3: Social Conflict Approach

possible useful reddit discussion?


The Social Conflict Approach

(Karl Marx)

before, our "lens" focused our eye on stable patterns of social interaction (structures) and survival (functions).

Now with this new lens, our eyes will instead focus on very different phenomena: change, conflict, and social stresses and pressures.

Instead of starting with the question, "why does society exist at all?" we would now start with questions like, "why does one society come to replace another? why do countries wage war? why do revolutions happen? why do culture, public opinion, and laws change over time?"

Instead of the "organism" analogy, now we use the analogy of a gladiatorial arena, where contestants fight and struggle to kill one another, and to the victor go the spoils. The contestants are groups, subcultures, categories of people (race/class/gender/religion/sexuality/etc.)

   

We focus our attention on finite (limited) resources, and competition for money, prestige (status), and political power.  So the standard process a social conflict theorist follows is to first look for moving targets, such as social change, revolution, protest, conflict, etc..., and then look for some disparity or inequality in resource distribution that may explain it. 

This approach REJECTS the idea that stable patterns (structures) exist BECAUSE they have a function of promoting the operation of society as a whole.  Instead, this approach views social structures as tools of the powerful that function to channel resources upward, and if they survive over time it is not because they are functional for all of society, but because the powerful have used their greater resources to entrench them in the battle with the less powerful.

It is very possible, then, for social structures to, in fact, benefit only a very small slice of society, and for most of society to be struggling to tear down those structures - but if the small slice that benefits is powerful enough, they can fortify those structures against these populist attacks.

To the extent that we look at structures, then, the focus is on how patterns of interaction are related to inequalities in the distribution of resources.

A few points to understand about how Marx viewed the world:

• Marx was a very early sociologist, a contemporary of Comte. In the middle-1800's, there was no "sociology" to study, so he started with a background in philosophy.  He took a philosophical position known as material determinism - summed up with the maxim, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."
• Essentially, the material world has primacy, meaning it comes first. Matter precedes thought.  Existence precedes essence.  Thus, our ideas about who we are (and what things "mean") are a consequence of how our physical/material/social/economic environments shape us.
• Marx viewed human history as a dialectical cycle, meaning 2 or more groups struggle over resources (wealth/power/status) until eventually one wins; then eventually the winner either splits again into competing groups, or encounters an outside group to compete with, and the cycle repeats.
• For Marx, work (i.e. economic activity) is the primary social fact, and gives people's lives meaning.  The products of one's labor are seen as being an expression of one's self.  For Marx, this is inherent in the human condition. Part of what it means to be truly human, for Marx, is to work and have your work have meaning for who you are.

A story to illustrate Marx's thinking on work, human nature, and the problems of capitalism:

Imagine you are living in feudal, aristocratic Europe in the late 1700's. You are an artisan, a craftsman, perhaps a carpenter. You make furniture, dining room sets, chairs for example. 

You might imagine that you would do your work with pride... you would put your heart and soul into your work, so to speak. You would take care to select good materials, you would express your work ethic in the quality of the product you produce, you might express your sense of aesthetic beauty in the designs and decorations carved into the wood; you might even express something about your values or morals or religion in the kinds of design elements you chose, and so on. So Marx would say that the product of your labor is an expression of your "self," your identity. It has MEANING to you.

Now, the industrial revolution begins. In the neighboring town, a rich man invests his capital to build a chair factory. He sets up an assembly line and hires a few workers.

As an independent craftsman, perhaps it takes you two days to make a complete chair. You have to get the wood, cut it into basic shapes, sand them down, carve the decorations, assemble them together, and paint it.  But in the factory, there is one person specializing in each of those steps on the assembly line. One person just cuts wood all day. One sands all day. One carves, one assembles, one paints. It's much more efficient that way, since when you have to do all those different tasks yourself, you lose time "switching gears," so to speak.  Now, an individual can focus on perfecting one specific task, and does it over and over all day.

Perhaps 5 men together can produce 3 chairs per day, whereas it would have taken you a week to produce 3 chairs working alone. Maybe you would charge $100 per chair when you did everything yourself, and you could live on $300/week that way. But now the factory puts out 21 chairs per week, and they may not be of quite the same artistic quality since they're mass-produced, but they can be sold for cheaper, perhaps $50 each. So the factory takes in $1,050 per week.

This has a couple of effects. 

First, it reduces chair-making from an art form to a mechanical process. So it must also reduce the chair-maker from an artist/artisan who expresses meaning in the products of their labor, to a part in a machine doing standardized, repetitive tasks. The products of your labor are now alienated from you, or made Other to you. What you do is no longer meaningfully connected to who you are. Marx says this is de-humanizing, because part of what it means to be human is to do work that is meaningfully connected to who you are. As an assembly-line worker in a factory, your creative ideas are useless and unwanted. Being unused, your creativity atrophies. Marx, coming from a background in philosophy, thought this was inherently bad, and that society should not be set up to dehumanize people and alienate them from the products of their labor.

The other effect is economic. The factory takes in $1,050 per week. They pay each of the 5 workers $200/week, and the owner pockets the extra $50/week as his profit. Now you might think, why would I work in the factory for $200/week when I could sell my own chairs and make $300/week? Yes, but who is going to buy your $100 chairs anymore, when you can get one, almost as good, that's mass-produced for HALF the price? The demand for your goods dries up as industrially-produced goods become more common.

Now something else happens as a result of all this. Keep in mind that you've spent years as an apprentice, then as a journeyman, and finally as a master carpenter perfecting your craft of chair-building. You make some kick-ass chairs! And now this upstart capitalist comes into town, ruins your business, and expects you to humble yourself and take a job as a soulless assembly-line worker, and to add insult to injury you have to take a pay cut from $300/week down to $200/week. What happens next is downward pressure on wages. 

Some young kid comes to the factory looking for a job. It's a simple and straightforward job you have now, at the factory. Almost anyone could be trained to do it, really. You're just doing the same thing, over and over - doesn't take much thinking, or much skill; after all, you're basically a part in a machine now. So even though you have a lot of experience and skill, that doesn't really make you any better than this kid. And he's willing to do the job for only $100/week, so the owner asks you: will you take a further pay cut to $100/week, or shall I fire you and get this kid to do the same work for less pay? 

What has happened is that with industrialization came a de-skilling of the workforce. This means a homogenization of the workforce – anyone will do, they're all basically of the same (homo) type (genous) in that they can all be trained just as easily to do the job.  An important consequence of this is that you have the whole population as the labor supply. When everyone is qualified for your job, the demand is high. If the supply of jobs is low, and the demand is high, then economics tells us that you are in a position to reap a great profit!  Now you can take bids, and whoever is willing to work for the least amount of money gets the job.  That, of course, increases the capitalists's profits. 

If the capitalist is rational, he will leverage his increasing economic capital and transform some of it into political capital, by making sure pro-capitalist politicians get elected. Now perhaps a law can be passed lowering the minimum wage, or changing child-labor laws so that younger kids are competing in the pool of potential job candidates.  

In this manner, the new class of capitalists entrench their power by squeezing progressively more and more profit out of the labor of their workers.

The "Industrial Revolution" was the bourgeoisie revolution.

• Aristocratic Feudalism vs. Democratic Capitalism
• transformed technology, social relations, and the global economy

Marx says that despite the appearance of freedom and equality (Marx would say those are cultural tools used by the powerful to help hold on to their power), capitalism means that some people end up living off the toil of other people.  Those other people (the proletariat or working class) have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and this keeps them from living truly human lives, in Marx's philosophical sense.

Capitalism NATURALLY LEADS TO alienation as the bourgeoisie (owners) exploits the proletariat (workers).  The surplus value appropriated by owners via this exploitation is called profit, and it gradually accumulates to create "wealth."

Economic exploitation then NATURALLY LEADS TO political oppression, as financial resources (or financial capital) are converted into political resources (political capital).  Economic elites gain control of the state, and use its power to protect their interests.

How does this happen?

As the transition from Aristocratic Feudalism to Democratic Capitalism happened, merchants, craftsmen, and freemen (the Feudalist equivalent of the middle-class) were able to save up a little bit of money (a.k.a. wealth, or economic capital).  They were the ones who invested their money in the construction of factories and so forth (the new Capitalists), and began to accumulate profit.

As the noble houses fell apart and democratic revolutions created new governance systems, it now became possible for ANYONE to rule, as long as they got enough votes.  So now for the first time, you could contribute your personal wealth to the political campaign of a candidate who was sympathetic to your perspective, and who could be counted on to protect your interests.  

It's not hard to see how candidates with a lot of money for their campaigns would be more likely to win elections than those without money, just like in the contemporary world.  Hence the controversy over the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and recent changes in campaign finance laws.

  

Now that you've "bought" yourself a politician who wants to help you and can make laws, why wouldn't you change the laws in ways that will further increase your profits, and therefore, ultimately, your political power?  Marx felt that the unrelentingly rational "profit-logic" of Capitalism was it's problem, because it tends to justify doing anything as long as it brings profit.  If you allow child labor, lower the minimum wage, and lower safety standards, then you can produce the same goods for cheaper and cheaper, and your wealth and power grow.

Now this is where I want to bring in Marx's evolutionary perspective on economic systems.  He felt that Capitalism was just one step on a ladder - a necessary step - between Feudalism and Communism.  Capitalism was morally superior to Feudalism, and necessary for the possibility of Communism, because it created incentives (profit) for the construction of a global productive infrastructure.  Once the world advanced technologically, and developed roads, power-grids, factories, schools, stores, etc... then a final revolution was supposed to occur as Capitalism "sows the seeds of its own destruction."  By this, Marx meant that this relentless profit-logic would cause the bourgeoisie elite to never stop looking for ways to "ratchet up" the pressure on workers, in a never-ending quest to squeeze by building up increasingly oppressive pressure on the working class.

An example: this approach would views schooling as a "structure" that serves the interests of the rich and powerful by reproducing class inequality. So, poor people get inferior education, making it harder for them to move up the SES ladder. We are told we live in a "meritocracy" yet there are these institutional arrangements that make it more and more likely that social standing gets passed down from one generation to the next.

This approach is less positivist/empirical and more explicitly political.  It says that the task of the sociologist is not merely to understand the world, but to actively change it for the better.  (It would view the Structural-Functionalist approach as implicitly political, however, in that its focus on stability makes it politically conservative, and in favor of maintaining the status quo.)

Monday was Labor Day, and in light of our discussion of the social conflict approach it may be instructive to think about the subject of labor unions as an example of a sociological topic to view with this lens.

Here is an article from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/economy/this-labor-day-we-need-protests/11228/

If Karl Marx was right, then why did communism fail in the Soviet Union and other places?

I talked about how, while the Soviet communist experiment did succeed at greatly reducing the ECONOMIC gap between the rich and poor, it left intact a rigid system of stratification based on status and political power, which was subject to corruption....

A similar question would be, If Karl Marx was right, then why did communism only start in a few countries? Didn't Marx say that capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction? And if that is true, then wouldn't we see a communist revolution all over the West (America and Europe) since industrial capitalism has been churning on for like 200 years?

There are two big developments that Marx failed to predict, that a modern sociologist coming from the Social Conflict Approach would point to.

One is that Marx envisioned the bourgeoisie as an ownership class of elites that would be very tiny, and would oppress and exploit the vast majority of people who would be in the proletariat worker class. What happened in much of the West that Marx didn't predict was the rise of the Middle Class, and the rise of the organizational form of the (stock corporation). With the invention of the idea of owning shares of stock in a corporation, it became possible for people who were not super-wealthy to have a stake in a business.

In other words, Marx thought only a few people would own everything, and the majority of workers would get mad and revolt. Instead, "ownership" began to diffuse throughout a much larger proportion of the population. With just a little disposable income, anyone could buy a small stake in "bourgeoisie interests" and therefore more and more people than Marx anticipated began to identify with the interests of capitalism, which obviously made it harder and less likely for the requisite pressure to build up to the level necessary for a revolt.

The second development Marx didn't predict is the rise of labor unions. When workers unionize that is like a microcosm of what Marx thought would happen society-wide, but it also served to prevent it from happening society-wide.

The creation of a union is essentially a minor political revolt within an organization or an industry. It serves to "let off steam" or ease some of the pressure that builds up from bourgeoisie oppression and exploitation. In a democratic society, unions leverage some of the power of numbers into political power, and they resist or provide a countervailing force to the relentless profit-logic of capitalism (namely, increasing exploitation, or extracting more and more value from the labor of workers). In other words, by protecting workers in certain ways, they prevent or at least temporarily stave off some of the pressure that would otherwise make conditions so bad that they would boil over in a full-scale revolution.

(What about the Twinkie workers?)

Someone looking through the lens of the Social Conflict Approach would be watching political events in Wisconsin very carefully! They would focus on the class conflict issues involved in Governor Walker's administration's dismantling of collective bargaining rights. 

Karl Marx would say, Great! This is exactly what we need to usher in a true communist revolution! We need to take away the protections and political power of the working class (which are just band-aid fixes that do not address the underlying symptoms of inequality), so that the ownership class can increase the exploitation and oppression so much that people finally reach the point where they become "Mad as Hell and aren't gonna take it anymore" – only then can we truly clear the playing field and build a new society. As long as the majority of people (the working class) have just enough to feel OK about things, there will never be a radical shift in how society is organized.

Keep in mind, Marx wasn't a misanthropist who hated people and wanted them to be oppressed, but he did think that it was a necessary step on the path towards a utopian society.  You know, "if you want to make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs."  It was NECESSARY to have capitalism overthrow the even MORE unjust system of feudalist aristocracy, just as it would be necessary to eventually overthrow capitalism because of ITS injustices, and replace it with socialism – a social system without stratification, where everyone's basic needs are met and people are therefore free to pursue their dreams and reach their highest potential.