Contemprary Sociology

I have learned a lot in Andrew Sayer's class on contemporary debates in sociology. By now we have covered Max Weber, Bauman, Karl Marx, and Bourdieu. I guess the sequencing is very meaningful and interesting as one seems to lead to another.

I liked Bauman’s account of Holocaust and Modernity and his account of how modern bureaucracy led to unique mass murder of a group and that this only happened because bureaucratic modernisation came to have a big role for the first time in the history of mankind. Bureaucracy in a sense that what is done is defined as a project in a hierarchical order of people and groups who work together to produce or perform a certain project without any value judgments needed or permitted on the part of almost all people involved in that certain end result. This is going back to Weber’s teachings and the dichotomy that he recommends to move from traditional to modern account of life. Here, Bauman argues that modern bureaucracy treated mass murder as a project to do and brought different levels to it in a professional way thus, individuals or groups were no longer responsible for they were just doing their duty and did not need to evaluate the end product either. That is why the job which would otherwise take 200 years to do in a traditional manner took a few years!!(not sure how many years exactly). This couldn’t have happened in any other way than having a modern apparatus as no hatred would last for 200 years in a row! This is the analysis which is presented as a counter effect of the earlier movements in scientification of everything and the dichotomisation of Max Weber in dividing what can be considered science and what falls into the category of non science.

Then we have gone to Marx and his account of how bourgeoisie is formed in capitalist society and that the capitalism is aggressive and expansive in its nature and always needs to look for new markets and this leads to the proletariat or working class to be comodificated by this process and become a sort of paid slave whose value is always competitively coming down. This phenomenon is seen in other sectors of the society like education providers like universities in functioning more and more as an institution which sells a commodity, ‘education’.

Later on I attended a lecture by Bob Jessop and I learned more about Marxism and Bob’s interest in it as he suggested that we talk about our projects and he would tell how Marx could be incorporated in that study and what it could offer. I particularly noticed that he among others refer to Sweden system and how the structure has been able to introduce a more socialist format which is still bring prosperity and welfare without having to give in to capitalism to take over. The discussion on how people in Europe with more or less leftist background try to resist the inroads of capitalism in favour of more national and traditional models has been taken up in some other settings too.

Among what I have been discussing here and there my discussion with my Greek flatmate who has a good theoretical background of leftist ideology has been very revealing to me. The more knowledge oriented economy of Finland and Sweden made sense to me and I could make sense of how capitalism brings societies to their knees to beg for more and more capital to come to the economy of a country and how these changes are against the benefits of working class and lower classes. In the same line the resistance against what is called globalisation makes sense in a way that it is not just about protesting against one single treaty of agreement but it is a protest and outcry against a hegemony which has established itself as the only working hegemony in the new world. Yet, I do make distinction between what I can call cultural globalisation and world village concepts and the economic globalisation the fist would make me feel better about the future and the latter makes me a cynical onlooker.

I found the book Communist Manifesto very interesting discoursally I am not aware if any discourse analysis type of study has been done on that document but to me it seems like a very interesting piece to do a discourse analysis not necessarily Critical Discourse Analysis though. The tone of the book is very strong and compelling with some strong and explicit proclamations. Some of those rule and slogans do not strike a positive association in many of us now because we know what came out of those in the hands of some rulers in Soviet Union or Poland. For example there is an explicit denial of individuality and alternative way of thinking and all other analyses are labelled as coming from bourgeoisie.

The copy that I found in the library was like 50 years old and there was an attached analysis written on the manifesto a few decades after the original book. That pamphlet should also be very interesting to discourse analysts. The Pamphlet is still very pro Marx analysis and borrows some ideologically strong language that Marx used in the book. The pamphlet talks about how Marx was wrong in prediction that the proletariat revolutions will start from within developed countries like Germany or England and the fact that Marx was not paying attention to Russia then it continues to explain why the revolution did not start from where Marx had thought it would and I should say I found the explanation logical enough.

There is no bibliography, no references, no academic tone, no expected jargon and nothing of the features which usually brings about a lay man vs. scholarly distinction as is the mainstream thing to do in academia. As linguist that was the first interesting feature of the book to me was the uniqueness of the discourse which would not fall into what is conventionally called ‘scientific’. In the beginning of the class I mentioned it without having any intention of degrading or undermining it but by the reactions that got from other students I realized that the word 'scientific’ still carries a load of positive associations and if you say something is not conventionally scientific it means you are trying to bring it down. That is not what I expect to see at least in sociology department or ‘Lancaster’ where everybody is attacking positivism and quantification of science and there is a prefix 'critical' for almost all the disciplines and trends.

I will write about Bourdieu later.