ‘the generator of the authorative resources out of which state power is created and sustained’),58 was the key to explaining the historical emergence of classdivided social relations in ‘traditional’ societies. Nor, for Giddens, was the mobilization and accumulation of ‘allocative resources’ (forces of production) the decisive factor in accounting for the origins of class-divided imperial states. Thus, for Giddens, Marx’s ideas certainly help make sense of some major transformations in history. . . . Yet as a general framework for analysing social change his scheme has notable limitations. . . . It is not clear how far other historical transformations fit into Marx’s scheme; for instance, some archaeologists have drawn on aspects of Marx’s theory to explain the early development of civilisations. . . . They argue that civilisations began when the forces of production had developed far enough to allow a class-based society to emerge. At best, this is an over-simplified view, since traditional states were more commonly formed as a result of military expansion and conquest. Political and military power was often a means of accumulating wealth, rather than the result of it.59 Since, for Giddens, ‘factors besides the economic (including military power, modes of government, and ideologies) are often equally or more important [in] ‘accounting for the diversity of human social development’, it necessarily follows that Marx’s understanding of history is ‘doomed to failure’.60

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Much the same kind of function can be legitimately attributed to Mann’s project as to Giddens’. Like Giddens’ theory of time–space-distanciation, Mann’s historical sociology is evolutionist in all but name. Mann develops an understanding of the role of ‘domination’ in shaping social structures into a comprehensive theory of historical change. Man’s central theoretical point is that societies should be grasped not as unitary social systems (as in Marxism and various forms of structuralism) but as ‘multiple overlapping and intersecting power networks’.61 More specifically, his contention is that ‘a general account of societies, their structure, and their history can best be given in terms of the interrelations of . . . the four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military and political relationships’.62 For Mann, neither economic, political, military, nor ideological power is ultimately decisive in determining socio-historical outcomes, and none can be reduced to any of the others. Mann’s argument is not, therefore, that economic or class power is inefficacious in shaping societal development, particularly in capitalism, but also in precapitalist society, but rather that social systems are not ultimately based upon or governed by modes of production or structures of class power: [T]here is no obvious, formulaic, general patterning of the interrelations of power sources. Economic power relations, modes of production, and social classes come and go in the historical record. In occasional world-historical moments they decisively reorganise social life; usually they are important in conjunction with other power sources; occasionally they are decisively reorganised by them. The same can be said of all the power sources, coming and going, weaving in and out of the historical record.63 At certain periods of history, such as during the period of empire building from Akkad to Rome, it was the military dimension of power which became the crucial causal factor of societal motion and change.64 At other, though generally less extensive, periods such as during the epoch of early laissez-faire capitalism, the economic mode of power has been ‘dominant’. At still other times, such as the period of European feudalism, political, military and ideological power were all of greater explanatory significance than economic power. Yet, here again, politics and the military came to the forefront, though Mann also wishes to say that the political and military dominance of the European state system in the early modern period was enabled by the prior development of Christianity as an all-embracing system of ‘normative pacification’. Christianity performed the cultural function, argues Mann, of bolstering the social cohesion of European civilization. This allowed an enormous accretion in social power overall, and eventually enabled the rise of capitalism in north-west Europe.65 Mann sees the development of the modern European state system as playing a particularly crucial role in providing essential preconditions for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Mann’s argument is that, contrary to Marx, the modern order of nation states does not have roots in the development of capitalism, but in fact provided the political framework in which capitalism

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could flourish. This, for Mann, is positive historical evidence of the autonomy of political and military power centres from economic structures or relations. Mann asserts that the ‘autonomy’ of the political and military power-centres from capitalist property relations stems from their irreducible origins in a Darwinian process of military competition between a plethora of warring statelets, manors and dukedoms in the early modern period. This led to a centralization of political power within a decreasing number of larger-scale territorial units.66 This process, rather than the development of commodity production and the binding of local communities in expanding networks of exchange-relations linking together town and country, also allowed the idea of ‘nation’ to become thinkable, plus the formation of modern state power. Yet, despite the flux of different power centres ‘weaving in and out in the historical record’, there is, claims Mann, nonetheless still a discernable pattern to history. This is, in effect, the rise and fall of successive modes of domination with greater capacity to exercise control over people and the environment. History is about the development of ‘organisation . . . logistics, [and] communication’, in order to enhance social control over ‘people, materials, and territories’.67 Power, for Mann, is, therefore, hierarchical domination, and is exercised through the media of different kinds of organizational capacities that ensure the compliance of subject populations. However, although Mann argues that the ‘four sources of social power offer alternative organizational means of social control’,68 in terms of his substantive analyses of social processes in pre-modern societies, it is state (political and military) power that appears to exert the fundamental historical influence, and a lesser role is attributed to economic and ideological power in most historical epochs. Certainly, the manner of the historical unfolding of state power is the main preoccupation of the first volume of Mann’s Sources. As we have seen, this emphasis shifts as Mann comes to consider the origins of modernity in the west, where he argues that ideological power, by which he means Christianity, was ‘an essential and autonomous part of the rise of the bourgeois classes and nations’.69 This is an obvious extension of Weber’s famous ‘Protestant Ethic’ thesis. Echoing Weber again, Mann claims in the second volume of Sources that in the conditions of developed modernity, ideological power is effectively a waning force, and that the political and economic power centres again assume centre-stage. Modernity, for Mann, has imprisoned humanity in the interlocking ‘iron cages’ of globalized capitalism and the international state system. Nonetheless, despite Mann’s particular emphasis on the role of political power throughout recorded history, and the particular dominant roles he wishes to attribute to ideological power at specific historical conjunctures, his key point is that the historical interaction between economic, political, military and ideological structures or power centres has led to an expansion of the power of each and therefore to a cumulative growth of social power overall. Thus, if history does have a ‘logic’ to it, it is precisely the expansion of social power, not the cumulative growth of the forces of production and their collision with property relations, mediated by class struggles:

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Marx versus Weber on the dialectics of history Social power has continued to develop, somewhat unsteadily perhaps, but nonetheless cumulatively. . . . Seen in the very long run, the infrastructure available to power holders and to societies at large has steadily increased. Many different societies have contributed to this. But, once invented, the major infrastructural techniques seem almost never to have disappeared from human practice. True, often powerful techniques have seemed inappropriate to the problems of a succeeding society and thus have declined. But, unless obsolete, their decline has proved temporary and they have been subsequently recovered.70

Socio-historical materialism versus the sociology of domination I have pointed out that neo-Weberian sociologists, most notably Giddens and Mann, postulate ‘evolutionary’ theories of societal development in all but name. Yet perhaps the major problem with such approaches is that they appear to contradict the multi-factoral or pluralistic theoretical logic upon which they are purportedly based. It will be recalled that Weber argued that history is a ‘meaningless flux’ or ‘heterogeneous continuum’71. His reason for endorsing this position was doubtless his recognition that any conception of socio-historical reality as energized by a multiplicity of autonomous competing power centres, such as modes of domination centred upon party, status and class, must necessarily be radically anti-evolutionist. For, given the fact that forms of domination are irreducibly plural, and indeed are locked into an eternal struggle with each other for ‘power’, no general reason can be given of how their mutual interactions should support or engender a pattern of systemic elaborationtransformation, leading either to ‘progress’ (in the Marxist sense), or to the cumulative increase of ‘social power’ or control over allocative and authoritative resources in time and space. On the contrary, in this Nietzschean world, as likely the rival and independent modes of (economic, political and cultural) domination would act to obstruct or offset one another’s ‘developmental logics’ than ‘push in the same direction’ for their mutual advance. This is especially so since the ‘will to power’, which is said by most Weberians to underpin the ‘eternal struggle of men against men’, is basically seen as an irrational property or tendency of the human psyche, which can hardly support any notion of an enduring or stable ‘elective affinity’ between rival elites for purposes of mutual self-interest. Rather, a more likely pattern would be an endless flux of alliance building and breaking between a plethora of competitors, and with this no cumulative social pattern at all. This being the case, I contend that conceptual and methodological pluralism is incompatible with evolutionary theories of history, such as those endorsed in practice by Giddens and Mann. Logically, one or the other has to give.

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Marx versus Weber on societal development I have said that Weber differs from contemporary Nietzscheans in so far as he recognizes that a pluralistic conception of society is logically incompatible with the idea of ‘epochal directionality’ in historical dynamics (leading from less developed to more developed societal structures). But it is not clear that even he has been able to stick to his conceptual-methodological pluralism in practice. In fact, an evolutionary theory can be discerned in his writings, though it is contradicted by other aspects of his work, despite his explicit rejection of evolutionism. By way of illustration of this argument, I will consider the uncertain status of the concept of rationalization in Weber’s sociology. At one level, consistent with his multi-factoral theory and method, Weber’s substantive analysis of modernity identifies a complex web of causal chains, linking together economic, political and cultural mechanisms, the culmination of which is a new ‘mode of rationality’ (capitalism  science  bureaucratic domination).72 From this perspective, rationalization (the establishment of cultural and societal forms founded upon ‘instrumentalism’ – i.e. the idea that ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play but rather that one can . . . master all things by calculation’73 – and the efficient application of technical means to ends) is the historical result of a chance combination of socio-cultural events which unfolded in the Occident but not in the Orient.74 But, at another level, Weber seems to be arguing that this ‘rationalization process’ is cause not effect of ‘modernization’ in the west. For rationalization sometimes appears to function in his writings as a kind of cultural ‘master-trend’ of societal development, as Parsons and others have pointed out.75 Certainly, Weber portrays rationalization as underpinning capitalism rather than vice versa, and as operating autonomously in spheres other than the economic. ‘According to Weber, this process cannot be reduced to the requirement of economic rationality; rather the development of economic rationality is one manifestation of the development of an instrumentally rational value-orientation’.76 What this means in terms of Weber’s overall understanding of modernity is well summarized by Karl Löwith: According to Weber, capitalism could only become the ‘most fateful’ power in human life because it had already developed within the framework of a ‘rational way of life’. . . . Weber conceived of this rationality as an original totality – as the totality of an ‘attitude to life’ and ‘way of life’ – which is subject to a variety of causal conditions but is nevertheless unique: as the occidental ‘ethos’. This determinant ethos manifests itself in the ‘spirit’ of (bourgeois) capitalism as well as in that of (bourgeois) Protestantism. Both religion and the economy are formed in their living religious and economic reality within the context of this determinant totality, and they, in turn, concretise this totality by leaving their imprint upon it. The form taken by the economy is not a direct consequence of a particular faith, nor is this faith an ‘emananistic’ consequence of a ‘substantive’ economy. Rather, both are

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Thus, Weber describes the bourgeoisie as the ‘bearers’ of this new ‘rational ethos’. This was forged from the combination of ascetic Protestantism and Renaissance art and science, as this emerged from the mixing pot of earlier cultural forms (including Judaic-Christianity and the secular philosophy of classical Greece and Rome).78 Whatever its origins, however, once established this new ‘rational ethos’ inevitably became institutionalized in every sphere of society, giving rise to ‘rational administration’, ‘rational law’, ‘rational capital accounting’, ‘rational free labour’, ‘rational knowledge’ and so on, the fundamental preconditions of industrial capitalism.79 Weber famously describes the rationalization process as unfolding with irresistible force or ‘inexorable power’, because once established it cannot be reversed, by virtue of which humanity has become entrapped in an ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic social organization of its own making, and is subject to ‘disenchantment’.80 As many commentators have observed, this fundamentally fatalistic and reductionist portrayal of capitalist modernity, which sees the system as banishing its own ideological legitimations, and resting instead on ‘mechanical foundations alone’, which ‘determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism’,81 stands in stark antithesis to Weber’s open-ended pluralist and individualist methods of social inquiry. Here the ‘warring gods’ of ‘structural’ determinism and voluntarist idealism are not dialectically reconciled, in a way that preserves the insights of each, but instead simply co-exist in Weber’s sociology as unreconciled oppositions quite external to each other. My argument is that this confusion at the heart of Weber’s historical sociology is at least in part a function of the inherent difficulty of sustaining a genuinely multi-factoral or pluralist analysis of societal change that has genuine explanatory value. Sociological pluralism, as ontology and method, inevitably collapses into a descriptive empiricism, which can sustain only a fundamentally random account of history, Anderson’s ‘encyclopaedia of accidents’. Yet if the social world is comprised of autonomous practices or modes of social power, each of which impact or react on the other in an essentially chaotic or indeterminate fashion, and none of which are in any sense ‘primary’ or ‘dominant’ in relation to the others, it follows that one cannot explain the movement or constitution of any one of these ‘elements’ or ‘factors’ of society without invoking the social whole or totality of which they are all a part. Nor can one explain the totality except by assembling it from all its constituent ‘elements’ or ‘factors’.82 But this seems to reduce sociological analysis to the truistic ‘insight’ that societies are comprised of a variety of different practices and/or structures, and that societal change or statics is the resultant of their mutual interactions.

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Society thus becomes an ‘undifferentiated totality’, in the sense that ‘everything explains everything’. Therefore, from this perspective, the structure of society is invoked to explain its structure, just as the movement of society is invoked to explain its movement. I take it that this kind of approach does not get us anywhere much. Now it is precisely because analytical pluralism cannot sustain developmental models of socio-historical process that Marx explicitly rejects this methodological approach. Thus, for example, Marx rightly takes Proudhon to task for his inability to explain social forms (in this case relations of production) ‘without having recourse to all the other relations of society . . . which . . . he has not yet made his dialectical movement engender’.83 Chris Harman rightly points to ‘three different consequences of such a view of society . . . [of] everything influencing everything else’: First it can lead to a view in which the existing form of society is seen as eternal and unchanging (the view which Marx ascribed to bourgeois economists, seeing social relations as governed by ‘eternal laws which must always govern society’ . . .). Second, it can lead to viewing the dynamic of society as lying in some mystical force that lies outside society (Hegel’s ‘world spirit’ . . .). Third it can lead to the view that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and ideas without any reference to anything else (the position of those idealists who followed Hegel in nineteenth-century Germany, and of more recent thinkers like Collingwood, Winch, and the ex-Althusserians).84 But, since Weber obviously does not wish sociology to concern itself with a mere listing of ‘chains of events’ (empiricism), and because his own historical researches into the origins of modernity in the Occident do seem to reveal a definite directional logic to societal change, he thus finds himself drawn towards an understanding of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity which is ‘evolutionist’ in all but name. Yet his ‘rationalization thesis’ can function as such only by implicitly going beyond the datum that ‘everything has an effect on everything else’ and establishing a hierarchy of socio-historical determinations. Thus, Weber locates the fundamental locus or axis of societal change in one particular ‘factor’ or ‘dimension’ of social life: namely cultural or ideational mechanisms (the ‘world images’ which shape interest-governed interaction and which have a ‘tendency to assert their movement as necessary’).85 It was, of course, this aspect of Weber’s voluminous output that became subsequently vulgarized as ‘modernization theory’ by functionalist sociologists. Nonetheless, such a theoretical move was possible precisely because Weber never saw fit to resolve the tension between his multi-factoral historical method and his resort to a crude idealist metaphysic of history, allowing the latter to be detached from his broader anti-teleological writings. I will not dwell long on the weakness of this latter conceptual strategy. Suffice to say that ‘cultural rationalization’, grasped by Weber as a directional

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process operative in the distinct spheres of law, administration, religion, science, the state, industry, art, music and so on, is undoubtedly dependent upon the development of the economic forms of commodity production in the interstices of medieval feudal society, and indeed at earlier times and places in the historical record. The point is well made by Simon Clarke: Weber was undoubtedly correct to argue that monetary calculation, formal law and bureaucratic domination could not be identified completely with capitalism, so that instrumental rationality could not be referred to the interests of a particular social class. Monetary calculation, formal legal systems and bureaucratic domination long preceded the development of modern capitalism, and arise in societies and in areas of social life which have little or no connection with capitalist economic forms. However, they do seem to be closely associated with the development of commercial and money capital, on the basis of the growth of commodity production, which are phenomena that are historically very much older, and geographically far more widespread, than capitalist forms of production.86 How else can one explain the emergence of the cultural ethos of ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘rational accounting’, believed by Weber to be definitional of rationalization, except by referring it to the competitive logic of market transactions? How else can one explain its subsequent growth and institutionalization in the cultural and political spheres of western society (during its transition to capitalism) save by acknowledging that the ideas of dominant elites are in every epoch the ruling ideas and by grasping that social institutions generally become subject to the law of value in societies where market mechanisms increasingly predominate? Further, the ‘inexorable logic’ of bureaucratic growth is incomprehensible unless grasped in terms of both the centralization-concentration of production under capitalism (which enables and necessitates more sophisticated mechanisms of hierarchical surveillance and control in the interests of efficient surplus-extraction under the whip hand of market pressures) and the ‘need’ of state elites to intervene more directly in the reproduction of class relations where these are based upon ‘free labour’.87 Enough has now been said about Weber’s own historical sociology. Clearly, his approach is hamstrung by its own internal contradictions (the incompatibility of rationalization with multi-factoral analysis) and by its failure to make out a plausible case for supposing that cultural processes or ‘ideal factors’ (rationalization in the west) are autonomous of economic processes or ‘material factors’ (the development of commodity production). Now I have argued that the incapacity of conceptual-methodological pluralism to sustain a theory of societal development is as much a problem for neo-Weberian sociologists – such as Giddens and Mann – than for Weber himself. Indeed, more so. For, unlike Weber, these aforesaid social theorists do not wish to deny upwards directionality in overall macroscopic processes of societal change, but wish instead to reject ‘social evolution’, which they see as synonymous with ‘adaptation’, as

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guilty of decentring exogenous development, and as teleological historicism. But, even ignoring this logical defect of neo-Weberian sociology, it is clear that it is confronted by other problems of a conceptual and empirical nature. These include its inability to theorize the interface between politics and economics in socio-historical analysis and its reliance on naturalistic metaphysics to ‘ground’ the most commonly deployed analytical understanding of power-relations. These, I contend, further undermine its explanatory power, as I now intend to demonstrate. Marx versus Giddens on societal development This is especially true of Giddens’ approach. There are a number of problems here. First, Giddens’ rejection in practice of a realist theory of society leaves him with precious little to say about socio-historical dynamics other than the commonplace observation that ‘social relationships and practices change continuously as patterns of interaction change’.88 Indeed they do. But in order to explain continuity and change one has to examine the way in which the properties and powers of interactants are linked to those of emergent social structures. Only by doing so can one speak of ‘action and its environments’, and thereby avoid the poles of voluntarism versus determinism. To make the point a little differently, because Giddens’ structuration theory portrays a social system as simply a set of regularized practices, stretched over space and time, it is not clear how his approach can logically underwrite any account of socio-historical dynamics other than ‘just-so’ empirical narrative. Thus, Giddens inadvertently outlines a weak evolutionary theory of history but lacks the theoretical means to support or sustain it. Indeed, his implicit postulation of an evolutionary or developmental logic in history is contradicted flatly by his own earlier recommendation (consistent with his ‘duality of structure’ concept) that the social analyst refrain from ‘looking for an overall theory of stability and change in social systems’, on the grounds that ‘the conditions of social reproduction vary so widely between different types of society’.89 This confusion is a necessary consequence of Giddens’ failure to account for emergent properties at the levels of structure and system. For only by recognizing the reality and causal efficacy of emergent structures and systems (as anterior and external to interactants and their practices and as therefore shaping their options for social conduct in determinate ways) can any plausible account be given of why or how social interaction is ‘organized’ in a way which imparts to structural forms a specific directional logic of motion or elaboration. But, having disposed of the concept of structure and/or system as an ontologically distinct stratum of social reality apart from interactants, Giddens can offer nothing more substantive than an untheorized appeal to ‘implicit knowledge of how to go on’ (routinization), ‘time geography’ (or ‘the daily movement of people through time and space’) and ‘unintended consequences’ to bridge the gap between social and system integration and motion.90 Yet the concept of ‘unintended consequences’ is a particularly impoverished method of deriving

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system restructuring from social interaction. For, as Ian Craib points out, ‘if order were an unintended consequence of action, we would expect chaos to be . . . as well’, this necessitating an explanation of societal integration and dynamics in terms of ‘social systems existing over and above individual and collective actors, with emergent properties of their own’.91 Nor can ‘routinization’ or ‘time geography’ suffice to furnish any kind of explanation of either ‘integration’ or ‘evolution’ in social systems, the former because cancelled out by Giddens’ corresponding ‘Nietzschean turn’ (the chaotic flux of power-relations as sources of conflict and change), the latter because negated by the former, and because simply another way of describing not explaining social systems and their ‘laws’ of motion. Second, Giddens’ argument appears to run counter to certain basic historical facts about ‘traditional’ societies that are well known to anthropologists and social historians. For example, the development of modes of ‘information storage’, or in plain language writing, which Giddens reckons to have its locus in the need of dominant city-based political elites to ‘record . . . information relevant to the administration of societies’,92 instead probably had its origins ‘in the clay tokens used by Neolithic farmers to keep track of their food stores’.93 As Gordon Childe has shown, the first alphabets were developed on this basis, following the consolidation of class society, as the means of keeping account of the surplus-product stored in reserve against bad harvests and for elite consumption.94 More generally, of course, it is certain that ‘time–space-distanciation [has] crucially depended on technological innovations – improvements in transport, new systems for transmitting information, etc.’, as Alex Callinicos has pointed out.95 But this means that the historic dynamic of the ‘binding of space and time’, which Giddens regards as ‘basic’ to economic mechanisms, must instead be seen as dependent upon a certain stage of evolution of the forces of production, and in no sense an ‘autonomous’ factor of societal motion apart from the modes of production. Finally, Giddens’ more substantive argument against Marx – his view that the origins of the first ‘traditional’ states (in Marxist terms, of tributary relations of production) were to be found in non-economic mechanisms, specifically in ‘military expansion and conquest’ and ‘political and military power’96 – also has virtually no empirical support. Nor does it appear to me conceptually defensible. In terms of logic, it is surely uncontentious that prior to engaging in wars of imperial conquest, and prior to constructing the military apparatuses for imperial adventures, it is necessary for propertied classes (of those agrarian societies which first took the ‘imperial path’) to have arisen and to have secured state power for purposes of domestic class exploitation. How else, save by organizing and developing state power for the purpose of defending or securing elite control over the surplus product or ‘allocative resources’ of a society, could the politicomilitary means of empire-building have been constituted? Though control over ‘authoritative resources’ is used to secure control over ‘allocative resources’ in every historical class society, as Giddens rightly insists, it is nonetheless clear that in the first instance possession or control of the

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former must have been based upon possession or control of the latter. For it is only once economic production has passed beyond a level necessary to support the simple reproduction of a society that classes can emerge on the historical scene. And it is only once classes have emerged historically that both the institutional means and the ideological motives (the enrichment of elites) for exercising politico-military ‘domination’ over other societies and for securing domestic class exploitation can come into existence.97 This means that politico-military structures of domination (in pre-capitalist societies) and the ‘imperial’ activities they sponsor have to be explained in terms of economic development and class relations, not vice versa. But perhaps Giddens would be inclined to reply to this argument by defining the primacy of ‘authoritative resources’ over ‘allocative resources’ in traditional societies in a different way. Certainly he wishes to say that, whatever the ‘ultimate basis’ of state power in pre-capitalist societies, this is the key element from this point onwards until the emergence of capitalist societies, and as such is the major driving force of societal change from the ancient civilizations up until the breakdown of feudalism. In defence of this position, Giddens is concerned to minimize the impact of economic mechanisms in shaping overall processes of societal development in non-capitalist societies, and to demonstrate the autonomy here of politico-military structures and processes from the forces of production. So, for him, ‘[t]he connections between the level of production and military strength are fairly indirect’.98 For him also, social struggles over ‘allocative resources’ in pre-capitalist societies were inconsequential in their structural or systemic effects, as we have already seen. Some of Giddens’ reasons for asserting these positions are quite defensible, even if one is forced to dissent from the conclusion (the primacy of politics over economics and the ‘autonomy’ of one from the other) he derives from them. Others seem to me barely credible at all, even as purely descriptive categories. Into the second category, on the one hand, falls Giddens’ over-hasty dismissal of the role of class struggles in bringing about epochal structural transformations in social relations in pre-capitalist societies. For, contrary to his argument: [T]he development of feudalism and the transition to capitalism were decisively shaped by the class conflicts between lord and peasant. Without a Marxist perspective on these conflicts, Giddens has no theory of the breakdown of feudalism. He can only lamely appeal to generalisations about the importance of military force in expropriation and to the city/countryside tension. Yet peasant rebellions . . . were actually preconditions of capitalism. These rebellions focused on the quantity of surplus the lords and/or the state could expropriate. If such actions do not qualify as struggles concerning social labour, as economic struggles over allocation, it is hard to know what would. The priority of class conflict remains.99 Into the first category, on the other hand, falls Giddens’ general theory of the interrelationship between polity and economy in pre-capitalist societies. Thus,

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although Giddens is right to argue that a ‘ruler may choose to channel resources into building up the military . . . even where this impoverishes the rest of society’,100 it does not follow from this that military power is here ‘detached’ from economic relations, as he contends. For there are, of course, definite limits to the extent a political authority can pursue a policy of ‘military accumulation’ without endangering its own material reproduction and the stability of the society it administers. Obviously an impoverished class of direct producers cannot supply the surplus product or the loyal soldiers to sustain an expensive politico-military machine, and over-reliance on mercenaries is both a very costly and a risky strategy for an imperial state. Moreover, an over-exploited class, such as one over-taxed to support imperial adventures, tends to be an especially rebellious one. The history of the ancient and medieval worlds is littered with examples of fallen manors, states and empires whose rulers apparently allowed themselves to believe in the remoteness of their civilizations from their mundane roots in economic development. Similarly, although Giddens is also right to argue that relations of class exploitation in pre-capitalist societies are politically constituted, and as such entail a ‘military’ dimension, it does not follow from this that the ever-present ‘economic’ aspect of these class relations is of any less importance than their ‘political’ or ‘militaristic’ aspects. After all, it is not at all clear how Giddens’ own insight that class exploitation depends upon domination in precapitalist societies is logically supportive of his conclusion that ‘authorization’ (politics) has primacy over ‘allocation’ (economics). On the contrary, Giddens’ own argument is suggestive of a ‘fusion’ of politics and economics in most historical class societies, rather than of the subordination of one to the other. Yet there are still good grounds for holding that the ‘economic’ dimension of the relations of production enjoys a certain explanatory primacy over their ‘political’ dimension in non-capitalist societies generally. First, the fundamental motive behind the exercise of politico-military domination in any class society is mostly ‘economic’ (the enrichment of elites). Thus, as Gottlieb rightly points out: Giddens frequently stresses the importance of direct violence in social life, especially in pre-capitalist societies. Yet if that struggle is not understood as part of a struggle over ‘allocative resources’, it becomes largely inexplicable. Relying on military force rather than technological development is one ‘fact’ about the feudal mode of production. In the twentieth century, imperialist wars cannot be understood without reference to economic interests in capitalist society. Again, a class analysis remains fundamental to understanding social life.101 Second, and of greater significance, there is also the fact that the structural explanation of why politico-military relations of domination are integral aspects of class exploitation in pre-capitalist societies (though not in capitalist societies) is itself ‘economic’, as I have already argued. For, to recap my earlier point, the

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dependence of pre-capitalist relations of class exploitation on mechanisms of ‘extra-economic coercion’ is attributable to a particular distributional pattern of the means of production that is typical of pre-capitalist societies. Thus, it is the possession here by the direct producers of certain of the means of production (access to land and to certain of the tools of labour) that ensures that politicomilitary mechanisms have to enter directly into the process of class exploitation. In capitalist society, by contrast, the total separation of the direct producers from the means of wealth-creation and subsistence allows the reproduction of the relations of class exploitation mostly by means of economic (not politico-military) mechanisms – i.e. by means of the coercive pressure of economic necessity. Part of the reason for Giddens’ incapacity to theorize the interplay between economy and polity in non-capitalist societies stems from the fact he has saddled himself with concepts which are so vague or nebulous they have virtually no explanatory value. Their plasticity or permissiveness is such they lead to confusion, not least in the writings of their author. Thus, if what is meant by Giddens’ concept of ‘traditional state’ is a class-divided society in which an elite group extorts surplus product from a dependent local countryside then materialist (i.e. Marxian) premises are unavoidable. At times, of course, Giddens does make this argument.102 But such is the imprecision of the category of ‘traditional state’ in Giddens’ writings overall, he is as often able to avoid drawing this obvious conclusion by apparently redefining it simply as a large-scale imperial state.103 This, of course, is a manoeuvre that allows him to ‘explain’ the origins of traditional society tautologically (the cause of the imperial state is, it seems, imperialism), and so magically emancipates him from the bother of having to address the historical economic preconditions that underlie the emergence of imperialism and relations of tributary exploitation. A second reason for Giddens’ conceptual difficulties is doubtless attributable to his misapprehension of the meaning of Marx’s historical sociology. According to him, the Marxian conception of society postulates a deterministic one-way causal relationship running from economic base to politico-ideological superstructure. This means that political processes are always simply passive reflections of economic development.104 Naturally it follows from this that Marx’s productive force evolutionism is a species of ‘productive force determinism’. But Marx’s theory of social structure does not commit him to the curious idea that a particular form of economy must engender a single type of political organization or state structure. Rather, his argument is that a given level of economic development both enables and sets limits to a specific range of relations of production and attendant modes of politics and culture. Agrarian forces of production, for example, allow the existence of the economic relations of pettysmallholding, private property or state property, together with those variegated political forms compatible with them, but obviously not those of huntergathering or socialism. Nonetheless, irrespective of the real differences and their structural causes that exist between political forms in class-divided societies, what cannot be doubted is that these must conduct themselves precisely as modes of class domination. Giddens’ contrary claim that political systems are

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autonomous of the modes of production with which they are associated is radically untheorized and monumentally implausible. Giddens’ theoretical problems also stem from the fact that his own misplaced treatment of authoritative and allocative power as autonomous forms of stratification encourages him to view the Marxist base/superstructure analytical distinction as one between economic and political institutions generally. This is why, for example, he regards the growing post-war involvement of the state in economic life in the advanced western societies as strong evidence that political mechanisms are now basic to economic mechanisms in contemporary capitalism, in the sense that the interventionist state is indispensable to capitalist development and success. But, of course, the Marxist couplet of base/superstructure distinguishes not between separate institutions (e.g. between the state and the marketplace), but between those social relations that are bound up in economic production and class exploitation and those that are not. Typically, specific institutions are comprised of economic, political and ideological relations or mechanisms. The capitalist state, for example, is primarily a political structure, by virtue of its function of exercising sovereignty over and policing a particular geographical or territorial locale, and securing the conditions of successful capital accumulation home and abroad. But the capitalist state is also an ideological structure, by virtue of its role in mobilizing consent for the social order it administers and vested interests it defends. Finally, the capitalist state is an economic structure, by virtue of its direct role as a major employer of wage-labour, administration of macro economic policy, control over of nationalized production and as major funder of private enterprise. Theorizing the capitalist state as an economic as well as political form is the first step in showing that the mere fact of growing state intervention in economic life does not necessarily imply that politics has primacy over economics in contemporary capitalism in shaping social change. The next step is to show that the development of the capitalist mode of production itself explains why it is that the state has got increasingly involved in the regulation of the economy and in the direct production of commodities. The evolution of monopoly and transnational capital (from the dynamic of the centralization and concentration of production), and the consequent pressure placed upon the state to identify the national interest with the interests of the big bourgeoisie, the rise of the organized labour movement and its capacity to win reforms from the state, the increasingly intractable nature of economic crises, the changing imperatives of capitalism for a better educated and healthier workforce, and so on, these are precisely the causal factors which explain the ‘growing together’ of polity and economy in modern capitalism.105 Yet, by misreading the base/superstructure model as articulating an empirical differentiation between the institutions of economy and state, Giddens cannot see any of this. He cannot grasp that the interventionist state of modern capitalism is simultaneously base and superstructure, and product of the contradictory ‘law of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production.

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I have said that Giddens’ attempt to prioritize politico-military mechanisms over economic mechanisms in his causal account of the historical origins of class society is not only theoretically defective but also empirically weak. I will now add some historical substance to this claim. Anthropological and archaeological research has shown that the historical basis of the first traditional civilizations, which arose independently in Mesopotamia, the Indus, the Nile Valley, in central and southern America and in northern China, lay in each case in the cumulative development of the forces of production over thousands of years, which over the centuries allowed the gradual movement away from small-scale horticultural village communes to larger-scale agricultural settlements.106 ‘Over thousands of years the agricultural settlements . . . grew into towns, and the towns into cities’.107 Those entrusted with supervising the granaries, originally containing the stocks of foodstuffs set aside for emergencies, became the leading stratum in society: normally the priesthoods. What originally was the ‘community’s’ product (i.e. the property of the deity) became in practice (if not ‘officially’) the property of this new literate class of religious functionaries and administrators.108 Under the guise of maintaining the granaries and the temples (themselves for the most part normally former granaries), this new urban elite utilized their control of allocative resources, translated into state power, to extort surplus product (in the form of taxation) from the surrounding local peasant economy. By the same means, they were able to force formerly independent cultivators into conducting ‘public works’ (digging canals, repairing the temples, granaries and city fortifications, and soldiering) in return for rations or wages.109 To these ends, and of course to safeguard the surplus product from external and internal foes, the new (normally but not always priestly) exploiting classes of each of these early tributary states devolved military and other non-religious functions onto other social groups, spawning in each case over the centuries an enormous unproductive urban-based state class. Sometimes, and in certain places, the non-religious elites were able to secure greater access to authoritative and allocative resources (and with this greater social prestige) than the priesthoods; at other times and places the reverse arrangement held fast.110 In every case, however, a huge bulk of the total social product was consumed or otherwise monopolized by the tiny minority who played no part in its production – the scale of class exploitation was colossal. For example, Harman reports research of T.B. Jones to the effect that, in the ancient city-state of Lagash in northern Iraq, at around 2100 BC, roughly half the agricultural product was consumed by the direct producers and by draft animals, a quarter went to the monarch’s court as royal tax and the remainder went to the priestly administrators as temple tax, according to ancient records.111 Such inegalitarian distributions of allocative resources were, it seems, fairly typical of Mesopotamian city-states from their inception up until their incorporation into the Persian and Macedonian empires.112 But, of course, the precise magnitude or distribution of the surplus which accrued to the monarch and military wing of the ruling class, on the one hand, and to the priesthoods, on the other hand, varied from one time and place to another.

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Nonetheless, in each and every case, the politico-military power of the elite was a form of class domination, motivated to ensure continued possession of the surplus product, extended to other societies to obtain a still greater share of economic wealth, and enabled by and supported by a certain level of development of material production. Thus, in ancient Mesopotamia, the formation of a plethora of city-states in the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers gave rise to a dynamic of internecine warfare and military competition between them for regional domination in the interests of economic and strategic advantage. This led to a process of empire building on an expanding scale.113 At times, this dialectic fed into phases or pulses of technological and economic development. But such episodes invariably gave rise to periods of societal stagnancy, even decline, since militarism and warfare as often weakened the subsistence peasant economy, to such a degree that the region entered periods of social crises, sometimes falling prey to successful invasions by marauding nomadic tribes.114 In China, by contrast with Mesopotamia, the poorer agricultural region of the north (the Yellow River Valley) was able to support neither many powerful city-states nor a strong landowning aristocracy, and so most of the land remained in the hands of smallholding village communes. Here a singular tributary state found it an easier task to establish centralized political domination over a vast geographical area, mobilizing the wealth appropriated as tax from the dispersed peasant communities of the north to extend its politicomilitary control into the rest of the country. This process culminated in the installation of tributary relations of exploitation over the richer agricultural land of the feudal-dominated centre-south of China (the Yangtse River Valley) by the second century BC under the Ch’in and Han dynasties.115 More generally, of course, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in traditional India and China, and in central and southern America under the Aztecs and Incas, collective class exploitation (by means of state taxation) eventually gave rise to or (in the case of China) reinforced class relations based upon feudal private property, as military governors, state officials and priestly administrators used a portion of their wealth to purchase land, slaves and other assets.116 Now this kind of historical data begs the obvious question: in what meaningful sense does Giddens’ theory of ‘time–space-distanciation’ or contextless ‘dialectic of control’ obtain a better explanatory purchase on these historical facts than Marx’s dialectic of economic evolution, class exploitation and class conflict? In fact, Giddens’ argument that in non-capitalist societies ‘authoritative’ power has primacy over ‘allocative’ power in shaping structural dynamics and societal development would have been more plausible if it had been applied to explaining the origins of feudalism in Europe. After all, I have said that the historical root of the feudal mode of production lay in the seizure by military means of much of the landholdings of the old Roman nobility by the warrior chieftains of a number of ‘barbarian’ tribes (or their successful military defence by surviving elements of the old Roman aristocracy). These landholdings were then eventually converted into manorial estates based upon serf labour. But even

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here, despite this, the primacy of the political over the economic in historical causation is not upheld, despite appearances to the contrary. There are two main reasons for this. First, the conquest of the western empire by the ‘barbarian’ tribes had itself definite economic preconditions, in the absence of which it could not have occurred. I refer to the internal structural contradictions of the slave-based economy of Rome (between its forces of production and relations of production) and its resultant decay and eventual collapse.117 Thus, barbarian tribes, originally invited or allowed into the empire to fight off other barbarian tribes, became the beneficiaries of a disintegrating state power, often seizing imperial territories with little opposition, and sometimes virtually unopposed. Second, irrespective of the politico-military origins of feudal society, it was nonetheless the effective control or possession of land by the new warrior aristocracy, which allowed its consolidation and reproduction. The politico-military power of the lords could be sustained and expanded only by translating it immediately into self-contained units of localized production: the manor system. It was for this reason that the tribal chieftains who overran the empire moved quickly to carve out an economic base for their political and legal sovereignty in social production and serf exploitation, utilizing their military entourage as paid retainers to coerce or persuade the smallholding peasantry to yield to the appropriation of a portion of their produce (as rent-in-kind or extra labour on the lord’s estate) in return for military protection from bandits. Indeed, persuasion not coercion was often sufficient initially to establish feudal relations of production. As Chris Harman points out: ‘Formerly free peasants often found that the only way they could get military protection from marauding bands (whether barbarian or Roman) was to accept a . . . serf-type arrangement with a powerful local lord’. But this means, as Harman rightly says, that the feudal mode of production arose in the first place, and established itself as the dominant social form across Europe, because it was a form of economy that ‘could maintain and develop production at a time when the preceding mode of production was in terminal crisis’. Sections of the old Roman ruling class and ‘barbarian’ warlords alike decided to base their power on feudal property because they ‘discovered that they could protect themselves from the collapse of the economy of the empire as a whole’118 by doing so. The dull weight of economic necessity pressurized both landowners and peasants to adapt to the manor system of serf production. Marx versus Mann on societal development Inasmuch as my critique of Giddens’ historical sociology establishes that ‘authoritative resources’ (the means of political and military domination) are neither ‘autonomous’ of ‘allocative resources’ (the mode of production and relation of production) nor enjoy explanatory primacy over these in shaping social structure and change in pre-capitalist societies, it obviously applies equally to the arguments of other neo-Weberian theorists. This is certainly true of Michael

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Mann’s historical claims. Upon his contribution to historical sociology I will now focus the remainder of my critique. Mann’s argument (shared in common with Giddens) that Marx’s belief that the state is primarily a mode of class domination is invalidated by the fact that inter-state competition and the formation of the modern state system preceded the domination of the capitalist mode of production. But this position is indefensible, for two basic reasons. First, Mann’s argument is undermined by the fact that the Darwinian process of politico-military competition in the late feudal period, which he sees as being responsible for the modern state system, is comprehensible only if contextualized within feudal relations of production. Specific aspects of these relations of production – namely the lords’ reliance on ‘extra-economic coercion’ to expropriate the surplus product (itself a function of the fact that the direct producers enjoyed independent access to major means of production) and the decentralized nature of the manorial system – rendered militarism and state-building an endemic feature of the social structure. Robert Brenner explains: In view of the difficulty, in the presence of pre-capitalist property relations, of raising returns from investment in the means of production (via increases in productive efficiency), the lords found that if they wanted to increase their income, they had little more choice but to do so by ‘redistributing’ wealth and income away from their peasants or from other members of the exploiting class. This meant they had to deploy their resources towards the building up their ‘means of coercion’ – by investment in military men and equipment. Speaking broadly, they were obliged to invest in their politicomilitary apparatuses. To the extent that they had to do this effectively enough to compete with other lords who were doing the same thing, they would have to maximise both their military investments and the efficiency of these investments. They would have had, in fact, continually and systematically, to improve their methods of war. Indeed, we can say that the drive to ‘political accumulation’, to ‘state-building’, is the ‘pre-capitalist’ analogue to the capitalist drive to accumulate capital.119 Second, Mann’s argument is also damaged by the fact that these politicomilitary rivalries (and attendant dialectic of state-building on an expanding scale) took place in the context of a rapidly expanding commercial economy, the first world market, ‘domination of which gave particular Great Powers the edge in their European rivalries – first Spain, then the United Provinces, and finally England after it had finally triumphed in its long struggle with France’. The formation of this world market economy, which in large measure was both medium and object of state competition, was partly stimulated by and partly stimulus of a growing marketization of economic life within the feudal societies of Europe themselves: [T]he gradual evolution of networks of trade and production on particular patches of European soil . . . both made possible and necessitated the forma-

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tion of relatively coherent territorial political units . . . Benedict Anderson, for instance, has stressed the importance of ‘print capitalism’ in Reformation Europe – the relatively large-scale commercial production of books in the vernacular – in creating unified fields of exchange and communications, each of which formed ‘the embryo of the nationally imagined community’.120 Thus, in correction of Mann’s over-emphasis on ‘militarism’, it seems more likely that the modern state system ‘was the largely unintended consequence of both the politico-military rivalries among the European ruling classes, and the gradual formation of a world market whose nodal points could develop into nation-states’.121 Whatever the truth, however, what is clear is that neither the ‘military’ nor the ‘economic’ dynamics of state building can be usefully abstracted from class relations or modes of production. This means that Marx’s basic claim that the state is essentially a form of class domination remains defensible, indeed compelling.122 Yet much of the substantive content of Mann’s account of the historical unfolding of power-relations is uncontentious, whatever one makes of his theoretical positions. Indeed, for the most part his argument is well constructed. Certainly most sensible Marxists would not disagree with his oft-repeated claim that political and military structures or mechanisms are efficacious in determining processes of societal change. The problem arises from Mann’s peculiar belief that acknowledging the part played by non-economic structures or ‘power centres’ (such as polity and ideology) in shaping economic developments is somehow a refutation of socio-historical materialism. That this view is simply false has hopefully already been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt by my exposition and defence of Marxism in this book. Nonetheless, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the reason for Mann’s confusion on this elementary point. Chris Wickham has suggested that ‘Mann’s position only seems non- (or quasi-) materialist because the state has not been theorized sufficiently as an economic form, in particular in its relationship with the landowning class’.123 This seems about right. Mann’s account of the unfolding of power-relations in pre-modern societies, because it is for the most part ‘state-centred’, simply skirts over the question of the relationship of political (and ideological forms) to property relations. This helps to sustain the illusion of their autonomy. Incidentally, as I have noted in Chapter 2, this error is precisely the one that Weber makes when elaborating his famous ‘Protestant Ethic’ thesis of the origins of capitalism. Because ideological forms feed into processes of economic change, this is interpreted as evidence that these have no material or economic foundations or determinations, which by no means follows, and which if true would leave them unexplained, ‘hanging in the air’ so to speak. But I have said that Michael Mann and other neo-Weberians are nonetheless right to say that political and ideological mechanisms shape historical events besides economic ones. All are efficacious in determining structural dynamics and episodes of social change. But Mann appears to be striving for a more radical conclusion than this. This is because Mann, like Marx, is not really

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interested in social change as such. On the contrary, as I have suggested already, what Mann’s historical sociology is about is theorizing societal development. Thus, despite his explicit rejection of Marx’s ‘evolutionism’, Mann still wants to say that there is a directional pattern to human history involving the expansion and accumulation of ‘social power’. His substantive argument against Marxism is not that it is wrong to postulate a developmental typology of social forms. Rather the Marxists are wrong to privilege forces of production, structural contradictions of the modes of production, and class agency in a causal theory of societal development. So, for Mann, although the growth or development of social power has an epochal directionality, this is not energized by the modes of production and class struggle, but by the historical interaction of the separate (ideological, political, military, economic) power centres. I have already identified one difficulty with this kind of approach. This is that any treatment of economic, political and ideological practices or structures, as independent centres of social power, cannot really explain how or why each of these should as a rule complement rather than obstruct the dynamic of the others. Marx’s approach does not suffer from this problem. This is because, according to Marx, social systems constitute a unity-in-difference by virtue of their anchorage in modes of production and class exploitation. For Marx, since the mode of production is ‘socially primary’ in the sense of its key role in constraining and enabling and stimulating developments in the wider social structure, and in the sense of comprising the source or genesis of extra-economic and non-exploitative social relations and practices, it is logical to regard it as the primary facilitator of structural or systemic elaboration and/or transformation. Less abstractly, for Marx, since the mode of production is ‘socially primary’ in the sense of operating as the major determinant of human social interests in the overwhelming majority of actual historical societies, it should also be recognized as by and large the prime mover of agents’ political and ideological consciousness, and thus of the modes of social interaction which bring about structural reproduction, elaboration or transformation over time. I have tried to show elsewhere that these fundamental theses of classical Marxism are defensible.124 A second difficulty with Mann’s view is that, although political, military and ideological practices or relations do indeed embody their own internal dynamics of elaboration and development, it is highly disputable that any of these are transformative in the sense of supporting an ongoing dynamic of societal evolution and transformation of overall structural forms or total social systems throughout history. Only the mode of production, including and especially the forces of production, is genuinely transformative in this sense. By way of demonstration of my argument, I will now consider, briefly, the role of ideological (religious) and then, in greater detail, the role of politico-military mechanisms in stimulating macroscopic social change.

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Economy and ideology First, I will look briefly at the role of ideology. Of course, religious ideology always develops in accordance with the logic of internal conceptual elaboration (the drive to render doctrine internally consistent and logically compelling). This much is indisputable. Nonetheless there is no real reason why such development should facilitate or encourage macro structural elaboration or differentiation in a total social system. The reason for this is that the rationalization of otherworldly doctrine in isolation from practical material activity and interests (i.e. politics and economics) only leads to the construction of perfect systems of scholasticism, with no practical import other than whatever vaguely ideological function they might perform in stabilizing existing social relations.125 By contrast, where religious ideology does ostensibly encourage structural elaboration or transformation, it does so only where it functions as a mystical expression or appropriation of political and economic interests, that is, as an ideological expression of social (i.e. class) movements which are aiming for the modification or overturning of existing political and economic structures. This is why the ‘world religions’ implicated in macroscopic structural transformations (e.g. the role of Protestantism in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe) have precisely been those which have been oriented towards ‘worldly’ concerns and interests. For it is only where religion is appropriated as a ‘cultural resource’ by collective agents, to challenge or legitimize existing social relations, that it is capable of feeding back into processes of structural elaboration or stabilization.126 But this means that it is the structural contradictions of society which are the primary cause of the social struggles which seek to transcend them, and that it is the vested politico-economic interests of collective agents which encourage them to appropriate religious ideologies in a ‘worldly’ fashion and to fashion them as weapons of class struggle. The mode of production, not religious ideology per se, has causal primacy in explaining system dynamics.

Economy, politics and the military Much the same point can be made in relation to the role of politico-military processes (or structures) in history. Again, the role of violence, war and military technology in influencing processes of social change is obvious and indisputable, and Mann is quite right to draw attention to these ‘factors’ of change and statics in determining the trajectory of social formations. Certainly, it seems uncontentious that innovations in military technology and technique, which enhance military power, are more likely to be retained rather than lost over the long historical duration, whatever the fate of individual states or empires. But, as I intend to show, processes of military conflict, territorialism and accumulation do not have the general and ongoing capacity to generate consistent cumulative structural or systemic elaboration. Societies which wage war, which accumulate military technology for the purpose of warfare and which construct territorial

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empires may often stimulate episodes of economic prosperity, and hence generate the material and human resources necessary to enable general system elaboration and differentiation. Nonetheless such processes are as equally likely to generate the opposite result. Military accumulation can serve to stimulate economic production, and warfare can be an economically productive enterprise for a successful imperial state. But, as often, military accumulation and attendant territorial expansion can overburden the economic capacity of a society and compromise its material reproduction. And warfare sooner or later always results in defeat, and the wholesale destruction of means of production and human capital, even for the most successful of imperial states.127 One major problem with Mann’s attempt to demonstrate that militarism is not as often ‘parasitic’ on the forces of production as otherwise is his relative neglect of the downside of militarism and empire building. Marxists, by contrast, have stressed the contradictory nature of militarism and imperialism. For example, Mike Kidron has pointed out that the long post-war boom of capitalism (1945–73) was supported by high levels of arms expenditure, which acted to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to decline by diverting resources away from direct economic investments in means of production and consumer goods.128 But Kidron also rightly argued that this ‘permanent arms economy’ would stabilize capitalism only temporarily, because militarism on the necessary scale would prove unsustainable, since it would function to retard the economic competitiveness of those nation states (Britain, the USA, the USSR) which bore the major burden of its upkeep relative to those (Germany, Japan, etc.) which maintained lower levels of peacetime military spending, this leading to the downscaling of military budgets.129 This analysis has subsequently been confirmed by the work of other Marxist economists.130 At the time of writing, existing levels of military spending are insufficient to restore the system to profitability, yet nonetheless divert massive economic resources away from capitalist investment, resulting in the pattern of weak growth interspersed with lengthy periods of stagnation which has characterized the contemporary world economy since the mid 1970s.131 Another major difficulty with Mann’s stress on the autonomous causal logic of militarism and imperialism in stimulating economic advance is his tendency to lump a vast range of state activities and functions, which are efficacious in stimulating economic development or stability in ‘traditional’ societies, under the rubric of ‘military power’, where these were in fact related at best only indirectly to ‘militarism’ or ‘imperialism’. Thus, he argues that the internal political logic of empire building from the period of Akkad to Rome gave rise to an ongoing cumulative development of the forces of production. This it did ‘by maintaining peace, by protecting exchange, by building roads, by establishing economic value, by intensifying exploitation’,132 and so on. But, in what meaningful sense can one define activities and functions such as these as simply or straightforwardly ‘militaristic’ or even ‘political’? Some of these activities and functions of state were, of course, directly economic. Moreover, most can be comprehended only by referring them to economic interests and class relations,

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which hardly indicates their autonomy, since military power was used here as the mere means of securing class exploitation for economic advantage. In any case, it is clear enough that neither ‘militarism’ nor ‘imperialism’ as such were efficacious in determining economic advance in traditional states. Rather, economic development was simply able to proceed more smoothly (at least for a period of time), under its own logic, because protected by the state and as a byproduct of political stability. Nonetheless it was still moved directly by economic and class mechanisms. Yet Mann has an additional argument in favour of his thesis that politicomilitary mechanisms have been at least as important as economic mechanisms in stimulating societal development. This is his claim that politico-military competition between states has been responsible for ongoing and cumulative economic growth, commencing from AD 1000 up until the present day.133 As Callinicos has argued, this is a truly staggering assertion, for the researches of social historians such as Guy Bois and Mark Postan have shown that, just as military competition between lords and monarchs for land and access to serf labour was heating up (in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the feudal world of Europe collapsed into convulsive economic crisis, resulting in mass starvation and disease.134 For example, up to 50 per cent of the population of England perished from war, starvation and plague in the fourteenth century; and half the population of eastern Normandy perished from the same between 1348–80, half again between 1415–22 and a further third between 1436–50.135 This ‘hellish Malthusian cycle’ of societal decline struck again in the seventeenth century:136 What historians call the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ set in around 1620 and reached its most acute phase between 1640 and 1670. Population stagnated or declined. Some countries, notably Italy, experienced deindustrialisation. The two main areas of international trade, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, declined. The Spanish and Portuguese empires contracted. Even Dutch overseas expansion slowed down. The Thirty Years War devastated central Europe.137 All of this is hardly indicative of a relatively smooth process of societal development, under the auspices of military and political developments, in the direction of greater material and cultural prosperity, as is argued by Mann. On the contrary, these were historical epochs characterized by economic, political and cultural decline or regression. Of greater interest than this woefully thin analysis, though, is the fact that the cyclic tendency towards economic stagnancy and societal decline, which set in from the thirteenth century onwards, after centuries of steady but slow development of the forces of production, was most likely the effect of intensifying military competition between the feudalists for landed property, once the limits of extensive cultivation had been reached.138 In this case, the increasing burden of military expenditures on the peasant economy, plus the devastation wreaked by internecine warfare, brought about

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the disruption, decline and periodic collapse of agriculture, along with the terrible demographic crises already described. One effect of this was an intensification of class struggle between lord and peasant. Another was, from the fourteenth century onwards, the eventual internal decomposition of lordly power itself, in part caused by a declining seigniorial levy and the process of intensifying peasant resistance to class exploitation. These were, of course, essential preconditions for the development of capitalism. The theoretical point to be drawn from all of this is a familiar one. This is that the Marxist analytical couplet of base/superstructure is the only way to get to grips with the pattern of economic development and state building in traditional imperial states. But this analytical tool has to be used correctly. I have said that it is not intended to differentiate between different kinds of institutions, but rather between those relations and functions that pertain to economic production and class exploitation and those that do not. Thus, for example, the institution of the state is more often than not simultaneously base and superstructure. This has a bearing on Mann’s arguments. Because Mann’s examples of the efficacy of ‘militarism’ and ‘imperialism’ in giving rise to economic stability and growth in the ancient world refer in fact to the ‘economic-class’ aspects of state policymaking, and hence to socio-economic generative mechanisms, it is far from clear that their advancement is sufficient to establish his point that the ‘political’ and ‘military’ sources of social power are autonomous or ‘detachable’ factors of societal development. I conclude that politico-military mechanisms are in the long run too arbitrary and contradictory to push society consistently in any given direction, upwards or downwards. They cannot account for the fact of upwards directionality in societal evolution. Only the developmental logics of modes of production, of which the forces of production are a key dynamic element (i.e. the rational imperative of agents to improve their livelihood by developing the forces of production and innovating new modes of wealth creation, and the class struggles of agents to expand their social, cultural and political freedoms more generally against the structural constraints or absenting ills of class-riven relations of production), can stimulate a generalized tendential evolutionary movement in the historical trajectories of social systems.

A critical note on the theoretical foundations of the sociology of domination I have made the point that Robert Brenner’s insight that a particular distribution of allocative resources in pre-capitalist societies explains the ‘fusion’ of politics and economics in such societies. This it does by virtue of the fact that this economic distribution forces the exploiting class (whether state officials or landed proprietors) to utilize extra-economic coercion to expropriate a portion of the social product (in the form of rent or tax) from the direct producers. Now Brenner’s argument, in effect, deprives both Mann’s and Giddens’ claim that Marxism cannot theorize ‘militarism’ or ‘domination’ of any real force. Indeed,

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the boot is exactly on the other foot. This is because it is Mann and Giddens who logically must deny ‘domination’ any structural roots. But this means, for Giddens and Mann, that domination must have other non-social determinations. In fact, there are only two obvious candidates for this role – either the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ or the notion of a dialectic between ‘scarcity’ and ‘human desires’.139 The first analytical strategy is followed by Giddens.140 Mann opts for neither, thus leaving his account of domination ‘free-floating’ so to speak, divested of theoretical roots. But making appeal to an irrational drive for ‘power’ or ‘domination’ to explain social conflict and inequality simply will not do, not least because it cannot explain the existence of the egalitarian and participatory-democratic social relations which have characterized most of human existence prior to the rise of class society.141 However, here I would like to endorse Callinicos’s view that explaining ‘power’ and ‘domination’ in terms of that old favourite of liberal social thought – material scarcity in a world of ‘insatiable appetites’ – does not fare any better. There are two reasons for this. First, certain forms of society, at a given level of economic development, which have overcome ‘natural scarcity’, namely modern capitalist societies, are undoubtedly riven with conflict and inequality. In capitalist societies ‘scarcity’ is artificial, effect not cause of the unequal distribution of allocative resources. Therefore, such scarcity can hardly function to explain from where such asymmetrical distributions of resources have originated. Second, as Callinicos has pointed out, a low level of economic subsistence (such as that characteristic of hunter-gatherer communities) does not always or even normally translate into intra-societal or inter-societal conflict, or an uneven distribution of power.142 On the contrary, the experience of pre-class societies shows that human wants, far from being ‘insatiable’, are regulated and stabilized within the limits of existing economic possibilities and by prevailing social relations and attendant cultural norms.143 In such societies, a relatively low level of development of material subsistence (compared with modern consumer cultures) coincided with an egalitarian distribution of resources, together with simple wants. Hunter-gatherer modes had obvious in-built constraints on their capacity to expand the output of social labour (because subsistence depended not on cultivating nature but appropriating it). Therefore, so long as life-affirming necessaries were provided for (in circumstances of natural abundance), and opportunities existed for a fulfilling community and cultural existence, members had no pressing motives to further develop the means of labour beyond the confines of this type of economy. Sahlins observes that hunter-gatherer modes persisted for as long as they did as the dominant type of economic society because they were extraordinarily successful in satisfying the diverse needs of community members (social, psychological, economic and cultural). In fact, in pre-history, it seems that these forms catered rather better for the subsistence needs of ordinary community members than the class-divided agrarian ones that followed. In the long term, however,

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the success of the hunter-gatherer mode led to rapid population growth and hence resource-stress. Eventually a point was reached when new economic practices were needed to maintain human subsistence at culturally acceptable standards. This generated community-wide motives and interests in economic innovation – horticulture and agriculture. The dialectic of productive force development had begun. Once agrarian modes were established, the opportunity was created for a cumulative expansion of the productivity of labour, and hence of expanding consumption needs and leisure opportunities. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that even modern western ‘appetites’ are ‘insatiable’ (despite the incitements to consume characteristic of capitalism to maintain growth and profits), for if they were capitalism would face a permanent legitimation crisis, as these popular expectations would be frustrated by class inequalities, and anomie would undermine society. Even if our contemporary consumerist desires were insatiable, this would be a phenomenon peculiar to the commodity culture of late capitalism, rather than an anthropological given of human nature.

Conclusion Weberian social theory stands or falls on two basic theoretical propositions. First, that Marxist sociology is inadequate, because the ‘economic’ is not basic to politics and the military, but rather that these different structures of power or domination are either interwoven and mutually supporting, or that politicomilitary structures tend to predominate over economic structures. Second, that due to the heterogeneous nature of social power and stratification in society, a sociological understanding of history must be organized as conceptual-methodological pluralism. These theoretical propositions unify the work of Max Weber and contemporary sociologists such as Giddens and Mann, irrespective of the real conceptual and methodological differences that exist between them. In challenging the first of these key positions, I have shown that Weberian sociologists have failed to demonstrate either that structures of cultural stratification (such as gender and ethnicity) are autonomous of modes of production and class relations, or that their causal powers and real-world effects would necessarily persist in the absence of their roots in material production and class exploitation. I have also demonstrated that only Marx’s structural materialist sociology can explain the variegated relationship between allocative power and authoritative power in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies.144 In challenging the second proposition (in this chapter), I have made the argument that those theories of historical development offered by Weber and the neo-Weberians are hamstrung both by their inadequate understanding of power-relations in societies past and present and by conceptual and empirical defects in the logic of pluralistic or multi-factoral historical method itself. There are two major problems here. First, neither Weber nor the neoWeberians are able to square conceptual-methodological pluralism with the notion and empirical reality of societal evolution. Second, the neo-Weberians have failed to demonstrate that politico-military power centres or forms of the

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distribution of social power have had the major influence in shaping societal development, particularly in the ancient and feudal worlds. On the contrary, political and military developments have always been dependent on economic developments, and are incomprehensible outside a class frame of analysis. Moreover, consistent societal evolution (from lower to higher social forms) has been energized rather more by developments in the forces of production than by the logic of politico-military development. This is obviously true of progressive tendential geo-historical development towards greater human freedoms and autonomy. This means, I conclude, that Marx’s socio-historical materialism remains unsurpassed as a meta-theory of the structuration, developmental dynamics and transformative mechanisms of social systems.

Conclusion

My analysis in this book is situated in the debate between realists and Marxists on the status of Marxism as realist science, the extent to which Marxism requires critical realism and/or dialectical critical realism and vice versa, and the likely pay-off of this engagement in terms of substantive social analysis and emancipatory politics. I have attempted in this book to accomplish two main objectives. First, to consider the relationship between Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems and the materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition in philosophy and the sciences, or to explore the conceptual and methodological interface between realist philosophy and Marxian dialectical materialism and socio-historical materialism. Second, to lay out a systematic theoretical defence of classical Marxist methods of analysis and explanatory critiques in the socio-historical sciences. My first key argument is that Marxism and critical realism/dialectical critical realism have important things to learn from one another. Critical realism/ dialectical critical realism, I argue (in Chapter 1), provides a coherent philosophy of science, key aspects of which are capable of enriching and substantiating materialist dialectics and the emancipatory goals of Marxism. These include: 1

The central critical realist ontological distinction between the domains of the empirical, the actual and the real, and the critical realist concepts of stratification and emergence. The latter is indispensable to any usable materialist epistemology, such as that elaborated by Lenin, which in certain respects foreshadows Bhaskar’s arguments. The latter render philosophically defensible a ‘depth realism’ which is supportive of an anti-reductive materialism in both the natural and social sciences. These too have their precursors in Engels’ dialectical materialism, but are systematically developed and powerfully vindicated by Bhaskar by means of transcendental arguments. On the terrain of the social sciences, the critical realist ontology of stratification and emergence (transformational model of social action and four-planar-social-being) allows a productive solution to some of the central dilemmas of Marxist theory (voluntarism versus determinism, structure versus agency, objectivism versus subjectivism, etc.). These either/or

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positions (which are errors) are avoided by classical Marxism, because Marx and Engels pioneered a recognizably critical realist social science. Nonetheless, Bhaskar’s critical realism renders specific and provides philosophical grounds for a realist perspective that is in classical Marxism relatively undeveloped (and implicitly assumed rather than argued for). Additional concepts developed by critical realist scholars in the social sciences (such as Collier’s distinction between vertical and horizontal causality in social systems and Archer’s conception of structural conditioning as ‘opportunity costs’) help substantiate Marx’s materialist understanding of social systems. The evaluative realism of critical realism (based on the theory of emancipatory critiques) and the ethical naturalism of dialectical critical realism. This too is invaluable for Marxism because it furnishes rational grounds for an understanding of social science as a critical and prescriptive discipline. By destroying the dogma of the fact–value dualism, Bhaskar’s theory of emancipatory critiques has made defensible the idea that objective socialscientific analysis has a normative dimension, since this is logically secretive of politico-ethical judgements of the rights and wrongs of social relations, and thus supportive of emancipatory projects (such as the Marxian project of replacing capitalism with socialism). This moral realism is substantiated by a naturalistic ontology of human-being-in-nature (as driven by the desire to absent constraints on universal free-flourishing) which recalls Marx’s own humanism. Negative dialectics. This is the conceptual basis of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist overreaching of critical realism. Bhaskar’s argument that all change (in nature and in society) should be conceptualized as absenting absences, and that absence (non-being) be attributed ontological primacy over presence (positive being), is probably misconceived. Nonetheless, Bhaskar does succeed in demonstrating that absence or non-being is as ontologically real as presence or positive being, and that dialectical processes are inconceivable without the interface of positive and negative existents. For this reason, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism enriches the ontological substance of materialist dialectics. Moreover, Bhaskar’s specific theorization of the dialectic of human emancipation as entailing the absenting of constraining ills on human free-flourishing, a dialectical process which moves from concrete singularity towards concrete universality, succeeds rather better than Engels’ negation of the negation formula in specifying the rational directionality of socio-historical change (and hence the real possibility of a fully emancipated or eudaimonic human existence). Bhaskar’s modes of negation (transformative negation, real negation, radical negation) and his careful delineation of dialectical processes (especially his distinction between internal, external and dialectical contradictions) offer real analytical purchase on the multiple sources of change in natural and social systems. This adds to the formal specification of materialist dialectics.

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But, at the same time, I have also argued that the ontology and methodology of Marxian social science – materialist dialectics – is indispensable to any defensible meta-theory of social reality and human emancipation. Thus, insofar as critical realism and/or dialectical critical realism neglects materialist dialectics as the necessary foundation for philosophy and social theory (in favour of agnosticism or even idealism), they remain deeply compromised, in need of Marxian ‘under-labouring’. If this is done, as I have attempted in this book, the key concepts of Marxian socio-historical science (modes of production, relations of production, forces of production, base/superstructure, etc.), and their specific application to capitalist modernity (value and surplus value), can be shown to retain their explanatory power. I have developed this line of reasoning as follows. In Chapter 2, I argue that the dialectical thinking of major authors of the classical Marxist tradition (especially Engels, Lenin and Trotsky) represent a radical break with the idealist dialectical tradition of Hegel and classical German rationalism. Marxian dialectic preserves the rational form of Hegelian dialectic (the interlinked concepts of totality, transformative change, mediation and contradiction and their further specification as general ‘laws’ of dialectic – unity and interpenetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality and negation of the negation) but transcends its irrealist errors of content (idealism, teleologism, fatalism, reductionism – i.e. the conflation of subjective and objective dialectical processes). This establishes a fundamental compatibility between materialist dialectics and the most important concepts of critical realism and dialectical critical realism, since this draws out the strongly (albeit often implicitly) realist or emergentist character of Marxian philosophy. But this also establishes the former as foundational to the latter, rather than vice versa, for three main reasons. First, this is because the Marxian materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectic provides a redoubt against the transcendental idealism and moral idealism that has so seriously deformed Bhaskar’s most recent work. By the same token, this has dissolved the rational basis of the agnostic apologetics of some critical realist scholars who would affirm its rational assertability. This is an unqualified good, since Bhaskar’s ‘spiritual turn’ has deflected critical realism/dialectical critical realism from its most important role of uncovering and combating the ideological and material structures that obstruct human free-flourishing. Second, this is because these materialist dialectics provide methodological guidance to the natural and social sciences and can be utilized to make sense of the findings of a range of natural scientific disciplines (quantum physics, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, ecologism). In the hands of the so-called left Darwinians, the efficacy of materialist dialectics is proven in analytical practice, since they apply Engels’ dialectical materialist concepts to make rather better sense of natural processes of stratification and emergence than is possible using Bhaskar’s abstract ‘absenting absence’ formula. Finally, this is because these materialist dialectics inform a specific body of social theory (socio-historical materialism) which is vastly superior to its major rivals in the social sciences. I have laid out the case for this emergentist

Conclusion 325 Marxism in Chapter 2, but have substantiated it in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. In these chapters, I have affirmed the analytical and explanatory superiority of Marxian social science in the context of an engagement with the rival sociology of domination of the Weberian school of thought, which rejects materialism in favour of a highly fashionable pluralistic understanding of stratification and sociohistorical change (shared in common with postmodernism). Here there are two main strands to my analysis. First, I attempt to establish Marxism as a successful critical realist theory of the dialectical interface between structure and agency in social systems from the earliest class-divided societies to the present day (Chapter 3). Marx’s historical sociology, as I have argued, avoids the errors of reductionism, teleologism and historicism, but without collapsing into voluntarism or idealism. At the same time, this critical realist reading of socio-historical materialism renders defensible an understanding of socio-cultural development as energized by the evolution of the forces of production, the structural contradictions between forces of production/relations of production and base/superstructure, and the social malintegration engendered by class conflicts over the distribution of authoritative and allocative resources. This substantiates Marx’s own theory of the rise and fall of successive modes of production, and of class struggle as the agency of epochal structural transformations of social relations. Second, I show how this emergentist Marxism offers a theory of stratification and of the logic of socio-historical development that is theoretically coherent and conceptually superior to rival accounts informed by its Weberian and neoWeberian competitors (Chapters 4 and 5). I have argued that materialist dialectics offers the analyst much better theoretical purchase on the major forms of domination (‘race’, gender, state power) than those approaches which treat these as autonomous of modes of production and class structures and as equivalent causal variables in socio-historical analysis. This is because cultural and political systems of power and domination, as I show it, are rooted in and emergent from modes of production and structures of class power, just as processes of socio-cultural evolution are energized particularly by productive force development and the internal contradictions of modes of production.

Marx and Bhaskar on the dialectics of freedom This completes my summary of the present undertaking. By way of conclusion, however, I would like to return to a theme I touched on in Chapter 1. There I argued that one of the great strengths of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist system is its affirmation of a moral realism which is underpinned by ethical naturalism. Now crucial to this is his concept of dialectical universalizability. Here Bhaskar posits an objective process of rational geo-historical directionality in social systems. Bhaskar’s intervention is a welcome one, since he is concerned to argue the case for tendential geo-historical directionality in social relations and rational social consciousness in the direction of greater human freedom or autonomy, and has thus re-introduced the idea of social change as

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developmental dialectical process to a new generation of critical social scientists, in an academic milieu that had hitherto dismissed the idea out of hand. But, since this idea is central to classical Marxism, a consideration of the relationship between Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom and Marx’s historical sociology of epochal societal transformations, in particular of the possible benefits of such an engagement, may cast light on Marxism’s contemporary status as emancipatory social theory. I have argued (Chapters 3 and 5) that Marx’s socio-historical materialism supports and sustains a general geo-historical tendential impulse in the direction of greater human freedom. This is conceived both as developing historical knowledge of universal human needs, and as the attendant historical revolutionary fabrication of modes of production that allow in practice an expanding element of freedom or self-autonomy of agents within the hiatus of freedomwithin-unfreedom comprised by the ensemble of social and natural relations. Now I wish to argue that this dialectical impulse of geo-history specified by socio-historical materialism can be legitimately seen as a concrete sociological theorization of Bhaskar’s famous dialectic of freedom, articulated under the terms of his moral realism.1 As we have seen (Chapter 1), Bhaskar argues that there is a ‘pulse’ of freedom at work in the geo-historical process. This imposes a real though contingent (upon the complex interplay of subjects ↔ practices ↔ structures on the multi-layered ‘depth’ terrain of ‘four-planar social being’)2 directionality towards eudaimonia or human emancipation. This is a society in which the ‘free flourishing of each is the condition for the free flourishing of all’),3 both necessitated and obstructed by ‘discursively moralized power2 relations’.4 But Bhaskar does not have much to say about the ways in which social structures and attendant relations of domination and exploitation both necessitate and offset progressive social change, this ‘conatus’ towards universal freedom. This lack of concreteness is the fundamental weakness of his dialectic of freedom. Bhaskar says that ‘absence will impose the geo-historical directionality that will usher in a truly human global society’.5 This is seemingly a very strong claim about the likely course of geo-historical development, and similar confident pronouncements are to be found scattered throughout Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. However, Bhaskar qualifies this by saying that this is primarily a ‘rational’ directionality, and that ‘actual’ history is ‘deeply contingent’.6 But there is a major conceptual ambiguity here. Bhaskar would appear to be making a claim about how ‘absence’ or ‘lack’ in the broadest sense (and not simply in the normative sense) in human and social relations generates a real tendential impulse (or drive) to absent the absences or constraining ills on human autonomy, this establishing a geo-historical directionality towards eudaimonia, powered by the social and ideological struggles of the alienated. This is, I think, a defensible position (though one which requires sociological fleshing out of the relationship between freedom and necessity in different historical social systems), even if one dissents from the rosy optimism of Bhaskar’s own formulation.

Conclusion 327 But, if, as Bhaskar then seems to suggest, the pulse of freedom has only a rational directionality (because it is rational for humans to desire and struggle for freedom, and to generalize this desire for freedom to those who share the same essence as a ‘natural social kind’ and the same circumstances in fourplanar-social-being), there is no reason at all to suppose that actual history has any directionality at all towards greater human freedom. Dialectic is, then, apparently reduced to a totalizing moral imperative, which can be annulled indefinitely by the material and ideological power of elites and their hegemonic struggles to preserve their rule in specific social relations. History becomes indeterminate, and Bhaskar’s confident declaration that dialectic is the pulse of freedom, which will usher in the truly free society, becomes radically undertheorized, because situated outside any analysis of the possibilities and constraints of structural social relations in any particular historical era. One way of resolving this ambiguity in Bhaskar is by making the dialectic of universalization an essentially normative process. This is basically the strategy followed by Branwyn Gruffydd Jones in her recent interesting article addressing the emancipatory status of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist moral realism.7 This obviously foregrounds Bhaskar’s claim that actual geo-history is ‘deeply contingent’. For there is more to real history than a principle of objective human commitments sedimented in rational action and communication (what other philosophers before Bhaskar have described as a ‘principle of charity’ or ‘humanity principle’).8 This makes Bhaskar’s own confident pronouncements that dialectic will bring about emancipation a simple problem of rhetorical overkill or over-confidence or ‘excess enthusiasm’ on his part. But I am not sure this is an entirely satisfactory interpretation of Bhaskar’s purpose, not least because Bhaskar does obviously make repeated substantive claims about real geo-history, and his concept of ‘rational directionality’ is deeply questionbegging. The logical difficulty of accepting this view of Bhaskar’s dialectic of emancipation is that ‘differentiating the rational directionality of human being in geo-history from the actual processes of historical change’ does not simply ‘raise questions of contingency in history’ (as Gruffydd Jones asserts),9 but undermines any understanding of real or actual history as other than contingency. I do not think this is what Bhaskar wishes to argue, though I will accept that his position is unclear. Ambiguities aside, Bhaskar does make the legitimate and important moral argument that power2 structures, by denying or constraining basic human needs and desires, necessarily generate resistance by the oppressed, and that collective struggle informed by both moral and practical reasoning is necessarily universalizing. This is because the possibility of collective resistance involves solidarity, grasping that others share the same circumstances, and that if each is to be free from power2 constraints, all must or should be likewise.10 Bhaskar’s moral realism also makes the point that human beings as a ‘natural kind’ share objective or universal properties of being-in-nature (sociality, consciousness, selfconsciousness, intentional communication and action), and that therefore intentional interaction and communication objectively presuppose acting in

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‘good faith’. This means projecting our own needs and interests onto others, treating other people as we would wish to be treated by other people, acting on the basis of mutual support, trust and empathy. Not to act in ‘good faith’, argues Bhaskar, is to become embroiled in a ‘theory/practice inconsistency’.11 This is because it is objectively immoral and irrational to accept the reality of one’s own human needs and interests in selfautonomy and act in accordance with these interests and needs (concrete singularity) and yet deny the reality of and necessity of the needs and interests of others who share a common objective being-in-nature (concrete universalizability). By the same universalizing logic, it is inconsistent with moral reason to support social structural circumstances or relationships that negate the maximum degree of free flourishing of each and all that is possible in any given historical or socio-cultural locale.12 This is particularly the case since social scientific knowledge is capable of specifying these universal needs and identifying the constraints or ‘absences’ that hold them in check, and since it is perfectly acceptable, both morally and scientifically, to specify ‘ought’ from ‘is’,13 which agents routinely do during their everyday dealings with each other. Of course, this does not mean that agents in social relations in practice always act or communicate in ‘good faith’, on the basis of mutual support or trust. Dialectical universalization (the movement from concrete singularity to concrete universalisability) can be offset by the subjective choices of individuals. People will act inconsistently with objective moral and practical reason, in order to satisfy vested interests. Moreover, individuals often have desires and wants that are incompatible even with their ‘concrete singularities’, in large part because of the impact of dominant ideology and the mystifications and reifications wrought by commodity fetishism. In power2 structures, the incumbents of positions of authority and control have socially constructed vested interests in preventing the free flourishing of each and all, insofar as this comprises the reproduction requirements of the structural status quo, in stopping the oppressed and downtrodden from absenting the constraining ills that blight their lives, necessitating the fabrication of TINA (‘there is no alternative’) formations (to provide comforts or rationalizations for the oppressive practices of oppressors) and ideologies of ‘personalism’ (victim-blaming).14 Bhaskar is thus fully alive to this role of structural power2 relations in blocking as well as facilitating the dialectic of emancipation (the ‘presence of the past and outside in the present’). But his lofty level of conceptual abstraction prevents him from exploring the nature of the structural constraints and enablements of emancipation in different systemic contexts, or analysing how and when the structural mechanisms and situations supportive of either contingency might prevail. This can be addressed only by examining the relationship between the emergent institutional and distributional properties and attendant generative mechanisms of social systems in development (including and especially unfolding institutional contradictions, the complex intra-actional articulation of modes of domination, the ‘structural capacities’ possessed by concretely situated agents in social relations for effecting stability or change), on the one

Conclusion 329 hand, and the normative-ethical and practical imperatives towards the ‘absenting of constraining ills’ which powers the dialectic of freedom, on the other. I am not talking here about the ‘subjective’ element of social struggles by the oppressed against their oppressors (of ideology, leadership, political strategy and tactics in the heat of the battle, etc.), which is indispensable to any systemic outcome, for good or ill. Rather, I am addressing the objective possibilities opened up for emancipatory practices by the structural configurations of real historical social systems. I have said that Bhaskar is not afraid to say that ‘absence’ will usher in eudaimonia. But since his confidence is rooted simply in his notion that moral necessity can in certain circumstances become a material force for change (insofar as it is rooted in the material interests and struggles of agents), there is no good reason to share his optimism. This renders the status of Bhaskar’s dialectic as ‘pulse’ of freedom unclear. Whether the pulse is a strong or weak one is impossible to ascertain. This is not a problem of Marx’s socio-historical dialectic. Marx’s sociohistorical materialism allows sociological and historical flesh to be put on Bhaskar’s concepts of dialectical universalizability and human emancipation. This form of socio-historical materialism, to reiterate the fundamental point again, is neither reductive nor deterministic, and nor does it offer a theory of historical inevitability. I have shown (Chapter 3) that Marx’s insight that history is simultaneously a process of class struggle, and of the collision between forces of production and relations of production, is successfully integrated and theorized. Agents and structures possess distinctive emergent properties and causal powers, and social development is explained in terms of the historical interface between them, embodying not teleologically predetermined ‘stages’ of development, but rather historical tendencies and trajectories of development. Marx provides good grounds for accepting that the dialectic of freedom is not simply an impulse powered by absence or lack, necessitated by the simple fact that power2 relations repress real objective human needs and interests in satisfying the alienated vested interests of powerful minorities. Rather, it is further undergirded by the structural and interactional fault-lines and enablements for transformative agency built into class-divided relations of production. For Marx, the dialectic of freedom is a real developmental tendency of social change, and geo-history has objective progressive tendential directionality. This is because class-divided relations of production generate systematic internal pressures for their own absenting (periodic systemic crises which feed into class polarization and struggles over allocation and control, a dialectic of universalizing knowledge among the exploited of the nature of structural sins and what needs to be done to negate them, and the structural capacities for bringing about progressive change invested in subordinate class agents by virtue of their positioning in relations of production).15 Let us add to this some (in my view uncontentious) Marxian theses. These are: (1) subordinate class agents invariably constitute the overwhelming majority populations of most societies; (2) superordinate classes are dependent on their subordinates to administer institutional functions fundamental to their rule, indeed can exist materially and socially only

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by virtue of their activities (whereas the converse does not hold – the existence of workers or labours does not presuppose a separate class of non-productive owners); and (3) subordinate classes only need to defeat the oppressors once in the world-historical scheme of things (but the oppressors must continue to defeat the oppressed indefinitely in order to maintain their dominance).16 These arguments render Marx’s revolutionary optimism concerning the socialist eudaimonic future of humanity theoretically defensible. Yet Bhaskar’s point that the ‘drive’ to freedom must persist (sometimes a stronger pulse, sometimes a weaker pulse), so long as humans are subject to social relations that alienate their needs,17 is fundamental here. For it is this unquenchable desire for freedom from constraining ills or absences that ensures that, as long as humanity still breathes, the struggle for emancipation can never be decisively defeated (in the world-historical sense). Thus, although it seems correct to say that Bhaskar’s dialectic of universalization does not get to grips with the social structural fetters or enablements of progressive normative and social change, this requiring substantive sociological analysis, and especially historical materialism, I would like to add the crucial qualification that I do not think making this point gives us grounds for simply replacing Bhaskar’s universalistic dialectic of freedom with Marx’s structural dialectics of forces of production/relations of production, capital and class, and so on. Marxists are sometimes over-hasty in their dismissal of political and moral judgements informed by naturalistic and humanist philosophy. This, at any rate, is the conclusion Gruffydd Jones would distil from the ambiguities and vagaries of Bhaskar’s emancipatory theory: The global scope of capital’s causal efficacy entail that for human emancipation to be possible, the relations of capital must be overcome globally. This conclusion does not arise from the transhistorical dialectical universalizability of the common human condition, but from analysis of the objective properties of historical relations and conditions in the world today.18 But, arguably, we need two kinds of argument for human emancipation, one of which is philosophically informed by the kind of objective moral reason that Bhaskar proposes, the other which is sociologically informed by socio-historical materialism. Certainly, there is no reason why they should be mutually exclusive. Marx’s dialectic of capital and wage-labour allows us to grasp the sociological possibilities of human emancipation (socialism) in the conditions of late modernity, as well as the sociological determinations of human unfreedom in specific societal and historical contexts. It is the structural fault-lines and dynamics of global capitalism that place human freedom on the historical agenda. This is by virtue of its production of a global proletariat, its binding of their life-chances to the vagaries of the global marketplace, its universalization of surplus value and its massive expansion of the forces of production. These dynamics generate the economic prerequisites of universal free-flourishing whilst at the same time reproducing its actual determinate absence at the centre

Conclusion 331 of contemporary social life. Nonetheless, if Marx’s materialist dialectics establish that objective socio-historical conditions are ripe for eudaimonia, it is still the task of critical philosophy to rationally explore the issue of why the abolition of power2 relations is a moral necessity. This foregrounds the issue of what constitutes human emancipation. Why should the abolition of stratification systems or hierarchical social relations (seen by Bhaskar and Marx as essential conditions of the eudaimonic society) be necessary to the project of human emancipation or the maximum free flourishing of each and all? After all, the traditional argument of conservatives is that any attempt at wholesale transformation in the direction of socialist equality is antithetical to human freedom because counter-productive, and because contrary to human nature in crucial ways. Why should agents potentially conceive of this as being fundamental to the possibility of freedom? It seems to me correct to grasp the moral necessity of Bhaskar’s eudaimonia in terms of our unfolding normative dialectical self-understanding of the needs and capacities of our essential common social being-in-nature, and of the social conditions necessary for free flourishing of each and all to be possible. We see evidence of this process all around us. For example, the radical elements of the fast-growing anti-capitalist and ecology movements today are not against capitalist globalization because they are for localism and against ‘industrialism’, but rather because they want to champion ‘one world’ of cultural diversity united in its respect of common human needs and interests and values. This is a humanized globalization, based on an understanding of ourselves as social beings linked together by our interdependencies with each other (to ‘do good’ to all others of the ‘same natural kind’) and with nature, not the globalization of multinational companies and reified market forces.19 For sure, it is contemporary social conditions (universalization of capital, its potentials and liabilities) that have shaped this new outlook, but this does not alter the fact that this new rational consciousness is articulating old truths (at the level of the real rather than the actual) about what it means to be human.

Human emancipation in the twenty-first century Following Marx, I have argued (Chapters 3 and 5) that progressive societal change depends on the alignment of structural and social malintegration, the translation of structural contradictions into deepening ideological polarization along class lines and of generalizing and intensifying resistance by the exploited and oppressed to the institutions of class domination. This potentially will render the ‘free flourishing of each and all’ a historical reality. As Bhaskar rightly says: This suggests the possibility of a dialectic of globalising self-consciousness which may presage movement in the direction of a totalising depth praxis partially offsetting the dialectical lag of transformative agency behind social structures, with endemic crisis tendencies, so that the extrinsic enabling conditions for change are satisfied too. If this were so, the unity of theory

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Conclusion and practice would be satisfied in practice and geo-historical directionality . . . would catch up with dialectical rationality. And we would be on the way to universal human autonomy.20

Why is this a powerful objective impulse of the present-day world order? Because the developmental logic of contemporary globalizing capitalism, together with its universalizing and proliferating absences, and the impulses the system generates to collective critical consciousness and struggle, is bringing together a global alignment of the subjective and objective factors necessary to support a revolutionary recasting of social relations.21 I have shown (Chapter 5) that the crisisridden development of the forces of production under capitalism has massively expanded the size of the global proletariat, so that it seems likely to overtake the peasantry as the largest single class grouping of late modernity during the first half of the new century. I have also affirmed (Chapter 5) Marx’s argument that the working class alone possesses the objective potential to usher in socialist eudaimonia, for two main reasons. First, the proletariat is the only historical class which is freed from all property (or which is denied sufficient property to earn a living), and so the only class with objective vested interests in bringing the forces of production under collective democratic control. Second, members of the proletariat alone possess the structural capacities (massive collective power at the point of production and within the strategic urban nodal points of the system) to disrupt or undermine the production and realization of surplus value upon which the profitability of capitalism depends. This means that the proletariat is uniquely placed to challenge the very material presuppositions of modern property relations, and never more so than at the start of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the intensifying structural contradictions of the system (between forces of production and relations of production) are feeding increasingly into generalized social malintegration on an international scale. As Simon Clarke rightly says: The alternation of boom and slump, the coexistence of overwork and unemployment, of staggering wealth alongside devastating poverty, of concentrations of power alongside hopeless impotence, is as much a feature of capitalism today as it was a century or more ago. The sense of a world beyond human control, of a world driven to destruction by alien forces, is stronger today than it has ever been. The gulf between the bland assurances of the bourgeois economist and the reality of life for the mass of the world’s population has never been wider.22 This means, as Harvey observes, that ‘anti-capitalist struggle is to be found . . . everywhere. There is not a region in the world where manifestations of anger and discontent with the capitalist system cannot be found’.23 This provides us with good reasons for dispensing with the historical pessimism that has afflicted much of the left over the past 20 years in favour of what Harvey calls a cautious theoretically informed ‘optimism of the intellect’.24

Conclusion 333 I conclude that socio-historical materialism may be legitimately underlaboured by Bhaskar’s moral realism, but nonetheless is required to situate Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom within a sociological context that allows the analyst to explore the structural factors that facilitate and constrain human emancipation in the current epoch. Bhaskar’s rational directionality of dialectical universalization (in human self-consciousness), if it is to become translated into real geo-historical progress, still depends on the proletariat placing itself at the very centre of the struggle for human emancipation. This will obviously involve forming alliances with other oppressed groups, but will require that the workers draw especially on their structural capacities to undermine the capitalist system. Marxism itself has an indispensable role to play in this process, not simply by virtue of its status as the best critical social theory of capitalist modernity, but by virtue of its affirmation of an englobing emancipatory politics that will take humanity beyond capitalism. For, as Harvey rightly says, one ‘of the historical strengths of Marxism has been its commitment to synthesize diverse struggles with divergent and multiple aims into a more universal anti-capitalist movement’.25

Notes

1 Critical realism and dialectic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

Bhaskar (1978). Bhaskar (1998a), p. 2. Bhaskar (1998a), p. 25. Bhaskar (1998a), p. 3. Brown (2002), p. 170. Bhaskar (1978), p. 36. Bhaskar (1978), p. 29. Bhaskar (1998a), pp. 23–4. Bhaskar (1998a) p. 25. Bhaskar (1998a), p. 25. Bhaskar (1986), p. 35. Bhaskar (1998a), p. 25. Collier (1994), pp. 34–8. D.-H. Ruben argues, successfully I think, that philosophy must base itself as well on the results (i.e. theories, concepts, knowledges, etc.) of the empirical sciences, not simply on their rational procedures or actualities (Ruben, 1977, pp. 128–33). Dennett (1996), pp. 81–3. Collier (1994), p. 46. Callinicos (1996a), p. 107. Rose et al. (1984), pp. 277–8. Collier (1994), p. 109. Bhaskar (1978), p. 119. Collier (1994), p. 110. Bhaskar (1978), p. 115. Sayer (1992), p. 119. Sayer (1992), p. 105. Bhaskar (1989a), p. 63. Collier (1994), p. 172. Collier (1994), p. 172. Creaven (2000), p. 86. This is Marx’s own humanist-naturalist position articulated frequently (though never theorized) throughout his writings. See Marx (1976), pp. 275, 277, 341, 375–6, 460, 586, 591, 621, 772; Marx (1971), pp. 86, 800, 826, 837, 854; Marx (1972a), pp. 117–18; Marx (1973), p. 488; Marx and Engels (1975a), p. 217; Marx and Engels (1976), pp. 78, 255, 437, 439. Creaven (2000), p. 279. Bhaskar (1993), p. 2. Bhaskar (1993), p. xiii. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 561.

Notes

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33 Bhaskar (1998b), p. 579. 34 Bhaskar (1993), p. 581. 35 Bhaskar (1993), p. 2. By ‘constellational closure’ Bhaskar does not attribute to Hegel the view that history simply ceases, that change no longer occurs. Rather, Bhaskar’s argument is that the forms of capitalist modernity forever bound change for Hegel, after identity between subject and object has been achieved. Change is constellationally closed, i.e. bound within the limits of the structure or system of modernity. 36 Bhaskar (1998b), p. 582. 37 Bhaskar (1993), p. 585. 38 Brown (2002), p. 175. 39 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 172–3. 40 Bhaskar (1998b), p. 586. 41 Bhaskar (1993), p. 3. 42 Bhaskar (1993), p. 396. 43 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 98–9. 44 Bhaskar (1993), p. 180. 45 Brown (2002), p. 173. 46 Thus elsewhere Bhaskar describes Hegel’s philosophy (1993, p. 91) as ‘atomist, punctualist, extensionalist and individualist, expressivist-holist, blockist, intensionalist and collectivist’. I have to admit that the meaning of most of these ‘dialectical’ insults escapes me. 47 This does not imply that Bhaskar does not find much of value in Hegel’s philosophy. Aside from endorsing the ‘rational kernel’ of Hegel’s dialectic (the logic of negativity in conceptual thought), Bhaskar points out that Hegel provides ‘brilliant diagnoses of real, including non-logical, dialectical contradictions of civil society which he never sublates’ (1993, p. 64). Bhaskar argues that these elements of Hegel’s thought are inconsistent with his teleological idealism and cognitive triumphalism. 48 Bhaskar (1993), p. 176. 49 Bhaskar (1993), p. xiv. 50 Bhaskar (1993), p. 5. 51 Bhaskar (1993), p. xiv. 52 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 4–5. 53 Collier (2002), p. 158. 54 Bhaskar (1993), p. 27. 55 Bhaskar (1993), p. 95. 56 Bhaskar (1993), p. 7. 57 Bhaskar (1993), p. 47. 58 Bhaskar (1993), p. 46. 59 Bhaskar (1993), p. 5. 60 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 5–6. 61 Bhaskar (1993), p. 56. 62 Therefore, such relations might be better understood as ‘internal–external relations’ or ‘external-within-internal relations’, since they are obviously internal in the sense of being elements of a human-social ensemble or totality, yet external in the sense I have described. 63 Bhaskar (1993), p. 56. 64 Bhaskar (1993), p. 58. 65 Bhaskar (1993), p. 125. 66 Bhaskar (1993), p. 58. 67 Bhaskar (1993), p. 2. 68 Bhaskar (1993), p. 62. 69 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 60–1, 58. 70 Callinicos (1994), p. 9. 71 Rees (1998, pp. 69–97) cogently outlines this example, and others, of the dialectical

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117

Notes approach in classical Marxism – including the logic of capital, the theory of alienation, the dialectic of history and the dialectic of nature. Marx (1959), p. 67. Creaven (2000), pp. 71–9. Marx (1970), pp. 20–1. Creaven (2000), pp. 58–63, 233–9. Marx (1973, 1976). Creaven (2002a), pp. 131–54; Rees (1998), pp. 61–125; Sayers (1996). Bhaskar (1998b), p. 644. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 562. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 645. Bhaskar (1993), p. 126. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 563. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 646. Bhaskar (1993), p. 9. Bhaskar (1998b), pp. 34–5, 36. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 40. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 30. Bhaskar (1998b), pp. 40–1. Bhaskar (1993), p. 160. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 566. Bhaskar (1993), p. 264. Bhaskar (1993), p. 154. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 645. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 659. Bhaskar (1993), p. 115. Bhaskar (1993), p. 62. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 566. Bhaskar (1993), p. 153. Bhaskar (1993), p. 153. Bhaskar (1993), p. 202. Bhaskar (1993), p. 374. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 646. Bhaskar (1993), p. 182. Bhaskar (1993), p. 175. Bhaskar (1993), p. 242. Bhaskar (1993), p. 299. Bhaskar (1993), p. 180. Bhaskar (1993), p. 264. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 263–4. Bhaskar (1993), p. 372. Bhaskar (1993), p. 263. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 170–1. Bhaskar (1993), p. 381. Bhaskar (1993), p. 300. Bhaskar elaborates (1993, p. 98): ‘But it is contingent upon a transformed transformative totalising transformist praxis (which will revolve in large part around hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles in the context of discursively moralised power2 relations), itself dependent upon the rationality of agents and the contingency of accidents in a contradiction-riven but open systemic world whether freedom or rational autonomy of action will be’. Bhaskar (1993), p. 3. Marx (1971), p. 817. Or see the labour-process as an integral part of the forces of production. See Marx (1976), chapter 7.

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118 Marx (1970), pp. 20–1. 119 Bhaskar (1993), p. 44. 120 As I intend to demonstrate, there are nonetheless profound problems with Bhaskar’s ‘negative dialectics’. 121 Bhaskar (1993), p. 160. 122 Bhaskar (1993), p. 163. 123 Bhaskar (1993), p. 44. 124 Bhaskar (1998b), p. 619. 125 Archer (1995), p. 138. 126 Archer (2000), pp. 121–53. 127 Dennett (1996). 128 Creaven (2000), pp. 48–58. 129 For example, Bhaskar’s distinction between epistemological and metaepistemological dialectics, and his concept of relational dialectics, are unnecessary complications of his typology of different modes of dialectic, which advance his case not one iota. 130 I suppose it could be objected to my argument that this comparison is unfair, because Bhaskar is first and foremost a philosopher, not a sociologist or political activist. This would have some merit if Bhaskar himself did not see his project as directly supportive of emancipatory politics and social science, which he obviously does. But the classical Marxists were simultaneously philosophers, social theorists and political activists, because they recognized that philosophy ‘left to its own devices’ was prone to abstractionism and theoreticism, just as a politics uninformed by critical social theory and philosophy was shallow and narrowly pragmatist, and the often unwitting prisoner and instrument of power. The task was to unify practice and theory in practice as practice. 131 Bhaskar (1993), pp. 98–9. 132 Bhaskar (1993), p. 67. 133 Bhaskar (1993), p. 56. 134 Collier (2002), p. 163. 135 Collier (2002), pp. 159, 164. 136 See especially: Arthur (1986); Murray (1988); Rose et al. (1984); Sayers (1996, 1998); Smith (1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1999). 137 I will explore this issue in Chapter 2. 138 Callinicos (1994), p. 15. 139 Bello (2001, 2002); Bond (2002); Bourdieu (1998); Bové and Defour (2002); Danaher and Burbach (2000); George (1994); Klein (1990, 2002); Neale (2002). 140 Bhaskar (1993), p. 203. 141 It should be pointed out that a large part of the blame for this ‘uncertain status’ and ‘limited appeal’ of Dialectic cannot be laid at Bhaskar’s door. Dialectical philosophy, because it is necessarily a challenge to static common sense and a movement beyond formal logic, is inevitably complex and difficult up to a point. Often the accusation of ‘bad writing’ directed against Bhaskar by critical realists functions as an excuse not to engage with dialectical critical realism, to disregard the genuinely challenging and radical aspects of his dialectical reworking of critical realist categories. 142 Bhaskar (1993), p. 155. 143 Bhaskar (1993), p. 159. 144 Bhaskar (1998a), pp. 25–6, 174. 145 Bhaskar (1989b), p. 76. 146 Bhaskar (1998a), p. 78. 147 Giddens (1979, 1984). 148 Archer (2000), pp. 121–53. 149 Archer (1995), pp. 143–5.

338 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

178 179

Notes Bhaskar (1993), p. 158. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 159–60. Creaven (2000), pp. 48–58. Archer (1995), pp. 247–93. Creaven (2000), pp. 154–203. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 585. Engels (1975a), p. 459. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 565. Bhaskar (1993), p. 117. Trotsky (1973a), p. 49. Trotsky (1973b), pp. 400–1. Trotsky (1973a), p. 52. Bhaskar (1993), p. 61. Marx (1971), p. 87, cited in Callinicos (1998), p. 97. Engels (1982), p. 496. Creaven (2000), pp. 32–40. Lenin, cited in Rees (1998), p. 274. Trotsky (1986), p. 77, cited in Rees (1994), p. 121. Hence Bhaskar refers to the ‘simple reflection theory of dialectical materialism’ (1993, p. 217), ‘the poverty of most materialist dialectical philosophy’ (1993, p. 300), the ‘empiricism’ of diamat (1993, p. 352) and to the ‘unhappy consciousness of the split between the objectivist processual empiricism of dialectical materialism and the characteristically subjectivist totalising idealism of western Marxism’ (1993, p. 363). Bhaskar does not distinguish between the mechanical materialism of ‘orthodox’ dialectical materialism and the progressive ontological dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition (which did not suffer from these defects), a line of descent from Engels, through to Lenin and Trotsky, on to Ilyenkov, and finally to more contemporary thinkers in the Trotskyist political current and in major branches of contemporary science. This makes his ontological dialectic appear more revolutionary than in fact it is. Bhaskar (1993), p. 301. Molyneux (1985), pp. 34–40, 54–64. Creaven (2000), pp. 238–51. See Chapter 3 for a full specification of this argument. Bhaskar (1993), p. 162. Bhaskar (1993), p. 333. I explore this body of theory in Chapter 4. Engels (1972a). Harman (1994, pp. 129–42) offers an excellent account of the historical origins of women’s subordination from a Marxist perspective, drawing upon a wide range of anthropological sources, and basing his account on the research findings of Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists and cultural anthropologists. German (1989) and Vogel (1983) develop penetrating Marxist analyses of women’s oppression in contemporary capitalism. Again, I explore this body of theory in Chapter 4. Collier (2002, p. 16) argues this point very well. This has not stopped some Marxists trying to claim Bhaskar’s dialectical critical naturalism for socio-historical materialism. In his Plato, Etc., Bhaskar does affirm that the Marxist thesis of the ‘primacy of the mode of production and reproduction’ is ‘heuristically acceptable’ (Bhaskar, 1994, pp. 101–2). Does this commit him to socio-historical materialism at least until 1994? Probably not. There is no positive affirmation here of the primacy thesis or substantive analysis of how it might hold. Yet in Dialectic Bhaskar does appear to endorse the view that the capital–labour relation is the central dynamic of capitalism, and he does refer here to the global cultural domination of commodification. Again, some have taken this as a tacit endorse-

Notes

180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

210 211 212

339

ment on his part of the primacy thesis. But this is questionable. I have said that both Weberians and postmodernists are often happy enough with the idea that the commodification of culture is a global master trend. A culture of commodification may well be a ‘fateful power’ of contemporary society, but this does not rule out the possibility that there are other ‘fateful powers’ of equal weight and significance besides. Since Bhaskar regards capitalism as just one nexus of power-relations amongst a plurality of others, asserting the centrality of class relations here in the economic sphere is not the same thing as asserting their primacy in stratification systems per se. I conclude there is little that is distinctively Marxian about Bhaskar’s substantive social theory. Bhaskar (1993), p. 260. Bhaskar (1991), p. 145. Bhaskar (2000a), pp. ix, 51, 151–2. Bhaskar (1991), p. 145. Creaven (2000), pp. 85–9, 101–2, 279–80. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 584. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 173–4. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 618. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this book for this insight. Bhaskar (1993), p. 98. Rees (1998), pp. 170–201, 262–89. These arguments are clarified and substantiated in Chapter 2. Bhaskar (1993), p. 350. Bhaskar (1993), p. 333. Bhaskar (1993), p. 350. Bhaskar (1998b), p. 576. Molyneux (1985), pp. 41–53. Callinicos (1991), pp. 15–40; Rees (1991), pp. 29–70. Rees (1994), pp. 73–4. The materialist dialectics of the left Darwinians are explored in Chapter 2. Bhaskar (1978). Callinicos (1994), pp. 19–20. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 93–5. See Foster (2000) for an effective debunking of this view. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 348–51. Bhaskar (1993), p. 351. Creaven (2000), pp. 214–70. See Chapters 3–5. Bhaskar (1993), p. 352. Creaven (2000, pp. 214–21) presents a detailed critique of the charge that Marx’s social theory is a species of economic determinism. Bhaskar (1993), p. 180. Or, as Bhaskar puts it elsewhere: ‘Definitionally then, there is a conatus to deconstraint or freedom, in a depth dialectic and to the knowledge of the power2 relations constraining the satisfaction of wanted need. Absence will impose the geo-historical directionality that will usher in the truly human global society’ (Bhaskar, 1993, p. 169). Of course, Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom is not teleological, but if one followed Bhaskar’s example (exemplified by his critique of socio-historical materialism), one would find him guilty of the charge on the strength of these kinds of remarks. See also Creaven (2000), chapter 4. Bhaskar (1993), p. 351. Arguably, this is paralleled by a certain slippage in Bhaskar’s understanding of stratification and emergence in comparison to his earlier work. Here, instead of emergent strata being explained by those in which they are rooted, and hence determined by a

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213 214 215 216 217

218 219 220 221 222 223

224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

232 233 234

Notes specific pattern of complexity of interaction at the lower level, they are spontaneous innovations ‘out of pre-existing material from which they could have been neither induced or deduced’ (1993, p. 49). Of course, to point out that higher-order structures in society and elsewhere are ‘determined’ by underlying structures is not to resort to ‘greedy reductionism’. ‘Determination’ should be grasped in terms of stratification, rootedness and emergence, meaning that, for example, physical mechanisms explain biological mechanisms, or economic mechanisms explain political mechanisms, without ‘explaining them away’ (they remain efficacious in their own right). Bhaskar (1993), p. 176. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 43–4, 47–8, 49. Bhaskar (1993), p. 177. Bhaskar (1993), p. 46. In fairness to Bhaskar, he does not appear to endorse creation ex nihilo in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. But this makes this argument of Bhaskar’s for the possibility of negativity being prior or foundational to positivity a rather odd one. However, in From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, Bhaskar does appear to endorse creation ex nihilo. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 44–7. Bhaskar (1993), p. 44. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 45–6. Bhaskar (1993), p. 46. McGarr (1994), p. 166. This argument should not be taken to mean I dissent from Bhaskar’s view that absence is ontologically real. This is the rational core of his dialectic. Rather, I am saying that Bhaskar’s ontological prioritization of absence over presence is at least questionable and problematic. Porpora (2000b). Callinicos (1994), p. 12. Bhaskar (1993), p. 175. Bhaskar (1993), p. 229. Callinicos (1994), p. 12. Bhaskar (1993), p. 304. Bhaskar (1993), p. 67. Bhaskar actually finds much of value in Engels’ reworking of Hegel’s ‘three laws’, particularly his understanding of the ‘negation of the negation’ concept. Nonetheless rather more is required than the couple of pages Bhaskar devotes to Engels’ dialectical materialism in Dialectic (1993, pp. 150–2). My analysis of Chapter 2 builds on arguments of earlier work (Creaven, 2000, pp. 24–41; Creaven, 2002a, pp. 131–54). See Chapter 2 for a full elaboration of this argument. See my forthcoming Against the ‘Spiritual Turn’ of Critical Realism: From Transcendental Idealism to Materialist Dialectics.

2 Materialist dialectics 1 For reasons of time and space, I regret I have to focus here on the dialectic of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, to the exclusion of other important figures of classical Marxism, most notably Lukács, who also made a rich contribution to dialectical philosophy and applied dialectical analysis. 2 Marx (1976), p. 103. 3 Marx and Engels (1965), p. 100. 4 Marx (1976), p. 103. 5 Marx (1976), p. 102.

Notes

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6 My discussion of Hegelian dialectic, Marxian dialectic and the relationship between them is particularly informed by John Rees’s (1998) magisterial analysis of these issues. The reader will also detect the influence of Callinicos (1999) in the analysis that follows. 7 Hegel (1956), pp. 1–12. 8 Hegel (1956), p. 3. 9 Rees (1998), pp. 4–5. 10 McGarr (1994), p. 171. 11 Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 273. 12 Rees (1998), pp. 5–6. 13 Hegel (1977a), p. 2. 14 Marx and Engels (1987), p. 112. 15 Rees (1998), p. 46. 16 Hegel (1966), p. 67. 17 Hegel (1977a), p. 2. 18 Parsons (1951). 19 Lockwood (1964). 20 Rees (1998), p. 5. 21 Engels (1982), p. 6. 22 Hegel (1956, 1966, 1977a). 23 Hegel, quoted in Rees (1998, p. 45). 24 Callinicos (1999), pp. 47–50. 25 Hegel (1966), pp. 64–5. 26 Hegel (1977b), p. 156. 27 Rees (1998), p. 42. 28 Hegel (1977a), p. 263. 29 Hegel (1977a), p. 263. 30 Callinicos (1999), p. 51. 31 Rees (1998), pp. 43–4. 32 Hegel, cited in Rees (1998), p. 53. 33 Rees (1998), p. 43. 34 Hegel (1956), pp. 23–7, 73–7. 35 Hegel (1975), p. 89. 36 Callinicos (1999), pp. 53–4. 37 Hegel (1966), p. 484. 38 Hegel (1956), p. 77. 39 The argument of Rees (1998), which I endorse. 40 Marx (1973), p. 100. 41 Marx (1976), pp. 92, 174. 42 I am grateful to Tony Smith for this insight (referee report). 43 Lenin (1961), p. 276. 44 Lenin (1961), p. 359. 45 Lenin (1961), p. 221. 46 Lenin (1961), pp. 284, 360. 47 Lenin (1961), p. 360. 48 Lenin (1961), pp. 182, 195. 49 Lenin (1961), p. 171. 50 Marx (1976), p. 103. 51 Rees (1998), p. 190. 52 Murray (1988), p. xiv. 53 Gasper (1998), p. 143. 54 Lenin (1961), p. 130. 55 Lenin (1961), p. 208. 56 As Althusser (1990, p. 173) puts it.

342 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Notes Lenin (1960), pp. 214–17. Lenin (1960), pp. 55–7. Trotsky (1962), pp. 194–5. Lenin (1965). Carr (1966), pp. 53–9. Engels (1982), p. 6. For example, Marx uses ‘the negation of the negation’ concept to illuminate the transition from petty commodity production to capitalism in Capital (1976, pp. 713–15). More generally, Marx’s sketch of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism in Capital can be legitimately interpreted as drawing on these concepts. Marx and Engels (1987), pp. 12–13, 342–3. A point well made by Parekh (1979). Marx (1978), pp. 99–100; Marx and Engels (1975b), pp. 57–8. Marx and Engels’ ‘inversion’ of Hegel was first elaborated systematically in The German Ideology (1970). See especially Hegel (1966). Hegel (1977a), p. 117. Again, my account here draws heavily on John Rees’s excellent discussion of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic (1998, pp. 37–9). Rees (1998), p. 39. Hegel (1977a), p. 119. Rees (1998), p. 39. Marx and Engels (1970). This distinction between the Marxian and Hegelian dialectic was drawn out by Lenin (1972) and theorized more precisely by Trotsky (1986). As Hegel (cited in Rees, 1998, p. 31) puts it: ‘[S]pirit intervenes in the way the world is ruled. This is the infinite tool – then there are bayonets, cannon, bodies. But . . . neither bayonets, nor money, nor this trick or that, are the ruler. . . . They are necessary like the cogs and wheels of a clock, but their soul is time and spirit that subordinates matter to its laws’. Rees (1998), pp. 69–74. Trotsky (1986), p. 90. Marx and Engels (1987), p. 124. Engels (1982), p. 499. McGarr (1990, 1994) provides an excellent overview of these developments for laypersons (such as myself). I will summarize his argument in my section on ‘materialist dialectics and the natural sciences’ (pages 116–21). Dennett (1996), pp. 56–7. Molyneux (1985). Giddens (1997). Marx and Engels (1973a), p. 444. Engels (1980), p. 8. Marx and Engels (1988), p. 84. Marx and Engels (1965), p. 402. Marx (1959), p. 101. Marx and Engels (1970), pp. 57–8. Marx and Engels (1967), pp. 93–4. Marx (1971), p. 763. Gottlieb (1992), p. 46. Marx (1970), p. 21. Marx (1934b), p. 42. See Molyneux (1995) for an informed discussion of the relationship between Marxism and social determinism.

Notes 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

343

Magee (1987), p. 205. Scaff and Arnold (1985), p. 202. Spybey (1992), p. 19. Gottlieb (1992), p. 44. Marx and Engels (1970), p. 42. Marx (1959), pp. 67–9, 92–101. Kocka (1985), p. 195. Easton and Guddat (1967), pp. 415–16. Kocka (1985), p. 195. Marx (1959), pp. 95, 97–9. Marx (1976), p. 12. Popper (1957), p. 62. See for example Trigg (1985), pp. 180–4. Archer (1995), pp. 195–208. Callinicos (1983), pp. 178–200; Mandel (1983), pp. 197–220. Engels (1976), pp. 45–6. Marx (1971), pp. 251–2. Kocka (1985), p. 189. Kocka (1985), p. 190. Kocka (1985), p. 192. Marx and Engels (1988), p. 890. Marx (1959), p. 92. Marx et al. (1972), p. 285. Marx (1976), p. 175. Marx (1976), p. 175. Marx (1973), p. 657; Marx (1976), p. 742. Marx (1971), pp. 232, 235. Marx (1971), p. 249. Marx (1972a), p. 497. Weber (1970), pp. 191–219. The idea that Marx subscribed to the ‘iron law’ of wages has been shared by a number of illustrious critics, including Popper (1945). Marx (1976), p. 790. Marx (1956), pp. 414–15. Marx did subscribe to this ‘law’ up until 1848. Marx (1972b), p. 566. Marx and Engels (1973b, v 2), pp. 71–2. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 874. Hilferding (1981), p. 24. Marx and Engels (1977a), pp. 295–8. For example, one critical realist writer (Porpora, 2000a, p. 14) argues that since objective evidence is indecisive on the question of God’s existence, it is therefore rational for individuals to trust their own judgement on the matter, as this is informed by subjective experience. A point well made by Holbach (1856, p. 27), the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers (cited in Siegel, 1986: 9). Bhaskar (2002a, 2002b), p. 15. Siegel (1986), p. 36. Benton (1979), p. 122. Engels (1969), p. 442. This term was coined by Trotsky (1986), p. 97. Benton (1979), pp. 121, 125. Benton (1979), p. 126. Marx and Engels (1973a), pp. 339, 362–3. Trotsky (1973c), p. 214).

344 145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Notes Trotsky (1973c), p. 216. Trotsky (1986), p. 87. Trotsky (1986), p. 102. Trotsky (1986), pp. 96–7. Since teleological views of history attribute goals or purposes to evolution, which are immanent in its genesis, and towards the fulfilment of which it inevitably gravitates, it follows that theories of natural or social evolution are not necessarily teleological. Melvin Calvin, cited in Siegel (1986, p. 11). Dennett (1996). Marx and Engels (1987), p. 132. Rees (1998), p. 286. Engels (1976), pp. 45–6. McGarr (1994), p. 155. Engels (1982), p. 6. Freud’s mind – based on the dynamic unity-in-conflict of three functions or structures (Id, Ego and Superego) – is manifestly dialectical. Engels (1982), pp. 98–9. My account here is especially informed by McGarr (1994). This is an excellent discussion of the relationship between Engels’ dialectical materialism and the new physics. See also McGarr (1989, 1990). McGarr (1994), p. 162. Marx and Engels (1973a), pp. 231–3. McGarr (1994), pp. 162–3. McGarr (1994), p. 163. Rose et al. (1984), p. 288. McGarr (1994), p. 163. Rose et al. (1984), p. 288. Porpora (2000b). Bhaskar (1998a). McGarr (1994), p. 168. McGarr (1990), pp. 147–8. McGarr (1994), p. 168. McGarr (1994), p. 168. Prigogine and Stengers (1984), p. 252. Marx and Engels (1987), pp. 22–3. Rose (1997), pp. 27–8. Marx and Engels (1987), p. 22. McGarr (1994), p. 167. McGarr (1994), pp. 166–7, 170–1. Levins (1996) and Levins and Lewontin (1985, pp. 267–88) provide excellent summaries of these key concepts of a dialectical understanding. Levins (1996), p. 76. Dawkins (1986). Rose, et al. (1984), pp. 270–4; Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 85–106. Dawkins (1976); Wilson (1975, 1978); Lumsden and Wilson (1981). Rose et al. (1984), pp. 268–70, 276–7, 281–2. Rose (1997), p. 236. Rose et al. (1984), pp. 286–7. Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 272–3, 274. Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 278, 277. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 280. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 279. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 282.

Notes 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240

345

Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 280. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 281. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 282. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 285. Rose et al. (1984), p. 278. Rose et al. (1984), pp. 279–81. Rose et al. (1984), p. 282. Rose et al. (1984), p. 11. Creaven (2000), pp. 48–58, 71–89, 181–203. Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 260–4. Rose (1997), p. 125. Rose (1997), p. 164. Rose (1997), p. 130. Parrington (1998), p. 111. Parrington (1998), p. 112. Sober (1993, p. 312), cited in Callinicos (1997), p. 11. Sober (1993, p. 313), cited in Callinicos (1997), p. 110. Parrington (1998), p. 113. Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 85–106. Gould (1991), p. 289. Rose (1997), p. 235. Leakey and Lewin (1992), pp. 164–7. Rose et al. (1984), p. 272. Rose et al. (1984), p. 273. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 55. Rose et al. (1984), p. 273. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 277. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 100. Marx and Engels (1987), pp. 494–5. Rose (1997), p. 142. Parrington (1998), pp. 112–13. Parrington (1998), p. 112. Engels (1982), p. 495; Engels (1969), p. 77. See Eldredge (1996). Rose (1997), p. 236. McGarr (1994), pp. 154–5. Levins (1996), p. 65. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 268. McGarr (1994), p. 154. Callinicos (1998), p. 100. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 268. Callinicos (1998), p. 100. Levins and Lewontin (1985), pp. 286–7. The latter happened, for example, when the limits of mechanical determinism were exposed by the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s. As, for example, many philosophers of science do. See especially Kuhn (1970), who sees science as moving through incommensurable ‘paradigm shifts’, in response to external pressures and internal contradictions. Haldane, cited in McGarr (1994, p. 165). Bhaskar (1993), p. 44. Bhaskar and Norrie (1998), p. 562. Levins and Lewontin (1985), p. 279.

346

Notes

3 Socio-historical materialism 1 Marx and Engels (1967), p. 79. 2 Marx (1970), pp. 20–1. 3 Lukács (1971) and Althusser (1965)/Althusser and Balibar (1968) are the classic representatives of the two sides of this dualism. 4 Bhaskar (1978). 5 Creaven (2000), pp. 32–41. 6 Archer (1995), p. 14. 7 Archer (1995), p. 1. 8 Archer (1995), pp. 58–92. 9 See Creaven (2000, pp. 147–52, 208–14) for a discussion of the nature, role and determinations of ‘social interests’. 10 Marx (1934a), p. 12. 11 Archer (1995), pp. 135–61. 12 Cohen (1968), p. 93. 13 Andrew Collier (1989, pp. 58–61), to whom I owe this useful distinction between vertical and horizontal causality in social analysis, argues that socio-historical materialism is defensible only as a thesis of vertical determination (of superstructure by base). But I cannot see how this understanding of Marxism can support a materialist theory of history (or historical materialism), as opposed to a materialist theory of social structure (or sociological materialism). 14 Creaven (2000) offers a detailed specification of this argument. 15 Creaven (2000), pp. 40–67, 204–76, 277–81. 16 Creaven (2000), pp. 41–8, 71–141, 142–203, 277–81. 17 Creaven (2000), pp. 109–14, 118–36. 18 Anderson (1983a), p. 54. 19 Creaven (2000), pp. 112–13, 114–19. 20 Arthur (1970), p. 23. 21 Collier (1989), p. 98. 22 Marx and Engels (1973a), p. 13. 23 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 42. 24 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 121. 25 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 47. 26 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 122. 27 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 64. 28 Geras (1983). 29 Elster (1985), pp. 64–6. 30 Geras (1983), pp. 61–2, 69–73, 83–6. 31 Marx (1959), p. 68. 32 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 42 (my emphasis). 33 Marx and Engels (1975a), p. 333. 34 Marx (1959), p. 69. 35 Marx (1973), p. 83. 36 Marx (1973), p. 84. 37 Marx and Engels (1970), p. 48. For Marx, ‘species-being’ is in part definable as ‘my needs . . . my own nature, this totality of needs and drives’ (Marx, 1973, p. 245). 38 Geras (1983), pp. 72–3, Heller (1976), pp. 23–5, 44–8, 75–8, 96–9, 123–6. 39 Even ardent defenders of analytical individualism have noted the universal existence in human society of such norms as ‘reciprocal altruism’, ‘distributive justice’ and ‘fairness’. George Homans (1964), for example, was prepared to acknowledge their salience in human history, although his theoretical interests and political values led him to attempt to colonize them for utilitarianism.

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40 For a useful discussion of ‘structural capacities’ see Wright (1978, pp. 99–101) and Callinicos (1987b, pp. 86–91, 132–3, 184–7, 235–6). 41 German (1996), pp. 7–20, 21–61. 42 Creaven (2000), pp. 48–58, 71–89. 43 Creaven (2000), pp. 236–8. 44 Creaven (2000), pp. 48–58. 45 Creaven (2000), pp. 238–51. 46 I elaborate this argument in Chapter 4. 47 As Childe (1963, pp. 155–6) puts it: ‘The accumulation of a substantial . . . surplus in the temple treasuries – or rather granaries – was actually the occasion of the cultural advance that we have taken as the criterion of civilization’. 48 Childe (1963), pp. 12–21. 49 Childe (1963), pp. 21–30. 50 Timpanaro (1975), pp. 40–1, 43–52. 51 Collier (1989, 2004). 52 Timpanaro (1975), pp. 401–3, 428–33. 53 Labriola (1966), p. 20. 54 Labriola (1966), p. 217. 55 Timpanaro (1975), pp. 48–52. 56 This dilemma has relatively recently been posed within Marxism (Collier, 1989, pp. 54–5). 57 For example, this view was held by Karl Kautsky (1976, pp. 48–9; 1968), leading theoretician of the Second International. 58 For example, this view was held by Auguste Comte (see Mill, 1966) and, more recently, by David McClelland (1961). 59 This is the analytical and theoretical pluralism exemplified by Max Weber, and by contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner and Theda Skocpol. 60 Harman (1986), p. 8. 61 Kautsky (1953). 62 Weber (1958). 63 See also Weber (1961, 1978). In these latter works, Weber situates Protestantism in a historical chain of economic, political, military and cultural processes, in his explanation of capitalist origins, although he clearly privileges cultural developments over political and economic developments, and political developments over economic developments. 64 Weber (1968, v.2), p. 61. 65 See especially: Amin (1976, chapter 1); Rodinson (1977); Siegel (1986, pp. 158–60, 180–1). 66 Siegel (1986), pp. 139–46, 156–6. 67 Siegel (1986), pp. 155–6. 68 A point well made by Weber himself. Weber (1960, pp. 35–6) identifies the caste system of social stratification, not Hinduism per se, as being responsible for India’s failure to undergo capitalist development. The fact that this insight is not consistent with Weber’s overall argument – that ‘ideological differences’ explain why capitalism arose in the Occident but not in the Orient – is disguised by the fact that he conflates the subjective and objective (or the ideational and structural) dimensions of caste society. 69 Siegel (1986), pp. 172–3. See also Rodinson (1977, p. 14). 70 Siegel (1986), pp. 70–82. 71 Weber (1958), p. 53. 72 Weber (1958), p. 175. 73 Le Goff (1988), pp. 72, 73–4, 76, 77. 74 Spybey (1992), pp. 64–5. This is especially damaging to Weber’s case, since his

348

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Notes argument is that capitalistic activity prior to Protestant influence was non-rational, centred largely on piracy, speculation and unequal exchange. Holmes (1975), Braudel (1984), p. 124. Woytinsky and Woytinsky (1955). Siegel (1986), pp. 171–3, 178–80. Harman (1989a), pp. 36–7, 47–9, 57–60, 61–5, 73–5. Amin (1976), pp. 33–4. This is the rational core of Weber’s theory. Harman (1999), pp. 182–218. Bhaskar (1978), p. 13. Engels (1980), p. 10. Engels (1972b), p. 299. Coulson and Riddell (1970), p. 81. Harman (1986), p. 14. Spybey (1992), pp. 16–17. Harman (1986), p. 14. Archer (1995), p. 201. Archer (1995), pp. 203–5. Archer (1995), pp. 213–18. Archer (1995), pp. 205–8. For example, as Brenner (1998) and Smith (1992, pp. 9–30) have demonstrated, the recent failure of the North American working class to draw upon their class capacities to resist the successive waves of labour market rationalization and downsizing resulted in a disastrous drop in average income together with a significant increase in the average length of the working day during the 1980s and 1990s. See Archer (2003). Marx and Engels (1967), p. 79. Marx (1970), pp. 20–1. Cohen (1978). Cohen (1978), p. 134. Levine (1984), pp. 164–74; Callinicos (1987, pp. 58–64) provides an excellent summary. Levine (1984), p. 164. Giddens (1981a), p. 20. Harman (1986), pp. 17, 19. Spybey (1992), p. 17. Spybey (1992), pp. 12–17. Wright (1983), p. 26. Cohen (1978), p. 156. Wright (1983), p. 26. Giddens (1981a, 1985); Mann (1986, 1993). Wright (1983), p. 31. Wright (1983), p. 27. Wright (1983), p. 28. As Walter Rodney (1972, p. 7) puts it: ‘Economically, each succeeding stage [of social evolution] represented development in the strict sense that there was increased capacity to control the material environment and thereby to create more goods and services for the community. The greater quantity of goods and services were based on greater skills and human inventiveness. Man was liberated in the sense of having more opportunities to display and develop his talents. Whether man uplifted himself in a moral sense is open to dispute. The advance of production increased the range of powers which sections of society had over other sections, and it multiplied the violence that was part of the competition for survival and growth amongst social groups. It is not at all clear that a soldier serving in capitalism in the last world war was less “primitive” in the elemental sense of the word than a soldier serving in one

Notes

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121

122

123

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of Japan’s feudal armies in the sixteenth century. . . . Nevertheless we do know that in th[e]se . . . respective epochs . . . feudalism, capitalism – the quality of life improved. It became less hazardous and less uncertain, and members of society had greater choice over their destinies. All of that is involved when the word “development” is used’. Spybey (1992), p. 17. Sahlins (1974). Harman (1999), pp. 10–16. Spybey (1992), p. 17. Childe (1954); Harman (1994, 1999); Henry (1989); Katz (1997); Maisels (1993); Megaw (1987); Renfrew (1973). Harman (1999), pp. 13–14. See also Childe (1954) and Megaw (1987). Childe (1954); Harman (1999), pp. 17–21. See Russell (1989) for a useful discussion of the concept of the tributary mode of production. Basically, the concept of the tributary mode of production denotes a mode of class domination in pre-capitalist agrarian societies, in which the direct agricultural producers are compelled to surrender a portion of their produce as tax (‘tribute’) to a centrally organized urban ruling class normally headed by either a royal court, or temple elites, or warrior aristocracy (or combination of all three), and administered by a bureaucracy of top state officials. In other words, class power in the tributary mode is organized as state power, rather than based on private ownership of land, as in feudalism. Tributary modes were the dominant form of precapitalist class domination outside feudal Europe. Yet in practice, of course, the tributary mode tended to co-exist with variants of the feudal and slave-owning modes in most of the Asiatic societies. Amin (1976); Anderson (1974); Cohen (1978); Connah (2001); Davidson (1984a); Duby (1976); Elvin (1973); Habib (1995); Haeger (1975); Harman (1989a, 1999, pp. 106–60); Hayter (1990); Kosambi (1965, 1975); Le Goff (1988); Mo (1971); Rodney (1972); White (1972); Woytinsky and Woytinsky (1955). Habib (1995); Harman (2004); Ronan and Needham (1978–96); Sharma (1999). As Harman (2004, p. 66) notes: ‘By the 12th century [China] had most of the productive techniques which were associated with the rise of capitalism in western Europe 500 years later. There was widespread use of “free” labour. And there was a merchant class capable of exerting influence on the state’. As Habib (1995) notes, from the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth century in India, machine production, commerce, money-relations and urbanization were developing along the same trajectory as in Western Europe. Prior to that, in medieval India, there were major advances in agricultural techniques and levels of output, which paralleled those taking place in Europe. These developments enabled the later growth of commercial agriculture feeding urban expansion (Sharma, 1999, pp. 102–3), which is the same basic pattern of European feudal development. Braudel (1984); Burke (1986); Davidson (1984a). Yet it is important to stress this developmental tendency of the forces of production globally was a fitful and uneven process. There were ups and downs in particular regions even if there was progress overall. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, right up until 500 BC, there was ‘a rapid growth of urban crafts, flourishing internal trade and international trading networks which stretched to Vietnam, Indonesia and China in one direction and to the Roman Mediterranean in the other’. But this process went into decline from the 6th century AD under the auspices of the caste system of social stratification based on village communities (Harman, 2004, pp. 66–7). This regional decline was more than compensated for, however, by an upsurge of economic development (including in trade, long-distance banking practices, seafaring and textiles) right across the Middle East and North Africa under Islamic influence, allowing one commentator to describe this period as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ (Lewis, cited in Harman, 2004, p. 67).

350 124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Notes Harman (1986), p. 18. Marx (1934a), p. 111. Marx and Engels (1987), p. 22. Spybey (1992), p. 17. Callinicos (1987b), p. 62. Callinicos (1987b), pp. 60–2. See also Brenner (1986, pp. 28–33). But, in fairness to Callinicos (1987b, p. 92), he retracts this strong position a few pages later! ‘I think we can agree with Wright . . . that there is at least a “weak impulse” for the productive forces to develop through history. Other things being equal, the direct producers will adopt innovations which reduce the burden of toil’. Indeed, but this is not consistent with Callinicos’s earlier assertion that the rationality or otherwise of agents developing the forces of production is determined by the specific nature of their relations of production. Nor is this consistent with Brenner’s view (endorsed by Callinicos) that there was no systematic impulse whatsoever for ‘productivity enhancing investment’ in pre-capitalist societies (including and especially feudalism), which could be achieved only under ‘specific structural conditions’ (capitalism), that even extensive growth was weak in feudal conditions and consisted of simply bringing new land under the plough and the political centralization of land, or that as a consequence the only long-term trend of the feudal mode was towards stagnation. Crombie (1972), p. 240. Duby (1976), p. 196. Roehl (1977), p. 133. White (1972), p. 146. Duby (1976), p. 103. A point well made by Bois (1992). Cohen (1982), p. LXXIX. Wright (1983), p. 29. Levine (1984), p. 58. Giddens (1990), p. 640. Levine (1984), p. 59. Bhaskar (1993), p. 56. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 58, 125. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 25–8. Callinicos (1987b), p. 54. Marx and Engels (1967), p. 79. Marx (1970), p. 20. Anderson (1983a), pp. 34–5. Anderson’s claim is that ‘classical Marxism, even at the height of its powers, provided no coherent answer’ to the problem of how ‘these two distinct kinds of causality [subject and structure, social and system integration] . . . are . . . to be articulated in the theory of historical materialism’. The main point of this chapter is to show that this is not an insuperable problem for a critical realist Marxism. Brenner (1977, 1982); Dobb (1946); Harman (1989a). Bois (1984); Brenner (1985, 1986); Duby (1976); Harman (1989a, 1999, pp. 147–55); Hilton (1991). Levine (1984), p. 170. Childe (1954), pp. 134–6. Elvin (1973). Harman (1999), pp. 80–6; de Ste Croix (1981), pp. 453–503; Jones (1974); Wickham (1984). Anderson (1974). Marx and Engels (1967), p. 79. Levine (1984), p. 172. Brenner (1985, 1986).

Notes 158 159 160 161 162 163

164 165 166 167

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Hill (1991, 1993); McGarr (1989); Soboul (1989). Levine (1984), p. 174. Cohen, cited in Callinicos (1987b), p. 63. Cohen, cited in Callinicos (1987b), p. 63. Levine (1984), pp. 174, 176. On some accounts, unlike in China and other parts of south Asia, the tributary mode of production was not established in India until the late medieval period (Habib, 1995). Before then, the feudal mode of production was the dominant economic form (Sharma, 1999). Weber (1951, 1958, 1960). Amin (1976), pp. 13, 16, 33–4; Wickham (1985), pp. 186–90. Wickham (1985), pp. 171–6. Harman (2004, p. 67) illustrates this point with the example of China under the T’ang dynasty where ‘the state kept tight control over the cities to prevent their inhabitants exhibiting any independence – walls divided the cities into separate wards, and police patrolled the streets at night to prevent people moving around’. Not even the massive crisis of Chinese absolutism of the fourteenth century could fracture centralized state domination over both the towns and the more productive areas of the agrarian economy. Right up to the period of China’s subordination to western imperialism and capitalism, the absolutist state bureaucracy enjoyed ‘far greater control than [existed] in feudal Europe or even in the monarchies of the 16th century’, used tax inspectors to harass traders, ‘and used its power to inhibit foreign trade’ (Dixin and Chengming, 2000, pp. 390, 391, 396). This meant that commercial agriculture based on wage-labour was unable to break free from local landlordism (protected by a state which underwrote serfdom and slave labour) and manufacture in the towns remained in the hands of petty traders and artisans (Dixin and Chengming, 2000, pp. 8, 18). In China, imperial control of commerce and trade was unshakeable, because the merchants relied on the canal system to transport goods and raw materials to markets in the urban centres, which could only be maintained by the central state. In India too the consolidation of the tributary state class as the major powerbroker made possible the radical suppression of capitalism and ultimate economic decline. As Harman (2004, pp. 74, 73) tells, the ‘conquests of northern India by armies from the north west of the subcontinent led to the . . . imposition of powerful, centralised political superstructures, which sapped productive resources and hampered further economic developments’. Here the new ‘monarchy followed a policy of moving its officials from area to area every few years so as to stop them ever establishing the independent local roots which would give them the ability to resist central control. But this meant the officials set out to enrich themselves as quickly as possible at the expense of the local people, showing little concern about sustaining, let alone increasing, the productivity of the land under their control’. I first developed this particular argument a number of years ago in a chapter originally intended for inclusion in my Marxism and Realism. Interestingly, Harman (2004, p. 68) has since reached similar conclusions based on his own historical researches. The superstructures in medieval Europe were weak and fragmented. A plethora of local lords struggled with each other to exploit and dominate the mass of people in each locality, often barely recognising the authority of kings or emperors who themselves were involved in continual dynastic conflicts. The main instrument of ideological control, the church, was organised along hierarchic lines of its own, with allegiance to popes in Rome (and at one point in Avignon) whose political ambitions often clashed with those of kings and lords alike. This fragmentation allowed the merchant and artisan classes to create

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Notes political space of their own, running many of the towns in which they resided, sometimes by agreement with local lords, princes and kings, sometimes in continual struggle against them. By the 14th century they were an independent element in the political geography of regions like northern Italy and Flanders; they were important components that enabled powerful monarchies to contract themselves in France, Spain and Britain in the 16th century; and they provided launching pads for the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th century (in Holland and England) and the late 18th century (in France).

169 170 171 172

173

174 175 176 177 178

Hayter (1990), pp. 36–7. Wickham (1985), p. 174. Wickham (1985), pp. 184–7. See also Harman (1989a), pp. 52–7. This seems a reasonable conclusion based on an analysis of the structural configuration of the tributary mode of production, though to my knowledge no one has made this argument. Whereas the serfs of medieval European feudalism could have as much as 40–50 per cent of their produce appropriated as rent by the landowning class, in the ‘Asiatic’ societies, the co-existence of feudalized and tributary relations of class domination often resulted in a rate of economic exploitation of the peasant cultivators significantly higher than this (Wickham, 1985). In thirteenth century Iraq, for example, it has been estimated that local landowners were able to appropriate between 30–40 per cent of the crop of the peasant producers under their dominion (always a minority of the total workforce), whereas the imperial state class (which exercised rights of surplus extraction over the entire country) was able to appropriate 25–35 per cent of the total wealth of the peasant economy. In a similar vein, in China and Khuzistan during the same period, local landowners tended to appropriate up to 50 per cent of the economic output of the peasants they controlled on their manors, whereas the tributary state tended to extort approximately 10 per cent of the total crop of the whole peasantry, both independent producers and serf-type labourers. It is plausible to believe that a higher rate of exploitation of the direct producers was a general feature of pre-capitalist societies where the tributary mode was structurally dominant over the feudal mode. It is also plausible to surmise that this would have meant a slower tempo of development of the forces of production than occurred in the feudal societies of Europe. Certainly, the double burden of rent and tax exploitation, as this intensified from the sixth century onwards, was responsible to a large extent for the stagnation of the forces of production of ancient Rome (Harman, 1999, p. 84). For example, the generalized peasant revolts in China against the feudal and tributary elites during the 1350s and 1630s, which caused the breakdown of centralized state control over the centre-south of the country and its weakening grip over the smallholding economy of the north (Wickham, 1985). See Elvin (1973, pp. 115–31) for an interesting account of the decline of the Chinese empire after the twelfth century AD. See Anderson (1974, pp. 502–9) for a useful analysis of the decline of the Islamic empire from the eleventh century onwards. Creaven (2000), pp. 240–7. Creaven (2000), pp. 247–51. Callinicos (1987b), pp. 184–93. Brenner (1986); Harman (1989a), pp. 52–7; Harman (1999), pp. 141–4; Le Goff (1988), pp. 57–9, 194–8; Kriedte (1981), pp. 95–7; Wickham (1985), pp. 184–7. Brenner (1993); Dobb (1946), pp. 57–71; Harman (1989a), pp. 57–67. The merchant class was, in fact, Janus-faced, with elements of its membership looking backwards towards feudalism and other elements looking to develop society in a capitalistic direction. In general, the wealthiest merchants tended to identify politically with the feudalists and the monarchy, and many of these used wealth from trade and piracy to buy their way into landlordism. The lesser merchants who were barred from the

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183 184 185 186 187 188 189

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monopolistic privileges of the guild system tended to side politically with the urban journeymen and artisans of the towns and agrarian capitalists. It was, of course, this ‘middling sort’ of petty capitalists and independent workers that provided the backbone of the English and French revolutions of 1640–88 and 1789–94 respectively. But it was nonetheless the expansion of overseas trade, pioneered by the big merchants, which played a crucial role in generating the economic conditions in which capitalism could develop, and thus helped undermine the old subsistence economy. These included expanding commodity production in town and country, to meet the rising urban demand for basic necessities and luxury goods, plus a huge surplus of loanable capital, some of which found its way into manufacturing industries and capitalist agriculture via the banking system. Gunder-Frank (1998). Mandel (1962, p. 117) estimates that the total profits obtained by the propertied and commercial classes of Western Europe from foreign trade, piracy, pillage and conquest between 1550 and 1815 (but excluding the wealth obtained from the sacking of the city states of south-west Africa) added up to more than a billion pounds sterling, or ‘more than the capital of all the industrial enterprises operating by steam which existed in Europe around 1800’. Hayter (1990, pp. 45–6) estimates that the ‘total British plunder of India between 1757 and 1815 amounted to £1,000 million; the national income of Britain in 1770 was about £125 million. Direct tribute payments through the East India Company approximated £1 million in some years. . . . For Britain alone, the profits from operations in the West Indies and India between 1760 and 1780 was probably more than double the amount of money available to invest in the new industries of the industrial revolution.’ Although it is undoubtedly true that much of this booty was sunk into landed property, squandered in luxury consumption, or used simply to expand trade, it would be naive to suppose that a significant portion of it did not find its way (via the banking system) into industrial production. This is especially likely since petty commodity production was already firmly established, especially in Western Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. Abu-Lughod (1989), p. 10. Bois (1984); Harman (1999, pp. 47–55); Hilton (1991); Postan (1975). These structural crises of the feudal mode of production had devastating human and social consequences. They resulted, for example, in a halving of the population of Normandy in the middle of the fourteenth century, and again in the following century. By 1460 the population of Normandy was barely half of what it had been in 1300 (Bois, 1984, pp. 53–78, 81–98, 114–21). More generally, as Bois (1984, p. 1) notes: ‘For more than a century . . . the greater part of the continent . . . suffered a massive decline in population and a regression in productive capacity. In scope and duration the phenomenon had no known historical precedent. It took place in an atmosphere of catastrophe: ceaseless epidemics, endemic war and its train of destruction, spiritual disarray, social and political disturbances’. Hill (1972, 1993); Manning (1991, 1992). Wickham (1985), p. 174. This happened, for instance, in the 880s, the 1350s and 1630s. Bhaskar (2000a, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). As Rosa Luxemburg once famously put it. A point made by Engels himself when specifying the relationship between polity and economy under capitalism (Engels, 1972b, p. 299). Harman (1986), p. 15. Yet the Development Thesis is grievously weakened, on Levine’s construction, by virtue of the fact that he has eliminated the mechanism which would allow a long-run historical tendency for social revolutions to be successful and to restore renewed development of the forces of production beyond the fetters of the old relations of production. Neale (1985), p. xiii.

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4 Stratification and power 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

And also in previous published work. See especially Creaven (2000). Giddens (1981a, 1985); Mann (1986, 1993). A point made by Callinicos (1995), p. 111. Scott (1996), pp. 8–10. Creaven (2000), pp. 63–8, 231–70. Clarke (1982), p. 219. Weber (1949), p. 26. Weber (1948), p. 357. Weber (1968, v 3), p. 941. Weber (1949), p. 29. Weber (1948), p. 180. Weber (1948), p. 181. Weber (1948), p. 301. Weber (1968, v 2) p. 937. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 927. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 937. Weber (1968, v 1), p. 932. Or as Weber puts it elsewhere: ‘ “Status” is a quality of social honour or a lack of it, and is in the main conditioned as well as expressed through a specific style of life’ (Weber, 1948, p. 405). Weber (1968, v 2), p. 937. Giddens (1992), p. 80. Weber (1948), p. 194. Weber (1948), p. 195. Weber (1948), p. 180. I will return to this issue in my critique of the concept of status ranking later in this chapter. Parsons (1940, 1949, 1953). Parsons (1953), p. 330. Incidentally, this should have been sufficient to alert sociologists to the inherent psychologism and conservatism of the concept of status ranking, but alas, the lesson was not learned. Parsons (1953), p. 330. Giddens (1981a), p. 242. Giddens (1990), pp. 206–9. Giddens (1981b), pp. 84, 131; Giddens (1981a), pp. 4, 113–17. Giddens (1981a), p. 107. Giddens (1981a), p. 108. Giddens (1981a), p. 4. Mann (1986). Mann (1986), p. 223. Mann (1993). Elster (1986), p. 116. Lee and Newby (1994), p. 201. Lee and Newby (1994), pp. 201–6. Giddens (1990), pp. 643–4. Weber (1948), pp. 188–90, 396–415; Weber (1960). Ironically, Weber argued that the Junkers were recovering their economic power, just as their capacity to exercise effective political and militarily power was in decline. This was because the Junkers were successfully transforming themselves into an economic class based on commercial agriculture (Weber, 1948, pp. 386–7), in effect ceasing to be a landed aristocracy. Much of Weber’s writings on the East Elbian ‘agrarian question’ expressed growing concern over the national consequences of this subversion from within of the Prussian aristocracy,

Notes

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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which for him had lamentable consequences for Germany’s status as a ‘Great Power’. Weber (1948), p. 301. Weber (1948), p. 190. Weber (1968, v 1), p. 306. Weber (1930). Weber (1948), p. 180. Harman (1999), p. 48. Siegel (1986), p. 138. Siegel (1986), p. 140. Kosambi (1965), p. 15. Siegel (1986), pp. 138–9. Srinavas (1962); Dumont (1970). Siegel (1986), p. 140. Thapar (1968), p. 46. Abecrombie et al. (1980). Scott (1985). Weber (1948), p. 187. Weber (1948), pp. 181–2. See, for example: Bottomore and Brym (1990); Crompton (1993); German (1996); Scott (1991, 1993, 1994); Westergaard and Resler (1975). Official social surveys tend to underestimate the inequalities in capitalist societies because they are based on the notoriously inaccurate reports of the propertied rich of the extent of their own wealth. Scott (1986, p. 5) cites statistics indicating that the top 5 per cent of the UK adult population owned 43 per cent of the total wealth, the top 10 per cent owned 66 per cent, the lower 75 per cent just 19 per cent, and the bottom 50 per cent just 6 per cent in the early 1980s. These statistics reveal far deeper wealth inequalities than those suggested by Social Trends surveys over the same period. However, since the 1980s, Social Trends surveys have shown a persistent trend towards the radicalization of wealth disparities in the UK. The 2005 survey (p. 80), for example, shows that the top 5 per cent have increased their share of national wealth (less the value of dwellings) from 51 per cent (1991) to 62 per cent (2002) whereas over the same period the share going to the bottom 50 per cent has decreased from 7 per cent to 2 per cent. de Ste Croix (1981), p. 90. As I have explained in Chapter 3. Giddens (1990), p. 207. German (1993, pp. 20–2) cites survey data which reveals that popular regard for ‘the sorts of institutions which most people believe are central to any sort of consensus in British politics: parliament, the judiciary, the police, the monarchy [is] at an all time low. . . . By 1991, fewer people expressed public confidence in the police, legal system . . . parliament, the church, the civil service and the press than had done so in 1981’. This has gone hand in hand with growing public support for the struggles and demands of public sector workers and trade unionists, acknowledgement of their key role as service providers, and recognition that their high regard in the community is not reflected in the rewards or status they receive from government. Ben-David (1964); Johnson (1972); Parry and Parry (1976). Braverman (1974); Callinicos (1987a); Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich (1979); German (1996). Callinicos (1987a), p. 31. Mitchell (1975), p. 412. German (1981), pp. 34–5. A point well made by Harman (1979), p. 15. Hamilton (1978), p. 11.

356 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101

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Notes Hartmann (1979). Hartmann (1979), p. 11. Hartmann (1979), pp. 11–12. As German (1981, p. 36) summarizes her view. Hartmann (1979), pp. 7–11. Hartmann (1979), p. 6. This kind of understanding is quite common amongst feminist authors. Aside from Hartmann, perhaps its most cogent expression is to be found in MacKinnon (1989, p. 66): ‘Male workers benefit from women’s services and support personally and sexually. They also benefit materially from women’s unpaid labour, much as capitalists benefit from the labour of workers’. See especially: Brownmiller (1976); Dworkin (1978); Firestone (1972); MacKinnon (1989); Ward (1984). Harman (1994), pp. 129–42. This excellent article provides a useful survey of the recent anthropological evidence. Creaven (2000), pp. 253–55 (chapter 2, footnote 68). Friedl (1975); Gailey (1987); Leacock (1978, 1981); Lee (1979); Rohrlich (1980); Sacks (1979); Sanday (1979); White (1977). German (1981), p. 37. German (1981), pp. 25–9, 31–6. German (1981), pp. 36–7. See also German (1989), pp. 74–5. German (1981), p. 38. Hartmann (1979), p. 15. German (1989), pp. 25–36, 74–5, 141–2; German (1981), pp. 37–9. German (1981), pp. 40–1; German (1986), pp. 141–2. German (1981, 1986). According to Social Trends (1985), cited in German (1986), p. 142. German (1981), pp. 40–1. German (1981), p. 40. McGregor (1986), pp. 95–6. Miliband (1989), p. 105. German (1989), pp. 116–17. Miliband (1989), p. 111. McGregor (1989), p. 20. McGregor (1989), pp. 11–25. Ageton (1985). Russell (1984) shows that stranger rape is closely correlated with young men on low income with low status, who ‘were more likely to feel a failure at school, isolated and unappreciated at home’ (cited in McGregor, 1989, p. 19). Sanday and Tobach (1985) point out that ‘rapists . . . suffer from a high rate of sexual dysfunction – difficulties in initiating and maintaining an erection, in achieving ejaculation or its opposite, premature ejaculation’ (cited in McGregor, 1989, p. 9) – which sits uneasily with Brownmiller’s (1976) claim that rape is an instrument of male domination of women. For a review of the relevant literature see Robertson-Elliot (1996), pp. 167–72. Wilson (1995). Straus et al. (1980, 1988). Stets and Straus (1989) make the point that the dominant pattern of domestic violence between adults is ‘mutual combat’, whereas female only violence is the intermediate pattern, and male only violence is the least common pattern. This casts into question the feminist thesis of Browne (1987) that most of the violence perpetrated by women on men is simply a response to their own abuse (either retaliation or self-defence). The feminist attribution of domestic violence to patriarchal men is also weakened by the research of Brand and Kidd (1986) indicating that violence is as likely to occur in lesbian as in heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Gelles and Cornell (1990); Rubin (1976); Straus, et al. (1979, 1980, 1988).

Notes 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

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Laing (1976). Gelles and Cornell (1990). Leach (1967); Renvoize (1978). Rubin (1976). Renvoize (1978). Barrett and McIntosh (1982). Zaretsky (1976). Gelles and Cornell (1990). Kempson (1996). Rubin (1976). Gelles (1972); Komarovsky (1991); Gil (1971); Straus et al. (1980). Straus et al. (1988) found that marital violence was especially more common in poorer families where the ‘man of the house’ was either unemployed or under-employed. Gil (1970, 1975) and Oliver (1974) (cited in Cliff, 1984, p. 216) analyse child abuse from this class/political economy perspective. Straus et al. (1988) found that (in the USA) more domestic violence against children is perpetrated by mothers than by fathers. Of course, this is unsurprising, given that mothers assume the greater burden of domestic responsibilities, and thus are more vulnerable to the stresses and strains of family life. This is the argument of feminists who are prepared to confront the reality of women’s physical abuse of children. Nonetheless, it is ironic that those factors which are dismissed by patriarchy theorists as a good explanation of male violence are promptly accepted uncritically as an adequate account of female violence. Messerschmidt (1993). See especially: Harman (1991, 1996); Callinicos (1996b); Rees (1996). See especially: Fielding and Fielding (1991); Holdaway (1983); Reiner (1978, 1980, 2000); Scripture (1997). The consequences of police culture and politics in terms of selective (i.e. classist and racist) law-enforcement is explored by: Box (1989); Bowling and Phillips (2002); Farrell (1992); Holdaway (1996); and Smith (1983). Its consequences in terms of sex discrimination in promotion and recruitment is explored by: Heidensohn (1992, 1994, 1998) and Walklate (1996). Carlen (1988); Hagan et al. (1979). Straus et al. (1988). Rubin (1976). Komarovski (1991); Rubin (1976). Brownmiller (1976); Caputi and Russell (1992); Dobash and Dobash (1980, 1992); Firestone (1972); Kelly (1988); Millett (1970); Parton (1990); Radford and Russell (1992); Scully (1990); Walby (1990, 1997); Ward (1984). As far as I can tell, this is not an obvious problem of postmodern feminism, but here there are more substantial defects. This form of feminism tends to reduce questions of women’s inequality in society to questions of gender difference constituted by language or discursive practices (see for example Cixous, 1981; Haste, 1993; Tong, 1998). The source of male domination is reckoned to be phallocentric discursive practices, which rank masculine linguistic signifiers higher than feminine ones. The task of postmodern feminism is to challenge the legitimacy of these discursive constructions, not in order to undermine gender differences (pluralism is good), but in order to affirm the value of the feminine in culture and language. I take it that this kind of approach does not get us very far, for two main reasons. First, it is a regression from more orthodox ‘modernist’ types of feminist theorizing, because the new emphasis on culture and language has shifted analysis away from the material forms of women’s oppression (wealth and income disadvantages, under-representation in the higher professions, domestic violence and so on). This has sanctioned political quietism, because from this perspective gender disadvantages may be overcome simply through waging a struggle in culture (writing books,

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131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Notes etc.), rather than by engaging in political struggles for institutional reforms. Second, postmodern feminism is self-contradictory. For if language is indeed maledominated, so that women are defined in culture simply as the inferior Other of men, the task of theory and politics ought to be to undermine gender differences, stress the unity of humankind, not affirm the inherent value of the neglected and downgraded ‘feminine mystique’ (which has been constructed by and within ‘phallocentric’ discourse). Despite the postmodern emphasis on culturally constructed ‘diversity’, then, difference feminism paradoxically ends up rehabilitating the idea of essential differences in male and female sexualities and gender identities. This is for the simple reason that the real femininity of women has to be rescued from phallocentrism and celebrated in culture. Tong (1998) suggests that this critique is misplaced, on the grounds that linguistic norms of masculinity and femininity are not necessarily sexualized or gendered (i.e. attached to ideologies of men and women respectively), but are free-floating cultural signifiers. But this smacks of desperation. Of course, it is true that men and women construct for themselves personal identities from attributes that have been culturally designated as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. But, if such culturally prescribed traits are to be detached from gender, what is the point in referring to them as either masculine or feminine (as the postmodern feminists do)? And why recommend that women affirm their own feminine values? Logically, if it is really intended that these be viewed as genderless cultural signifiers, with no basis in social relations, it becomes a mystery why they have been pervasively connected to sexualized bodies and gendered identities. Myhill and Allen (2003) estimate, based on a large-scale survey of victimization data, that one in 20 females aged between 16 and 59 have been the victims of rape in the UK and one in ten have been victims of some form of sexual victimization. Robertson-Elliot (1996, pp. 180–1) reviews the relevant literature. But see especially Gordon (2002). Creighton (1992); Straus et al. (1980). Echols (1990); Phelan (1990); Smith (1994), pp. 10–14. Harman (1994, pp. 129–38) provides an excellent summary of Engels’ argument, which I will draw on extensively in the analysis that follows. Engels (1972a). Godelier, for example, articulated the orthodox view of more than a century, where he famously claimed that ‘[i]n all societies, including the most egalitarian, there is a power hierarchy, with the top places occupied by men’ (cited in Harman, 1979, p. 37). See the extended footnote (1) in Harman (1979, pp. 37–40) for an excellent discussion of the limitations of this kind of understanding. Harman (1994), pp. 129–30. Friedl (1975); Leacock (1978, 1981); Sahlins (1974). Leakey (1981), pp. 97–109; Lee (1979). Harman (1979), p. 39. See Friedl (1975); Leakey (1981), pp. 97–109; Leacock (1978); Sacks (1979); Fluer-Lobban (1979); Lee (1979); White (1977). Leacock (1981); Sanday (1979); McGregor (1989), pp. 5–9. Harman (1994), pp. 130–1. Sacks (1979); Gailey (1987). Harman (1994), pp. 131–2. Harman (1994), p. 130. Leacock (1981), pp. 54–61. Harman (1994), p. 131; Sacks (1979), pp. 117–21. Rohrlich (1980) cited in McGregor (1989), pp. 7–8. Engels (1972a), p. 87 (italics removed). This is the main weakness of Engels’ account, as Harman (1994, p. 134) points out. Harman (1994), p. 135.

Notes 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

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Childe, cited in Harman (1994), p. 135. Childe (1954), p. 57, cited in Harman (1994), p. 135. Childe (1954), pp. 131–5. Gailey (1987); Leacock (1981). Friedl (1975), pp. 9, 17, 45, 59. Harman (1994), p. 136. Harman (1994), p. 137. German (1989), p. 36. German (1989), pp. 28–9. German (1989), pp. 25–9, 31–6. German (1989), pp. 28, 32–6. German (1989), pp. 36–42. Castells (1996), pp. 134–75. German (1989), pp. 50–1. German (1989), pp. 51–2. McGregor (1989), pp. 9–25. Rex and Moore (1967). This is, of course, the classic Weberian exposition of ‘racial’ stratification as status exclusion or ideological domination in modern Britain. See also: Fryer (1984); Lockwood (1970); Rex (1970). These provide Weberian analyses of racism. Alexander (1987), pp. 47–51. A major survey in 1955 found ‘two-thirds of Britain’s population considered themselves prejudiced, and half of these – one-third of the total – were “deeply” prejudiced. By contrast the British Social Attitudes survey of 1986 recorded 35 per cent of people who said they were “a little prejudiced”, while only 4 per cent said they were “very prejudiced” ’ (Alexander, 1987, p. 47). By 1991, those who considered themselves ‘very’ or ‘a little’ prejudiced had declined to 31 per cent, and by 2000 to 20 per cent (Jowell et al., 2000). This has been accompanied by a declining proportion of people who claim allegiance to discriminatory policies. See Rose et al. (1984) for an effective critique of biological reductionism in the social sciences. Rose et al. (1984), pp. 126–7. Fryer (1984), p. 190. Allen, cited in Shawki (1990), p. 96. Omi and Winant (1986); Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978). Yet my claim that the sociological analysis of racism or ‘racial formation’ as ‘cultural domination’ by black radicals or ‘racial’ theorists is informed by Weberian assumptions would be disputed by some, on the grounds that many of these (such as those academics cited above and those radicals based around the journal Race and Class) are either ex-Althusserians or have been more directly influenced by Althusser’s structural Marxism rather than by Weberianism. But Althusser’s theoretical understanding of society as a network of autonomous structures – the economic, the political, the ideological and the theoretical – was nominally a materialist rather than a pluralistic-conflict model of society only by virtue of its insistence that the economic is ‘determinant in the final instance’. Since this claim of Althusser’s is rejected by Sivanandan, Gilroy, Ramdin, et al., it is clear enough that their overall understanding of power-relations owes much more to Weber than to Marx. Ramdin (1987); Gilroy (1987). My analysis of the views of Gilroy and Ramdin (and those of other major black radicals such as Robinson and Sivanandan) is based on the important critiques furnished by Clegg (1987) and Callinicos (1993). Ramdin (1987), p. 63. Sivanandan (1977), p. 339. In fairness to Sivanandan, it must be said that he subsequently considerably softened his position. See, for example, Sivanandan (1985), p. 13.

360 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

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181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190

191 192 193 194

Notes Robinson (1983), pp. 3–5. Gilroy (1987), pp. 23–4. Ramdin, cited in Sivanandan (1982), p. 507. Robinson (1983), p. 451. Robinson (1983), pp. 2–3, 3–5, 451. Alexander (1987), pp. 51–2. See also: Castles and Kosack (1973); Miles (1982). In 1998–2000, 25 per cent of blacks and 26 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were in semi-skilled or unskilled employment compared to 20 per cent of whites (Twomey, 2001, p. 34). In 1994–2000, white men enjoyed earnings of nearly £300 weekly whereas black men earned just over £250, Pakistani men £230 and Bangladeshi men less than £150 (HMSO, 2002, p. 95). In 2001–2, 5 per cent of whites were unemployed compared to 13 per cent of blacks, 21 per cent of Bangladeshis and 16 per cent of Pakistanis (HMSO, 2003, p. 84). In 1999–2000, 32 per cent of Afro-Caribbeans, 52 per cent of black Africans and 67 per cent of Pakistanis/Bangladeshis, compared to 22 per cent of whites, received less than 60 per cent of median household income (Platt, 2002, p. 56). At the close of the last century, blacks and Asians in the UK are still more likely to be found in substandard housing than whites, whether as owner-occupiers or as tenants. According to Jones (1993, pp. 140–1), 20 per cent of whites but only 12 per cent of Indians, 9 per cent of Pakistanis/Bangladeshi and 4 per cent of AfroCaribbeans live in detached houses. The same survey also found more overcrowding in the homes of ethnic minorities than in those of whites (19 per cent of Indian households, 18 per cent of Afro-Caribbean households, 34 per cent of Pakistani/Bangladeshi households, but only 6 per cent of white households averaged one person per room). Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshi people are also less likely to be owner-occupiers than whites. Jones points out that 65 per cent of whites but only 46 per cent of Afro-Caribbeans and 46 per cent of Bangladeshis are owneroccupiers. There are approximately 718,720 empty homes across Britain, many owned by property speculators, who are hoarding them in the hope of rising house prices (Federation of Master Builders, 2004). In the mid-1990s, the average household in Britain was 2.5 people (Taylor, 1996). So there are enough vacant homes right this minute to house around 1.75 million people. Szymanski (1976), pp. 409–10. Shawki (1990), p. 97. Perlo (1980), cited in Shawki (1990), p. 97. Glaberman (1987), cited in Shawki (1990), p. 97. Szymanski (1976), p. 412. Szymanski (1976), p. 405. Callinicos (1993), p. 41. Callinicos (1993), p. 42. Hirst and Thompson (1999); Wood (1998). Callinicos (1993), pp. 42–3. ‘In fact, according to the World Bank, between 1965 and 1983 two thirds of all foreign investment went to the advanced economies, and the rest to a handful of Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs). The debt crisis of the 1980s actually made the situation worse: capital flows from the North to the South almost dried up, while “Third World” capital flight and debt repayments meant there was, for much of the decade, a net transfer of financial resources from the poor to the rich countries’. Callinicos (1993), p. 42. Callinicos (1993), p. 19. Callinicos (1993), p. 23. This point has been made by a fairly wide range of historical researchers, including the black radicals C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Oliver Cox, Frank Snowden Jnr and

Notes

195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

210 211 212 213 214 215 216

217 218 219 220

361

Walter Rodney. See especially: Cox (1970) Fields (1990); James (1960); James (1985); Rodney (1972); Snowden (1983); Williams (1964). The work of these and other scholars flatly contradicts the standard claim of Black Nationalism that ‘racism [is] . . . pre-capitalist in…social and ideological origin’ (Marable, 1983, p. 260). Alas, with the current obsession of sociology, not with issues of racism, but with issues of ‘ethnicity’, not much recent work has been done to develop the modern materialist analysis of racial stratification. The sociology of ethnicity, influenced by postmodernism, is profoundly apolitical (since the focus is not on combating racial disadvantage and oppression but exploring the distinctive cultural identities and meanings of various ethnic minority groups). Moreover, it appears to endorse what Gilroy (1987) describes as ‘ethnic absolutism’ (the peculiar notion shared with ideologues of ‘cultural racism’ that ethnic groups possess their own homogeneous and self-contained traditions, each quite separate from the others). Cox (1970), p. 475. Shawki (1990), p. 7. Callinicos’s (1993, p. 17) useful definition of racist ideology. Alexander (1987), p. 6. Callinicos (1987c), pp. 131–2. Alexander (1987), p. 6. Giddens (1990, pp. 254–5), for example, simply infers racism as a pre-modern phenomenon from the mere existence of such colour symbolism in pre-modern cultures. Clegg (1987), pp. 99, 116. James (1960), p. 124. Bauman (1989). Alexander (1987), pp. 5–6. Carlin (1987), p. 101. Giddens (1990), p. 246. Callinicos (1993), p. 26. Callinicos (1993) p. 26; Finley (1983) pp. 113–18; Wood (1988) p. 7. Abercrombie et al. (1980) argue persuasively that pre-capitalist class societies generally did not have ‘dominant ideologies’ that sought to legitimate class domination in the eyes of the downtrodden or which functioned to bind the subordinate classes to their oppressors and exploiters. Instead the divine rights of power, property and kingship were taken for granted by their beneficiaries, and at most the ideologies of the propertied (such as the distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’) functioned to solidarize or unify them (albeit tenuously) against the propertyless. Since class power tended to be reproduced here by means of a simple combination of economic and political coercion, coherent legitimatory ideologies explaining inequality were mostly superfluous. Herrin (1987). Callinicos (1993), pp. 26–7. Wood (1988), p. 102. Alexander (1987) pp. 9–13; Callinicos (1993) pp. 27–9; Fields (1990) p. 114. Alexander (1987), p. 17. Farrell (1992), pp. 48–77. Malik (1996) interestingly suggests that this racism of social distinctions emerged before the racism of colour distinctions. But his own emphasis on racism as a pseudo-scientific ideology appears to militate against this view, since this scientific racism postdates black slavery in the modern world. Either view would be compatible with the Marxian theory of racism, however. Callinicos (1993), p. 29. Alexander (1987), pp. 11–15. Disaeli cited in Alexander (1987), p. 16. Alexander (1987), pp. 12–14.

362

Notes

221 Barker (1981). 222 This deals with ‘Third World’ issues of poverty, backwardness and war in abstraction from their wider social and historical context, focusing instead on the ‘immediacy’ of each crisis as ‘tragic drama’. What this leaves out of account is, of course, the economic legacy of European colonialism (the systematic exploitation and underdevelopment of the ‘Third World’ countries by the Western imperial powers), and the current structured relationship of domination and subordination that exists between Westernized multinational capitalism, on the one hand, and the mass of ‘Third World’ toilers, on the other (which, in effect, reproduces this underdevelopment). 223 An unfortunate recent example of this is Blair’s and Bush’s much vaunted ‘New Deal’ for the poorer countries. This basically consisted of the commitment to reduce the burden of debt repayments on the strict condition that recipients ‘rationalize’ their economies and eliminate ‘political corruption’. 224 Callinicos (1993), pp. 35–6. 225 Creaven (2000, pp. 240–7) contains a review of empirical data showing the distribution of social disadvantages by ethnicity, focusing on the examples of employment, property ownership and education. More recent research (UK) shows that members of ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to be the victims of crime – whether burglary, theft or violence (Bowling and Phillips, 2002, p. 3; Clancey, et al., 2001, p. 12). Moreover, black people are more than five times more likely than whites to end up in prison, more than six times more likely than whites to be stopped-andsearched by the police and more than three times more likely than whites to be arrested (Home Office, 2005; HMSO, 2005). 226 The point is well made by Castles and Kosack (1973, p. 430): ‘In reality, the relationship between discrimination and prejudice is a dialectical one: discrimination is based on economic and social interests and prejudice originates as an instrument to defend such discrimination. In turn, prejudice becomes entrenched and helps to cause further discrimination’. 227 Callinicos (1993), p. 39. 228 This began in earnest with the Tories’ Asylum Bill (1995). This set up a ‘white list’ of countries arbitrarily deemed ‘safe’, abolished the right of appeal for certain categories of asylum seeker, and made it a criminal offence for an asylum seeker to be carrying false papers. This allowed the government to reject out of hand the asylum claims of fleeing refugees, and constructed the notion of the ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘bogus refugee’ who constituted the majority of asylum applications (Taylor, 1996). Since gaining office in 1997, the New Labour government has proceeded steadily along the same lines as its predecessors. New Labour noisily (and falsely) announced to the media in 1999 that 80 per cent of asylum seekers were ‘bogus’ (mere economic migrants or welfare scroungers or criminals). This was despite the fact that supporting evidence was virtually non-existent. In fact, there was (and is) no correlation between homelands poverty and asylum-seeking, but a consistently strong correlation between asylum-seeking and homelands political persecution (Cohen, 2003, pp. 63–4). The Immigration and Asylum Act (1999) then introduced the voucher scheme (which denies refugees access to welfare benefits and allows them ‘support in kind’ only up to the value of 70 per cent of income support) and the dispersal scheme (which has scattered refugees to various run-down inner city estates around the country which lack the appropriate financial, community and educational infrastructure to support them). These measures, along with the building of detention centres (i.e. special prisons for refugees), and the denial of the right to work for refugees until their status is settled, have institutionalized divisions between the ‘host’ population and refugees, identified refugees as a stigmatized social group, and reinforced the idea of them as a special social problem (Parekh, 2000). Consequently, as noted

Notes

229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237

363

by Morris (2002), they have increased the potential for anti-asylum racism (including harassment and violence). Again, the distinction between ‘genuine refugees’ and ‘bogus immigrants’ has been upheld, and once more (as under the Tories) the distinction is extraordinarily restrictive and arbitrary, being determined simply by the need to prevent desperate people settling on our shores. Initially, New Labour introduced visa restrictions on countries which threaten to dissolve into civil war or which witness a significant increase in internal state repression or ethnic violence. This made it extraordinarily difficult for refugees to claim rights of asylum from British embassies in blighted countries. New Labour also attempted to prevent asylum seekers entering Britain carrying a valid passport, on the grounds that possession of one ‘proves’ the country of exit is ‘safe’. But the government has also tried to ensure that asylum seekers cannot enter Britain legally without a valid passport, since that also demonstrates they are ‘bogus’. If they have forged or stolen or destroyed papers, this is taken as evidence their claims are fraudulent, irrespective of the human rights record of their country of origin. Partly because these arbitrary rules failed to do their work, falling foul of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, the 1999 Act introduced ‘carrier liabilities’. These are financial penalties of £2,000 per asylum seeker imposed on airlines, ferries and lorry drivers who inadvertently transport refugees into the country. These have to be paid irrespective of whether or not the asylum seekers concerned are subsequently found to be bogus (Cohen, 2003, pp. 51–71). These reactionary policies have effectively made all refugees bogus and illegal. As Parekh (2000) notes, they have made it virtually impossible for people escaping persecution to enter Britain legally. This has forced asylum seekers underground, hence fuelling the growth of criminal organizations involved in ‘people smuggling’. Such policies have also forced refugees into taking increasingly dangerous risks with their own lives (such as hiding themselves in airtight containers or securing themselves beneath moving vehicles) and have licensed murder (since hundreds of asylum-seeking stowaways have been thrown overboard by seafarers in order to avoid paying the ‘carrier liabilities’) (Cohen, 2003, pp. 72–3). Meanwhile, the political climate of anti-refugee bigotry stirred up by these reactionary policies has fed into and been encouraged by tabloid press reports of ‘floods’ of refugees overwhelming the housing and benefits systems and routinely engaging in petty crime (Mahamdallie, 2000). One local tabloid even went so far as to describe refugees as ‘human sewage’ (Dover Express). This has stoked up popular racism and racist violence in areas where refugee populations have been situated (e.g. Bradford and Sighthill in Glasgow), and has provided legitimization for the politics of the BNP and other far right organizations, which have recently made significant electoral gains. One lamentable consequence of this has been that public perceptions of the nature and dimensions of the ‘refugee crisis’ have been amplified beyond rational measure. So, for example, a recent survey has shown ‘that on average people believe that this country takes 23 per cent of the world’s refugees’, whereas the real figure is less than 2 per cent (Socialist Worker, 22/06/02). du Bois (1983), pp. 700–1. Callinicos (1993), pp. 36–8. Miliband (1977), p. 6. As John Rees elegantly puts it (1994, p. 68). Marx (1971), p. 791. Marx (1976), p. 176. Marx (1971), pp. 790–1. See also Callinicos (1987b, pp. 172–7). Elster (1986), p. 116. Giddens (1981a), p. 107.

364 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256

Notes Cohen (1978), pp. 34–5. Scott (1996), p. 3. Engels (1978), pp. 321–2. Marx (1978), p. 148. Marx and Engels (1975c), p. 329. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 72. Harman (1989a), p. 53. Harman (1989a), p. 80. Callinicos (1981); Howl (1990), pp. 101–4. Cliff (1988); Binns et al. (1987); Harman (1985). Rees (1991), pp. 3–29. Harman (1989b); Callinicos (1991), pp. 40–50. Harman (1989b); Callinicos (1991). As Lee and Newby (1994, p. 205) summarize their argument. Konrad and Szelenyi (1979). Vajda (1981). Lee and Newby (1994), p. 205. Hirszowicz (1980); Yanowitch (1977); Zaslavsky (1979). Cliff (1988), pp. 23–106.

5 Marx versus Weber on the dialectics of history 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Anderson (1993), p. 231. Callinicos (1995), p. 102. Callinicos (1995), pp. 95–109. Callinicos (1995), p. 100. Marx (1970), pp. 20–1. Marx and Engels (1967), p. 79. Marx and Engels (1975a), p. 186. Marx and Engels (1967), pp. 89–90. Marx and Engels (1970), p. 40. Archer (1995), pp. 205–8; Creaven (2000), pp. 208–14. Pearce (1984, p. 15) has drawn on FAO figures to show that ‘using current Western farming methods, the world could produce enough food for up to 33 billion people, seven times the present population. . . . [Even] if the whole world relied on primitive farming methods, using no fertilizers or pesticides, traditional seeds and no soil conservation methods, the present world population could still be comfortably fed’. This abundance of riches has steadily grown throughout the post-war years, since ‘world food production has on average increased 16 per cent faster each year than population growth’ (O’Brien, 1992, p. 6). What is true of basic foodstuffs is equally true of a vast swathe of basic consumer goods, both material and cultural, which can be mass-produced relatively cheaply to accommodate global needs. Marx and Engels (1970), p. 56. Molyneux (1985, pp. 18–19) develops this point. Rosdolsky (1989). Marx (1976), pp. 592, 595. A point well made by Cohen (1978), p. 65. Callinicos (1983), p. 193. It should be noted that Marx’s concept of class is relational – a class is defined according to its relationships to other classes vis-à-vis the means of production. This means that it is mistaken to identify Marx’s proletariat with any specific form of labour, such as ‘industrial work’ or ‘service work’ or ‘agricultural work’ (the common error of sociologists who have tended to identify the proletariat with ‘bluecollar’ industrial wage-workers). Rather, the proletariat is constituted by its separa-

Notes

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

365

tion from the means of production, the crucial dependence of its members on wagelabour to earn their livelihood, and their resultant exploitation at the hands of the employing class, in the sense that either surplus value or surplus labour is appropriated from their work during the labour process. Mandel (1983), p. 201. Harman (2002), p. 7. Wang (2000), p. 170. Harman (2002), p. 7. UN Development Programme (1999), p. 175. Marx and Engels (1977b), pp. 210–11. Molyneux (1995), p. 64. Roth (1971), pp. 227–52. Gerth and Mills (1948), p. 6. Antonio (1985), p. 29. Weber (1968, v 3), p. 941. Antonio (1985), pp. 21–2. Weber (1948), p. 357. Weber (1949), p. 72. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 874. Weber (1949), p. 68. Weber, cited in Mommsen (1985), p. 239. Weber (1949), pp. 167–8. Weber (1949), p. 314. Weber (1968, v 2), p. 874. Creaven (2000), pp. 40–8, 58–68, 230–70. Weber (1949), p. 68. Callinicos (1999), p. 162. Weber (1949), p. 68. Weber (1930). Weber, cited in Kocka (1985), p. 160. Giddens (1981a), pp. 21–5. See especially Wright (1983), pp. 24–9. Cohen (1978); Harman (1986). I argue this at length in Chapter 3. Mann (1986), pp. 73–89, 105–24. As I show in Chapters 3 and 4. Giddens (1981a), p. 90ff. Giddens (1984), p. 274. Giddens (1984), p. 23. Yet there are conceptual problems with the idea that the development of ‘authorization’ (politico-military power) as such is capable of stimulating or sustaining a progressive historical evolutionary trend in the movement of overall social relations or total social systems, as I intend to argue. Wright (1983), p. 31. Wright et al. (1992), p. 85. Wright (1983), p. 31. Giddens (1981a), p. 53. Giddens (1981a), p. 163. Giddens (1981a), p. 95. Giddens (1990), pp. 638–9. Giddens (1990), pp. 639, 640. Mann (1986), p. 2. Mann (1986), p. 2. Mann (1986), p. 523. Mann (1986), pp. 130–78, 231–300. Mann (1986), pp. 328–409.

366 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Notes Mann (1986), p. 511. Mann (1986), p. 2. Mann (1986), pp. 2–3. Mann (1993), p. 35. Mann (1986), p. 524. Kocka (1985), p. 145. Weber (1961). Weber (1948), p. 139. Collins (1980), pp. 925–42. Parsons (1937, 1971). Clarke (1982), p. 220. Löwith (1993), pp. 63–4. Weber (1930, 1961, 1968). Weber (1961). Weber (1930), pp. 181–2; Weber (1968, v 3), pp. 988–9. Weber (1930), p. 181. In fact, Weber’s ideographic method precludes both of these analytical strategies. As Weber himself (1949, p. 72) puts it: ‘The stream of immeasurable events flows unendingly to eternity. The cultural problems which move men form themselves ever anew and in different colours, and the boundaries of that area in the infinite stream of concrete events which acquires meaning and significance for us . . . are constantly subject to change.’ This means that for Weber there ‘is no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of culture . . . independent of special and one-sided viewpoints according to which they are selected, analysed and organized’. Marx (1978), pp. 103–4. Harman (1986), p. 8. Such ‘world-images’ for Weber were mostly religious in nature. As Weber (1930, p. 277) argues: ‘religious ideas . . . are . . . the most powerful plastic elements of national character and contain a law of development and compelling force entirely their own’. Clarke (1982), pp. 24–5. Mandel (1973). Giddens (1979), p. 36. Giddens (1979), p. 36. Craib (1992), pp. 116–17. Craib (1992), p. 116. Giddens (1981a), p. 95. Callinicos (1985), p. 150. Childe (1963), p. 155; Maisels (1993), p. 297. Callinicos (1985), p. 150. Giddens (1990), p. 638. Engels (1969), Part II (‘Force Theory’). Giddens (1990), p. 640. Gottlieb (1992), p. 173. Giddens (1990), p. 640. Gottlieb (1992), p. 173. Giddens (1981a), p. 145. Giddens (1990), p. 638. Giddens (1990), p. 640. Mandel (1975). Harman (1994), pp. 120–9. Harman (1994), p. 123. Childe (1954), pp. 62–88. Harman (1994), pp. 123–4; Maisels (1993), pp. 71–87; Maisels (1999), pp. 56–65.

Notes 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

126

367

Childe (1954), pp. 83–91. T.B. Jones, cited in Harman (1994), p. 124. Maisels (1993), p. 184. A point well made by Mann (1986), pp. 130–78. But, as Harman points out (1999, pp. 45–6), such periods of social crises and imperial collapse did not on the whole curtail ‘the essential continuity of civilization’. This was because such periods of crises either stimulated internal transformations in social relations, allowing further economic advance, or because ‘barbarian’ conquerors adopted part of the existing productive infrastructure and often added to this new innovations or techniques of their own. Wickham (1985). Maisels (1993), p. 269; Thapar (1978); Katz (1997), p. 70; Lloyd (1987), p. 10; Harman (1999), pp. 48–53. Anderson (1983b). Harman (1989a), p. 53. Brenner (1986), pp. 31–2. Callinicos (1992), p. 135. See also Anderson (1991), p. 47. Callinicos (1992), p. 135. Harman (1991). Wickham (1988), p. 67. Creaven (2000), pp. 214–70. Siegel (1986), pp. 135–58. Siegel cites the example of the decline of Buddhism in India after the eleventh century AD. This occurred because of its degeneration into scholasticism, which was in turn the result of the decline of the class forces and capacities that provided it with its constituency. Originally forged in response to the dominant religious ideology of Brahmanism, which functioned to legitimate the rigid hierarchies of caste, classical Buddhism became the dominant religion of the petty capitalist class of financiers, traders and handicraftsmen of the towns. The appeal and utility of Buddhism consisted of its doctrine of non-violence, its refusal to condemn usury, its denial that the caste system was an insuperable barrier to personal salvation and its doctrine that the wealthy could accumulate ‘spiritual capital’ by making donations to Buddhist monasteries. These properties of the religion ensured that it could become appropriated as a defensive cultural weapon by the petty bourgeoisie in their battle to survive and prosper in the face of the suspicion and obstruction of dominant feudal and state elites. The subsequent decline of Buddhism into monastic scholasticism (i.e. the increasing abstraction of the religion from worldly interests and concerns) corresponded with the decline of the mercantile sector of Indian society, following the disintegration of the relatively stable Brahman tributary imperial states into a plethora of warring kingdoms. This undermined the social base and dynamic of the religion. From this point onwards the internal conceptual development of Buddhism, like that of monastic Catholicism in Europe during the Middle Ages, had no substantive implications for either macroscopic systemic elaboration or reproduction. Siegel (1986), pp. 90–104, 135–70, 171–92. In fact, most of the ‘world religions’ have been implicated in either systemic elaboration/transformation or systemic reproduction at different stages in their history. The key to understanding the respective social functions that the major religions have performed at different points in the development of social relations depends on identifying which social and class forces appropriate them as mystical expressions of their values and interests. On the one hand, where religion is shaped by ruling elites or dominant social classes (as was Brahmanism, Confucianism, medieval Catholicism and Hinduism), it does tend to function as a mechanism of societal stability (albeit by enhancing the class solidarity or cohesion of the elite rather than by socializing the subordinate population into a system of beliefs or values which helps maintain their subordination). On the

368

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

Notes other hand, where religion is appropriated or constructed anew from the existing religious ‘thought material’ by the agents of subordinate classes (as for instance Calvinism and Lutherism were in the early modern period, as Christianity was before becoming institutionalized in the Roman state and as Islamic Fundamentalism is today in parts of the underdeveloped world), it can function as a potent ideological tool of social reform, even revolution, even if the form of religious ideology necessarily shortcircuits its emancipatory potential. I explore these issues at length in my forthcoming Against the Spiritual Turn of Critical Realism: From Transcendental Idealism to Materialist Dialectics. This was the fate of most of the ancient imperial states: Sumer, Akkad, the Hittite empire, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, Macedonia and Rome are obvious examples. Kidron (1989). This argument has been well developed by Harman (1984). Most notably Harman (1984). Harman (1993a, 1993b, 1995). Wickham (1988), p. 67. Mann (1986), p. 393. Bois (1984); Postan (1965). Postan (1965), pp. 39–44, 49, 73; Bois (1984), pp. 51–6, 59–64, 291–308. Ashton (1965). Callinicos (1987b), pp. 165–6. Callinicos (1995), pp. 67–70. Callinicos (1995), pp. 125–8. Giddens (1981a), pp. 28–9, 53, 177; Giddens (1982), p. 218. Creaven (2000), pp. 92–5. Callinicos (1995), pp. 125–8. See especially Sahlins (1974), chapter 1. See Chapter 4.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Bhaskar (1993), pp. 204–24, 279–99. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 152–73. Bhaskar (1993), p. 210. Bhaskar (1993), p. 202. Bhaskar (1993), p. 169. Bhaskar (1993), p. 300. Gruffydd Jones (2003). Davidson (1984b); MacDonald and Pettit (1981). Gruffydd Jones (2003), p. 48. Gruffydd Jones (2003), pp. 221–2. Gruffydd Jones (2003), p. 221. Gruffydd Jones (2003), pp. 263–4. Gruffydd Jones (2003), p. 60. Bhaskar (1993), pp. 248, 265. As I have argued in Chapter 3. Molyneux (1995), p. 64. Bhaskar (1993, p. 98): ‘What is certain is that as long as humanity survives, there will always be a conatus to freedom to become’. 18 Gruffydd Jones (2003), p. 19. 19 Bello (2001, 2002); Bond (2002); Bourdieu (1998); Bové and Defour (2002); Danaher and Burbach (2000); Klein (1990, 2002); Neale (2002). 20 Bhaskar (1993), p. 270.

Notes 21 22 23 24 25

Creaven (2003), pp. 78–90. Clarke (1994), p. 48. Harvey (2000), p. 71. Harvey (2000), p. 52. Harvey (2000), p. 108.

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Index

absence 64, 66, 326; abode of 29; absenting 6, 23, 33, 37–9, 61–7, 323; of constraining ills 329; and desire 33; proliferating 332 Africa 186–7, 205–6; apartheid in South 228; civilization 207; North 201 agency 71, 101, 142, 143; autonomy of 46; collective modes of 199; intentional 16, 30–1, 40; social 43, 89, 183, 191, 200; and structure 47, 86 agents 38, 100, 157, 165, 195–6, 284; access to resources 228–30; collective 315; of commerce 172; freedom of 289; involuntary placement of 177–8; of pre-class societies 188; of production 101; of subordinate classes 285 agriculture 186–8, 193, 206–8, 269, 274, 287, 309; decline of 318; development under feudalism 190, 195; local 202; subsistence 274 alienation 44, 54, 77, 80, 87, 92, 95, 134, 158, 235, 240, 263; of labour 236, 276 allocation 269–70, 276, 286; struggles over 295 America 186, 205; central and southern 187, 206, 309–10; United States 292, 316 Anderson, Perry 195 anti-capitalist movement 42, 331–3 Anti-Dühring 28, 138 anti-reductionism 56, 70, 106–9, 146, 161, 322 Antonio, R.J. 290 Archer, Margaret 144, 177 Asia 187, 205, 261; capitalism in 167; civilizations of 100, 170, 203, 207; contemporary peasantry of 287; southeast 201 autonomy 29, 45, 55, 65, 210; of structures 36, 144

barbarian 259–61; warlords 311 barbarism 200, 210 base and superstructure; base or superstructure 50–1, 148, 159–64, 175–9, 196, 209, 211, 215, 221, 266–70, 275, 279, 281, 284, 291, 308, 318, 324–5 being 62, 68, 71, 106–7, 111, 163–4; and non-being 63–4, 323; social 50, 151, 175, 267; zones of 46, 123 Benton, Ted 109 Bhaskar, Roy 1, 10–12, 35, 38, 46–9, 52–3, 56, 61, 64, 91, 143, 194–6, 322, 324; cosmic envelope 108; critical realism 8, 16, 34, 39, 110, 172, 209; critique of Hegel 23, 68; emancipatory theory 323, 330; naturalism 9; ontology 13–14, 43 Bhaskarian dialectic 22; of freedom 326, 330, 333; humanist 7; plural 27 blacks 253, 254–5 bourgeois 79–80, 99, 103, 156, 207, 222, 261, 297–9, 308; capitalist 248; class interests 166; cultural attitudes 240; economists 103, 301; parliaments 233; property 101, 273–4; Russian 85 Brahmanism 167, 170 Brenner, Robert 190, 318 Britain 170, 316; bourgeois revolution see English Revolution; monarchy of 274; racial politics in 265 Buddhism 167, 171 bureaucracy 171, 220, 300; consumption needs of 202; state 276–7; and surveillance 235 Callinicos, Alex 42, 48, 58, 64, 76, 189–90, 283, 304, 317–19 Calvinism 166, 168–9 Capacity Thesis 180–1, 192, 199–201, 203–4, 206, 212

Index capital 45, 81, 93, 100–3, 171, 194, 226, 287, 330; accumulation of 125, 156; flow 256–8; logic of 140; monopoly 308; rival units of 286 Capital 82, 93 capitalism 42, 48, 52, 62, 79–80, 88, 123, 166–9, 187–8, 194, 200, 232, 236–42, 255, 270–2, 275–6, 285, 299, 302, 315; contemporary 98, 254, 308, 332; decentralized social structure of 170, 202; decline of 90, 93–4, 258, 289; economy of 100, 103, 231, 269, 280, 290; global 45, 85, 297, 330; growth of 257, 261; laissez-faire 221, 296; origins of 165–73, 209, 273, 313; petty 171, 173, 207; post-colonial 263; print 313; privations of 264; problems of 265; relations of production of 98, 100, 105, 190, 229, 249 capitalist 99, 157, 170, 208, 218–19, 248, 264–5, 287; class 101, 288; crises 103–4, 320; development 102–6, 201, 205, 222, 254, 286; economy 125, 166, 261; expansion 171, 262; globalization 51, 331; institutions 17; interests 202, 274; modernity 24, 28, 300, 324; modes of production 172, 279; property relations 297; system 98, 244, 333 capitalist society 57, 79–80, 96–8, 101–2, 157, 203, 216, 219–21, 226, 250–1, 265, 268–71, 289, 305, 308, 319, 320; advanced 258; industrialization of 165–8, 173, 193, 201, 247; modern 156, 225, 228, 236–8, 251, 253, 260; negation of 254 caste society 167, 222–4; domination in 225; hierarchies of 261; non-determinist 197; unequal 261 causality 29–30, 116, 128, 137; dialectical 61, 64–5; structural 36, 160, 211, 270, 275; vertical and horizontal 14, 50, 146, 161, 164–5 causal powers 15, 65, 144–5, 157, 179; primacy of in social systems 281 child abuse 17, 234, 238–40, 243, 248 China 167, 170, 186–7, 309–10; Chinese Empire 197, 260; peasantry of 287 Christianity 168, 296–7; early 167 city states 186, 295, 310; Italian 169 civilization 187, 205–6, 259, 295, 306; traditional 186, 307, 220, 309; western 254, 264 Clarke, Simon 302 class 52, 174, 205, 216, 223, 228; agency

389

198, 204, 211, 314; antagonisms 60, 194, 218, 258; conflict 125, 160, 195, 266, 291; divisions 59, 226–7; domination 53, 159, 224, 271–2, 312, 331; exploitation 18–19, 219, 235, 247, 261, 268, 276–9, 281–2, 286–8, 305–10, 317–18; inequality 45, 253, 264–5; injuries of 237–8, 240; interests 191, 201; mechanisms 163, 220, 237, 296 polarization 199, 213; power 229, 247, 269, 289; relations 162, 192, 197, 203, 210, 262, 266, 274–5, 285, 293, 302, 316, 320; ruling 57–8, 259, 311, 313; stratification 222, 256; structures 149, 221, 325 class agents 172, 187, 192, 196–201, 203–6, 207, 210, 212, 284–5; propertied 179; tensions between 218 classical Marxism 4, 40, 49, 56–9, 65, 72, 79, 86, 89, 91, 106, 116, 121, 124, 139, 147, 322–8 class societies 10, 101, 181–3, 198, 218–19, 232, 295, 304; agrarian 320; divided 5, 194–5, 211, 281, 307, 325; modes of production of 194–6; precapitalist 259–61; relations of production of 50, 197–8, 210–12, 284, 289, 329; social relations of 187–8, 294 class struggle 2, 41, 50, 105–6, 142, 146, 155, 173–5, 180–1, 193–5, 200, 205, 208, 212, 254, 267, 276, 282–4, 288–9, 305, 314, 318, 325, 329 cognitive triumphalism 21–2, 28, 37, 47, 57–8 Cohen, G.A. 180–1, 189–201, 203, 206, 212, 272 Cohen, Percy 145 Collier, Andrew 24, 41–2, 161 colonial exploitation 203, 207, 257–8, 260–3 commerce 167–71, 187, 223 commodification 32, 80; culture of 238 commodity production 103, 267, 273–4, 288, 302; petty 170–2, 208; social relations of 98, 153 communication 42, 206 communism 58–9, 84, 92; former states of 274, 276–7 Communist Manifesto, The 93 communities 77, 184–5; racist divisions in 256 Compatibility Thesis 180–1, 192–4, 196–8, 212 consciousness 85–91, 97–8, 105, 112–14,

390

Index

consciousness continued 129, 150–4, 163–4, 175; human 27, 77, 108; social 101, 148 constellationality 20, 29 constraining ills 38, 61–2, 323; freedom from 329–30 constraints 8, 32, 54–5, 60, 64, 195 consumption 105, 207, 216–17, 233, 277, 316; people as objects of 238; privileged classes 126 contradictions 2, 25–7, 39, 48, 55–6, 61, 65, 74–81, 86–9, 102, 105, 114, 121–2, 125–6, 139–40, 179, 181, 192–4, 196–200, 324, 328; internal 134, 204; of real life 209; systemic 227, 285 Contradiction Thesis 180, 192, 194–200, 212 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A 28 criminal justice 240; domestic policies 262 crises 38, 198; demographic 318 critical realism 1–9, 20, 29, 68, 71, 107–9, 114, 137–9, 142–4, 177–8, 322–3; ontology of 23, 29, 67; preservative sublation of 66, 70; social theory of 5, 35, 73, 138, 142–6, 149, 157, 161–2, 325 cumulative development 183–8, 195 Darwinism 59, 133, 263 Dennett, Daniel C. 40 depth realism 8, 10–11, 34, 68, 322 determinism 30, 90–1, 93, 105–6, 127, 303; absolute 120; productive force 184, 307; social 152; structural 35; technological 180, 182, 189, 197; teleological 28, 212 developmental process 82; dialectical 326; linear 293; trajectories of 172, 315, 329 Development Thesis 180–2, 184–6, 189–92, 194, 197–8, 212; rejection of 183, 188 dialectic 83, 106, 134–6, 319; Bhaskar’s 7, 22, 26, 27, 330, 333; and critical realism 49; of nature 71, 112, 138; negative 23, 323 Dialectical Biologist, The 141 dialectical critical realism 4, 7, 19–20, 26, 29, 34–6, 40–1, 47, 66–71, 106–9, 114, 139, 196, 322–4; Bhaskar’s 3, 28, 37, 65–7, 70, 106, 139–41, 213–14, 325–7; four levels of 27; system of 19, 31, 62; transcendental 6, 8, 13 dialectical materialism 56–7, 106, 109, 111–15, 119, 139–40, 150, 209

Dialectics of Nature 28, 138 Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom 19–20, 24–8, 36–7, 42–3, 49, 51, 58, 66–8, 326 directionality 113, 147, 173–4, 178, 184, 289, 294, 314; epochal 143, 209, 282, 293, 299; progressive 34; rational 327, 333; in societal evolution 318 direct producers 181–3, 185, 192, 200, 202–3, 212, 226, 268–71, 274–6, 286, 306–7, 309, 318 discrimination 228, 249, 256, 260, 264 division of labour 217, 232, 249; see also gender domination 50–2, 214–18, 224–5, 233, 242–4, 249, 268–9, 274, 281, 290–1, 293, 297–8, 305–7, 319, 325, 328; bureaucratic 220, 302; legal and religious 228; non-economic 159–60; political 193, 278, 310; politico-military 221; racial 160, 250 dualism 2, 8, 32, 73, 107, 111–12, 121–2, 171 ecologism 132, 324, 331 economic 169, 174, 206, 225, 264–8, 278, 316; advance 183, 205; base 210–11; class 318; crises 100, 200, 285; determinism 176; evolutionism 181, 310; growth 207, 221, 317; innovation 195, 320; interests 291, 316; laws of motion 100, 103–5, 175; mechanisms 51, 216, 308–9; power 217–20, 269; pressure 276, 307; production 19, 185, 193, 308; progress 199, 204, 284; relations 148, 160–1, 175, 306; resources 189, 191 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The 92 economic development 94, 103, 186, 204–5, 268, 281–2, 305–6, 317–19; of tributary mode 202 economic exploitation 221, 227, 260, 267, 271, 275; of labour 248, 258; modes of 268 economic structures 159, 161, 219, 270, 278, 291, 292; and processes 175; of society 159, 162 education 315; disadvantage in 45, 262, 264 egalitarian 167, 188, 262; distributions 193, 245, 319 Einstein, Albert 116–17; theory of relativity 138, 140 elite 19, 90, 155, 186, 189, 200–2, 210,

Index 219, 223–4, 228, 236, 244, 260–1, 286, 295, 298, 307, 310; bureaucratic 57; consumption 302–4; domination 220, 226–7, 274–5; enrichment 191, 305–6; idealism of 150; political 276; propertied 262, 269; state 246–8; urban 304, 309; vested interests of 53, 58 emancipation 18, 42, 54–5, 106, 327–8; and goals of Marxism 322–3; and politics 7, 50, 333; and social theory 20, 35–6; struggle for 330; universal 32–4 emergence 1, 6–8, 14–15, 37–9, 54, 64, 68, 71–5, 107, 111, 137, 143, 303, 322; of class society 245; cultural 162–4; economic 146; material 140, 178 emergent structures 164, 175, 210, 266 emergentist 108, 149, 162; Marxism 71, 143; materialism 109, 209; ontology 144, 146 empiricism 1, 11, 70, 73, 119, 300–1 employers 156, 229, 236, 241, 308; propertied 286; of women 234 employment 98, 229, 255; feminization of 248; low status 264; opportunities 194; paid 240, 242; women’s occupations 249 Engels, Friedrich 13, 27, 36, 39–41, 47–8, 51, 56–8, 76, 84, 88–94, 101, 106–15, 117, 124, 135–41, 147, 150–2, 158, 174–6, 184, 188, 209–10, 245–7, 267–8, 271, 323–4; and dialectical materialism 2, 41, 59, 67, 71, 322; dialectics of 65, 111, 119–20; ontological dialectics of 49, 110, 116; and three laws of dialectic 86, 132 English Revolution (1640–88) 199 Enlightenment 20, 48, 54, 93; ideology of 262 environment 75, 80, 134, 150, 252–3; anterior 133, 164, 284; social 45, 205, 249 epistemic fallacy 1, 6, 10, 22, 24, 28, 35, 37 ethnicity: disadvantages 250; economic position of groups 250; minorities 251, 255, 263–5; populations 253 eudaimonia 32, 37–9, 42, 45, 53–5, 66, 323, 326, 329–31; socialist 280, 332 Europe 169–70, 187–91, 206–7, 258; Eastern 58, 274; feudalism in 202, 296, 317; global domination of 263; Jews of 260; wars 57, 261; Western 195 evolution 39–40, 59, 111–13, 121, 131–4, 146, 151, 182–4, 296–8, 302–4, 314, 324; mechanisms of 90, 96, 114; natural 54, 71,

391

75, 114; organic process 140; rejection of 189, 299; social 160, 289; societal 142, 173–4, 211, 282–3, 293, 320–1; theory unacknowledged 294 exchange-value 102, 126; unequal 257 explanatory primacy 174, 270, 275 exploitation 16, 32, 105, 194, 202, 208, 218, 225, 228, 237, 254–6, 269, 271; of black people 259; and oppression 189, 278; rent-tax 203, 227; resistance to 156, 331; sexual 232, 249; as unpaid labour 275; of women 244 exploited class 98, 102, 155, 158, 195, 197, 201–2, 212, 257, 261, 266, 286, 329 exploiting classes 99, 155, 183, 195, 203, 273, 286, 309, 318; location of 202, 206; non-producing 271 extra-economic coercion 219, 269, 279, 312, 318; mechanisms of 307 fact–value dualism 70, 323; judgements 17, 35 family 76–7, 236–7, 239; breadwinner system 242; joint decision-making in 245; patriarchal 247–8; wage 233–4; working class 241 fatalism 91–4, 96, 105, 324 feminism 231–3, 237, 241–3; orthodox 245; radical 244 fetishism 44; intellectual 101; of social theory 102 feudal 160, 203–5, 269, 274, 311; aristocracy 170–1, 206; burghers 226; Europe 191; societies 170, 195, 201, 258 feudalism 172, 201–2, 206, 286, 312; crisis of 207, 305, 317; forces of production of 190–1; mode of production of 208, 273, 310; relations of production 195, 273, 312; transition from 192, 315 Filmer, Deon 287 forces of production 79, 143, 167, 174, 179, 181–6, 189, 192–5, 199–208, 211–13, 223, 281–2, 284–5, 288–9, 311, 314, 316–17, 329–30; capitalist 84, 332; development of 190, 198, 309; material 55; of tributary mode 203 four-planar-social-being 1, 31, 34, 37–8, 46–7, 51, 62, 322, 326 France 169; revolution see French Revolution (1789–94) freedom 33, 65; absence of 32; dialectic of 32, 38, 107, 326, 329 free flourishing 55, 323–6, 328, 331; universal 323

392

Index

free labour 88, 261, 302 French Revolution (1789–94) 199 From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul 53, 55 Gailey, Christine 246–7 gender 238; division of labour 234–7, 240–1, 245, 248–9; domination 50–2, 214–18, 224–5, 233, 242–4, 249, 268–9, 274, 281, 290–1, 293, 297–8, 305–7, 319, 325, 328; inequality 242–5; stratification 230–3 generative mechanisms 13, 133, 143, 177, 211, 328 genetics 136, 233, 252–3; environmental interface of 122, 130–1; microstructures of 130, 153 geo-history 29, 37–9, 101, 172, 327, 329, 333; as development 62, 321; directionality in 283, 325–6, 332 Geras, Norman 151 German Ideology, The 91–2 German, Lindsay 233 Germany 222, 316; Junker aristocracy 226; philosophy of 92, 324 Giddens, Anthony 184, 193, 214–21, 228, 268–70, 282–3, 293, 296–8, 302–7, 319–20; historical sociology of 311; structuration theory of 43–4 Gilroy, Paul 254 God 53–4, 69, 107; reality of 108 Gottlieb, Roger 93–4 Gould, S.J. 135 Gruffydd-Jones, Branwyn 327 Harman, Chris 176, 182, 188 Hartmann, Heidi 232 Hegel, G.W.F. 39, 42, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 73, 83–4, 93–5; idealism of 150, 324; philosophy of 78, 91; system of 27, 79; and world spirit 301 Hegelian dialectic 20–2, 28, 41, 48, 71–2, 80, 86–8, 106, 114, 139; critique of 26, 56, 67; of history 79; inversion of 72, 89, 324; non-preservative sublation of 66; three laws of 76, 89, 115 hierarchical social relations 13, 156, 172, 204 Hindu society 167, 170–1, 223–4 historicism 92–4, 96; rejection of 105 history 125, 173, 284, 291, 293; and development 74–8, 320; as heterogeneous continuum 280, 298; social 142

horizontal causality 146, 161–2, 173; relations of 14 horticultural societies 186; kinship in the female line 246–7; pre-class 233 housing 255; overcrowded 240 human agency 29, 43–4, 61, 146, 148, 164, 177, 190; non-economic modes of 176; social 99, 157, 185 human agents 97–9, 142, 144, 147, 159, 163, 178, 197, 200, 204, 206, 212; innovative 186 human emancipation 5, 7, 19, 42, 53, 68, 71, 92, 105, 189, 326, 329–30, 331; dialectic of 213, 323 human freedom 2, 282–3, 289, 321, 325–7; constraints on 19; universal 34, 53 human nature 99, 129, 151, 157, 189–91, 200; social or co-operative 153; stratified concept of 158 human needs 155, 157–8, 163; universal 326 human rights: of citizenship 262 hunter-gatherer communities 185–6, 193, 245–6, 319–20; egalitarianism of 167; pre-class 233 idealism 48, 68–9, 79–80, 87–9, 107–9, 112, 165–6, 171, 189, 278, 290, 292, 324; cultural 232, 245 immigrants 262, 264; and host population 250, 255 imperialism 40, 85, 128, 207, 280, 307, 316–18 India 170, 187, 310; trade and industry 167 Indus Valley 224–5, 309 industrialization 188, 276, 278 industrial societies 221, 235, 300; and capitalism 186–7 inequality, social 227, 230 institutions 18, 122, 308; state 318 instrumentalism 280, 299, 302 interests 158, 163, 183, 191–2, 315; assertion of 159; material 178; naturalistic 156–7; objective 99, 106, 144, 165, 254; social 156–7, 314 interface 283; of nature and nurture 130 interpenetration 73, 126, 134, 175, 219, 221, 278, 291; dialectical 37; of opposites 22 investment 166–7; in goods sector 277; societal 154 Islam 167, 170, 206; classical 201; conflict with 260; as Empire 187, 261

Index Kant, Immanuel 77, 83, 290; notion of unitary time 43; thesis of mind–matter independence 48 Kautsky, Karl 50, 85, 165, 171, 192 Kidron, Mike 316 knowledge 9, 81; abstract conceptual 87; objects of 13, 16, 83; production 82, 184; rational 277 labour 129, 151–4, 167, 190, 269, 295, 330; alienation 77, 105; under capitalism 288; cheaper 104, 234; conditions 264, 270–2, 287; domestic 242; movement 41, 91, 253, 308; process 36, 102, 182–4, 284; productivity 193; social 163 labour market 240–1, 248–9; inequalities 237 labour power 102, 177, 226, 286–7; as a commodity 156, 275; reproduction of 248; women’s 232, 241, 247 landowning class 201, 208, 313 language 158; ability 154; structures 163, 174 law 89, 96, 99, 126, 132–3, 165, 187; dialectical 113, 137–8, 140; of motion of capitalism 80, 110, 291, 308; of nature 25, 116, 131; as probabilistic causality 90, 98, 118–20; societal 101–3; of value 169; and withdrawal of legal rights 278 left Darwinians 49, 56, 58, 71, 107, 121–3, 125–6, 128, 130–3, 135–6, 140–1, 324 legitimation 237, 293; ideological 19, 196 Lenin, V.I. 4, 27, 41, 48, 57, 79, 81–6, 91, 107, 140, 147, 266, 324 Levine, Andrew 180–1, 193–4, 197–9, 212 Levins, R. and Lewontin, R. 125–6, 131, 136, 138, 140–1 life chances 19, 45, 99, 210, 226, 256, 264, 283–5, 288; of agents 229–30; allocation of 216; differential 145; distribution of 160; of women 249 Lifelines 130 lifestyle 217, 222; separatism 244 living standards 189, 232–4, 254, 257, 278; defending 99, 229; improved 248; working class 105, 255 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy 97, 101, 150–1 Magee, Bryan 95 male nature 233, 237, 239; and criminality

393

240; exploitative behaviour of 249; ideology of 231–2; male–female equality 246; and power and authority 242–4 malintegration 90; social 31, 75, 142, 145, 179, 194–6, 325, 332; structural 104, 181, 211, 227, 284, 331; structural and social 180, 212; system 198, 200, 205 Mann, Michael 184, 214, 218–19, 268, 282–3, 293, 296–8, 302, 313, 317–20; historical sociology of 314 market 226, 241, 257, 267, 273–4, 288; and capitalist economy 126, 237; competition 80, 99, 103, 229, 264, 302; workers 235; world 312–13, 316 Marxian dialectics 3, 20, 26–7, 48–9, 56, 66–8, 79, 89, 93, 106, 114, 139–41; socio-historical 91, 95–8, 213 Marxian materialism 161, 173, 280–1; dialectical 140, 322, 331; sociohistorical 38, 69, 71, 147, 158, 174, 292, 294, 321, 324, 329; sociological 142 Marxian theory 146, 278, 320; contemporary 189, 195; of history 177, 180, 212, 276, 283, 289, 320; social 41, 149; as socio-historical realism 35, 213 Marxists 72, 92, 96–8, 142, 152, 163, 192, 316, 322 master–slave relationships 32–3, 42, 49–52, 87, 214 materialism 49, 86–7, 107–9, 165, 232, 237, 290–2; and empirio-criticism 81, 84–5; epistemological 79–80, 140, 280; historical 151, 212, 268, 291, 295, 330; mechanical 82, 150, 171; reductionist 58, 111, 249; synchronic emergent 9, 29, 39–40 materialist 154, 159, 161, 171; sociology 161, 282; theory of history 176, 218, 292–3 materialist dialectics 1–3, 27, 39, 47, 69, 70–1, 84, 86, 89, 106–7, 122, 137–9, 322, 324–5; classical 55; diffraction of 20, 26, 28; ontological 7 material production 103, 158, 163, 188, 207; development of 160, 181, 310; non-productive owners of 281 means of production 246, 275, 316; distribution of 102, 226, 269; separation of workers from 100, 276, 286; state ownership of 270–2; and subsistence 156, 160 mediation 37, 74, 76, 79, 86, 114, 121–2, 139–40, 324

394

Index

merchant class 206; and capitalism 168–70, 207; urban 167 Mesopotamia 186, 309, 310 micro-reductionism 121, 128, 138 Middle East 201 Miliband, Ralph 236–7 military 219, 312, 316, 318–19; competition 206, 297, 317; warfare 310 military intervention 269; foreign 57 military power 170, 206–7, 296, 304, 306, 317; of cities and towns 208; dependence of feudal peasants on 311 Mitchell, Juliet 231 modes of production 2, 36, 52, 60, 94, 96, 103, 142, 159, 161–2, 176–8, 204–5, 211, 213, 221, 270, 276, 281–2, 296, 308, 314–15, 318, 320, 325; capitalist 55, 100, 103, 137, 275, 287, 312; dominant 147, 195, 258; feudal 208, 273, 310; pre-capitalist 100, 190, 286 monism 63, 175 monovalence, ontological 23–4, 28, 63 moral realism 32, 34, 53, 325–6 morphogenesis 144–5; static cycle 177–8 mysticism 72, 79, 181, 300 naturalism 8, 13, 35, 58; abstract 258; dialectical critical 29, 38, 43, 62; ethical 19, 34, 68, 323, 325 natural science 115; disciplines 324; epistemology 66; goals of 9; research 4 nature 137; distinct properties of 112; and nurture 129; as system of systems 111; as unity of opposites 119 Neale, R.S. 213 negation 37, 72, 76, 136; determinate 21, 62; modes of 6, 66, 323; of the negation 20, 24, 39, 77–9, 86, 89–90, 114–15, 132, 135, 138, 141; radical 24–5, 194; real 24–5; of self 75, 125–6, 194; of social systems 196; transformative 24–6, 33, 37, 41, 71; triadic processes of 22, 24, 77 negativity 23–4, 28, 61–4, 66, 125, 128 neo-Weberianism 220, 231, 250, 263, 313, 320, 325; argument 219, 267; critique of 185–8; scholars 193, 293; as social theory 214, 221; sociologists 5, 183, 229, 253, 298, 302–3; theorists 184, 228, 282, 311 networks 257, 296–7 New World 170, 247, 258, 260; plantations 261 Nietzsche, Friedrich 280, 290, 298–9, 304;

metaphysic of domination 253, 273; philosophical commitments 215; stereotype of 269; will to power 319 Nile Valley 186, 309 Occident 299; and origins of modernity 301 opportunity costs 178, 212, 249, 285 oppression 38, 44, 158, 218, 259, 263–4, 327–9; racial 250–1, 254–6; of women 230, 248 Optimality Thesis 180–1, 192, 198–9, 200, 205, 212 Orient 299 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, The 245 overproduction 80, 100; crisis of 288 Parsons, Talcott 217–18, 230; Parsonian stereotype 269 patriarchy 235, 237, 242–6; and culture 233; as ideology 232, 241; theory of 215, 231, 236 peasantry 207, 274, 287; in pre-capitalist communities 259; economy 309–10, 317; exploitation 186; revolts 195, 203; rural economy of 202, 205–8 Phenomenology of Spirit, The 76 Philosophical Notebooks 48, 80, 83–4, 111 Philosophy of History, The 73, 76, 77 pluralism 73, 94, 146, 165–6, 214–16, 283, 293, 298–300, 320; analytical 301 police: occupational culture of 241 political economists 290 political economy 48, 153, 266–7, 305, 308; critique of 55, 271; liberal theory and 101 politico-military 221, 225, 273, 275; coercion 203, 268; competition 312–13; factors 223; mechanisms 200, 261, 309, 314–18; relations 161, 219, 245; structures 219, 278, 305, 320 politico-military power 195, 203, 220, 269, 295, 310–11; centralized 201, 321 politics 50, 266, 275; and authority 96, 306; as party organisation 216–17, 277; as power structures 161, 197, 211, 215, 289; and social struggles 7; and valuejudgements 291, 323 Popper, Karl 98 population 207, 329; decline in 317; growth 320; pressures 185; urbanization of 288

Index Possibility of Naturalism, The 16, 29, 37, 44 poverty 240, 332; and vagrancy 262 power 16, 32, 215–16, 269; access to 230, 246, 251, 265, 309; centres 282, 296–7, 313; deprivation 243; distribution of 228–9, 240–2, 275, 281, 295, 321; inequalities 158, 220, 239; political and military 32, 217, 267, 296, 304; relations 214, 218, 291; structure 231, 320 power2 relations 33, 39, 42–4, 50–4, 64, 329, 327–8, 331; abolition of 55 pre-capitalist 222, 307, 312; relations of production 191, 261; societies 216–19, 232, 267–70, 289, 295–6, 305–6, 311 pre-class societies 187, 233, 246, 319 pressures 186, 210, 241, 284–6; selection 134; structural 198; systematic 197, 212 prestige 216–17, 222, 228, 230–1, 251, 265 Primacy Thesis 180 privilege 175, 225, 231, 265; and lifestyles 229; mode of social agency 192; sociocultural 159 productive forces 180, 197, 272; development of 189, 191, 193–5, 288, 320; evolution of 187, 192 profit 256, 258; capitalist 332; making 157, 166–9, 255; rate of 105 proletariat 84, 99, 157, 234, 262; global 287, 332; productive power of 285–6; and sexism 237 propertied class 14, 170, 193–7, 203, 206, 226–8, 304; distribution of 50, 275; elites 183, 210–11; feudal 310; legal 271–4; ownership 53; pre-capitalist agents 287; private 153, 167–9; relations 180, 281, 295, 332 propertyless class 80, 177, 227, 285, 288 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 166–7, 171 Protestantism 166–8, 170–3, 292, 299, 315; ascetic 169, 300; as Protestant Ethic 297, 313 public ownership 220, 272, 275 qualitative change 115, 120, 190–1 quantitative change 78, 85, 118, 120 quantum theory 117–18, 119, 138, 140, 324 racism 45, 51, 250–3, 264–5; ideology 255–6, 259–63; institutionalized 254; segregation 228; white 261–2

395

Ramdin, Ron 254 realism 10, 14, 40, 55, 108–9, 139, 143–5, 280, 303, 322; evaluative 19, 323; judgemental 35, 66 Reclaiming Reality 37, 44 reductionism 2, 6, 8, 13, 70, 106, 119–23, 190, 324; biological 127, 233; critiques of 74–6; cultural 128; historical 289 reflection theory 81, 154 refugees see immigrants reification 95–6, 101, 237; errors of 30, 32 relations of production 143, 174–82, 189, 192–205, 211–13, 221, 253, 265–72, 275–6, 281–5, 311–12, 329–30; capitalist 98, 100, 105, 190, 229, 249, 260; feudal 195, 273, 312; historical 79 religion 169, 261, 314–15; as Catholicism 168–70, 201; as Confucianism 167, 171; differences 253; ethics of 165, 209, 291; and persecution 260; as Taoist tradition 123; values of 224; Vedic 223 research 116; scientific 59, 88, 122, 136–8, 149, 261; and social sciences 35, 41 resistance 33, 137, 327 resources 155–6, 201; distributions of 203, 228, 274; economic 258; monopolization of 219, 222, 277 resources, allocative and authoritative 162, 218–20, 228–30, 236, 268, 271, 273–5, 294–5, 305–6, 308, 320; control of 2, 298, 304, 309; distribution of 50, 177, 265, 269; in pre-capitalist societies 318; unequal distribution of 219, 222, 295, 319 revolution 57, 85–8, 172, 179, 181, 196–8, 203, 212, 285, 289; proletarian 93; social 174, 213; socialist 106, 220, 248; urban 247 Rohrlich, Ruby 246 rootedness 14; ontological 8 Rose, Steven 127, 130–1, 134–5 Sacks, Karen 246 Sahlins, Marshall 185 sanctions 178, 211; avoidance of 99 science 10–14, 63, 83, 93, 110, 121, 133–4, 139, 167; as chaos theory 116–19, 140, 324; empirical 86, 108; and knowledge 35, 76, 87, 107; modern 252 Science of Logic, The 76 Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation 16

396

Index

Scott, John 272 Second International Marxism 55, 91, 185, 290; socialist parties 84 self-alienation 53; of co-operative labour 194 serfs 87, 286; labour of 191, 310, 317; and manor system 311; productivity of 191 sexist ideology 249; freedom from 246 slavery 258–61, 286, 311; abolition of 263; black 262; social relations of 88 social change 75, 129, 147, 314, 325; progressive 5, 187–8, 192, 199, 211, 285, 288; and reforms 204 social conflict 143, 155, 179, 195, 203, 266, 319 social crises 90, 125, 203, 213, 310 social cube 1, 31, 37–8 socialism 55, 200, 258; in one country 57 social labour 80, 146, 149, 154, 158–9, 179, 183–5, 192–3, 211, 284; conscious 97; exclusion from 247; productivity 187, 190, 206, 319; transformative 59 social power 50, 298, 320; acquisition of 217; four sources of 297; modes of 146 social production 53, 179, 207, 248–9, 267, 272, 318; asymmetrical distribution of rewards 195; conscious 154, 182 social relations 9, 16, 19, 31, 44–6, 87–8, 98, 101, 122, 148, 155–7, 160–3, 175, 193, 212, 323, 330; capitalist 17, 83, 187, 207, 237–8; legally entrenched 228; between men 232; of production 102, 180, 191; reform of 196, 210; systemic crisis of 285; transformation of 276 social sciences 7–9, 16, 18, 29, 39, 42, 47–9, 59, 68, 137, 324–5; task of 30; theory 137 social structures 15, 43–6, 95, 144–6, 156, 190–2, 209, 242, 281; inherited 177; non-economic 159, 162 social struggles 156, 172, 181, 198, 266, 305, 315; by the oppressed 19, 329 social systems 30, 52, 99, 165, 173, 194–7, 214, 281–2, 314; transformation of 160, 284, 321 social theory 66, 68, 139; contemporary 67, 217; liberal 153; task of 97 societal change 168, 180, 227, 300–1; and decline 317; processes of 56, 74, 140, 170 societal development 36, 75, 99–100, 155, 165, 177, 191–2, 209, 219, 296, 298; macroscopic 178, 291, 314–15; process of 317

societies 15–16, 114, 148, 154, 301; historical 45, 102, 219–21, 293; noncapitalist 218–21, 269–71, 278, 306–7, 320; post-capitalist 275; stratified 8, 34, 99, 143, 146; traditional 29, 225, 304–5, 316 socio-cultural 30, 176; development 159; evolution 325; reality 152–5, 291; relations 220 socio-historical materialism 2–5, 36, 41, 49–52, 60, 71, 84, 91–7, 100–1, 105–6, 140, 143–5, 149, 154, 173–8, 180–5, 188, 192, 195, 199, 209–12, 220, 271, 282–3, 289–93, 325–6, 333; critique of 295, 313; and development 37, 59, 66; dialectical 110, 148 socio-historical processes 67, 175, 296, 301, 325; analysis of 71, 303; and science 4, 139, 322 Sources of Social Power 297 Soviet Russia 57, 85–6, 220, 274–8, 316 species 151, 154; being 129, 150–1, 153, 155, 184; capacities 152, 158; objective needs 156 Spybey, Tony 176, 186, 189 Stalinism 55, 57, 91, 138, 185 state 297, 312–13, 316; absolutist 274; building 273, 318; bureaucracy 201, 236; and capitalism 276; centralized 297; intervention 220–1; policy-making 318; power 240, 247, 297; relations 215, 293; repression 278; and socialism 57, 275, 277; tributary 202; urbanized class 170–1 status 228, 251; deprivation 239, 243; groups 216–17, 226; inequalities 223, 231; ranking 26, 218, 222, 225, 229–32, 245, 249–50, 258, 265, 282 stereotype 252–3; racist 264; sex-role 243–4, 246 stratification 5–6, 25, 32, 37–9, 47, 50–2, 64, 68, 111, 140, 143, 214–15, 218, 262, 278, 308, 322, 325; cultural 32, 45, 162–3, 215, 232, 278, 320; by ethnicity or gender 50, 159, 204, 228, 251–2; of nature 12–14, 107–8; political 216, 221–2, 277; racial 230, 256–9, 263–5; social 246, 253, 274; systems 4, 59, 128, 160, 218, 225–6, 281, 320, 331; tripartite model of 215, 282 structural capacities 159, 181, 203–6, 288, 333 structural contradictions 31, 124, 145, 173, 194, 197–9, 201, 205, 289, 325; of society 200, 315

Index structure 40–6, 101, 108, 114, 137, 142–4, 147, 161–2; and agency 29, 33, 213; pre-existent 16; of reality 22, 75, 127 subjective and objective dialectics 21, 23, 40, 43, 82–4, 87–8, 112 subordinate class 90, 205, 285, 330; agents 174, 329; interests of 196; life chances of 19 subordination 257, 300; of blacks 251, 254–6, 278; female 231–2, 236, 244–5; military 205, 211 superordinate class 16, 159, 196, 244, 261, 329 superstructure 161, 176; forms 199, 210; institutions 196 surplus 246–7, 305; appropriation 19, 156; extraction 161, 211, 275, 302; value 103–5, 157, 257, 332 surplus labour 104, 226, 270–1; appropriation of 19, 227, 286; unpaid 268 surplus product 103, 191, 202–3, 245, 271, 286, 304–6, 309, 312; appropriation of 223, 261, 276 system 118, 203; crisis 199, 202; elaboration 314–15; of multiple dependencies 300; of social relations 196; of systems 127; transformation 181, 193, 204 tax exploitation 202, 208, 309 technology 59, 100, 167, 310; innovations 104, 190, 202, 205; military 315; transport 187, 206, 304 teleologism 48, 60–1, 78, 92–4, 96, 106, 184, 324; historical 105, 113, 293 Theories of Surplus Value 105 Third World 50, 189, 254, 264; discrimination 255; workers 256–7 time–space-distanciation 293–4, 296, 310 totality 27–9, 37, 47, 73–82, 86, 114, 121–3, 128–9, 138–9, 164, 194, 290–1, 299–300, 324; closed 21–3, 55–7; complex 147; contradictory 31, 85, 116, 132–4, 148; differentiated 66, 140; fractured 280 towns 195, 206; as mercantile centres 169–70, 202, 206 trade unions 232, 278; sexism of 237 transformation 88, 112, 120, 133, 174, 192, 201–3, 314; epochal 204, 305, 317, 325–6; model of social action 30–2, 35–40, 44–6, 322; of quantity into quality 76, 78, 86, 114–15, 121, 132, 138, 141–2; structural 211, 283, 294;

397

theory of 283; Thesis 180–1, 192, 197–200, 212 transformative agency 28, 329; capacities of 31 transformative change 41, 59, 74, 76, 79, 85–6, 114, 125, 139–40, 324; internally generated 75, 81 tributary mode of production 201–5, 210, 304 tributary state 100, 193, 208, 223, 269–70, 309–10; exploitation in 171, 307, 35 tripartite model of agency 66, 76, 226 Trotsky, Leon 27, 41, 48, 55–6, 79, 85, 89, 91, 107, 111–13, 124, 147, 324 unemployment 104, 240–1, 264 unity 23, 61, 83; in difference 21, 66, 77, 79, 124, 129, 147, 314; and interpenetration 86, 114–16, 132, 134, 138, 141; of nature 110; of opposites 48, 80, 117–18, 148, 194 universalization 33–4, 286, 289, 318, 325–32 urban centres 202, 207, 262, 287–8 utopianism 53, 150, 165; abstract 68 vested interests 17, 99, 145, 177–9, 196, 210–12, 234, 284–5, 288, 315, 328–9, 332; social 189, 199, 272 victims 243–4, 258, 278, 328; of slave trade 262 violence 217; domestic and sexual 238–43; interpersonal 246; as rape 237 vulgar materialism 245, 292; Weberian critique of 290 wage labour 51, 80–1, 156, 169, 194, 257, 276, 287, 330; exploitation of 125, 186, 234–5, 269 wages 17–18, 99, 105, 255–6; fund 104, 264; higher levels 249; as male earnings 241 Wages, Price and Profit 105 war 84, 203, 225, 304, 315–17; Cold War 60, 91 wealth 166–9, 332; appropriation of 195; creation 172, 187–8, 202, 210, 247, 269, 284, 307; distribution 83, 255; economic 271, 310; inherited 226; productive 227; redistribution of 53, 312; traditional 225 Weber, Max 104, 160, 166–71, 201, 218, 222, 226, 289–92, 299, 320; historical sociology of 282, 300, 302; pluralism of 280; social theory of 147, 209, 214, 221, 278, 281, 325

398

Index

women’s oppression 52, 160, 230–1, 235–8, 248–9; and domestic sphere 240–2; and male benefits 232–5; as male domination 245; origins of 247 workers 85, 105–6, 156–7, 219, 255, 258, 276, 278, 286–7, 330, 333; highly skilled 257; male 241; professional groups 229; propertyless status of 261,

286; and protective legislation 232, 235–7, 248; racist divisions amongst 256; women 233–4, 244 working class 57, 100, 104, 235, 239, 244, 253, 258, 265, 332; black settlers 254; family 234, 241–2, 248; poverty 105, 262; sexism 237; solidarity 34, 256, 327; women 236

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