Читать книгу Public Sociology - Michael Burawoy - Страница 12

In whatever ways they may be seen as a product of their times, the founders also rose above their times to speak to the abiding problems of modern society. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are exemplary not only for their insights into the social world, not only for the methods they used to explore that world, but also for the distinctive way they upheld a science rooted in values. Each managed to establish social constraints – that is, they were anti-utopian, opposing the optimism that anything was possible – but at the same time, they sought to bring the world under human guidance, opposing the pessimistic view that what exists is natural and inevitable. Their sociology was many things, not least a dialogue between its utopian and anti-utopian impulses.

Durkheim’s utopia, first spelled out in his 1893 dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society, was one in which every individual would find their niche in the division of labor. They would feel at one with the world they inhabited through their mutual interdependence and their contribution to the end product, what he called organic solidarity. This would only be possible in a society that offered unimpeded equality of opportunity so that everyone has the chance to assume an occupation best suited to their specific talents and abilities. The realization of such a society – a meritocracy – would, however, require radical change: the elimination of unmerited advantages associated with the “forced” division of labor in which individuals find themselves in positions for which they are ill-suited. Eliminating the forced division of labor required the end of the inheritance of wealth, but we know today that in addition to economic wealth, cultural wealth (family upbringing, primary socialization) is no less important in determining where in society we end up. To replace the forced division of labor with a meritocracy would require transforming our educational system so as to cancel the abiding effects of social inequalities based on race, class, and gender. Affirmative action aims to counteract such inherited inequalities, while such projects as the Harlem Children’s Zone attempt the equalization of opportunities from an early age.

Already a radical project, Durkheim’s organic solidarity went even further. Believing that integration into society required not just equality of opportunity, he proposed the elimination of unjustified inequalities of power. Workers, he said, would only feel part of the workplace if they were on the same footing as their employer, that is, if they did not fear arbitrary firing, if their boss could not lord it over them. This would call for state regulation of employment relations, as well as state guarantees of minimal existence in the face of unemployment. Employers would have to organize the cooperation of their workers without wielding the threat of dismissal. And if employers were to go out of business, workers and their families would not become destitute but would still obtain a basic standard of living. Thus, today Durkheim might be an advocate of universal basic income – an income unconditionally distributed to all adults that would enable them to subsist. One could envision Durkheim upholding the principles of social democracy that have been approximated in Scandinavian countries. Arguably, Durkheim’s vision proposed more than a century ago is both more necessary and more remote today in a world of crushing inequalities of wealth and power and mounting precarity.

Durkheim had a broader vision, a form of guild socialism with the occupational associational as its elemental form. While he advanced the idea of a regulatory state to minimize unjust inequality, he argued that occupational corporations would organize production and inherit property, supplanting the family as the basic unit of society. Durkheim’s utopian “normal” division of labor emerged from his anti-utopian analysis of the actually existing “abnormal forms” that impose external constraints on human action. The abnormal forms included not only the forced division of labor rooted in the unjustified and unequal distribution of resources, but also the anomic division of labor in which rapid social change gives rise to states of disorientation (normlessness) and a third abnormal form in which the different parts of society are badly coordinated.

Karl Marx, who never knew Durkheim, would have brought his own anti-utopianism to bear on the idea of organic solidarity and evolutionary progress. He would scoff at the very possibility of realizing such a fantasy under capitalism. The obstacles to organic solidarity, namely, the “external” inequalities of power and wealth, are deeply inscribed in the structure of capitalism: they will not dissolve without a revolution that would overthrow vested interests, especially class interests, in defending capitalism. Durkheim has no way of getting from here to there, from the abnormal to the normal division of labor. Such would be the critique of Karl Marx.

Marx would turn his anti-utopianism against Durkheim’s project, but he would also offer an alternative utopia. Thus, Durkheim’s guild socialism should not be confused with Marx’s communism. Where Durkheim was concerned to perfect the division of labor by slotting people into their appropriate places, Marx wanted to abolish the division of labor altogether. Slotting people into places crushes their potential to develop rich and varied abilities. They are alienated from their essential being: they don’t control what they produce or how they produce it; they don’t control the relations through which they produce things. They cannot, in other words, develop their humanity, what Marx and other critical theorists of his time called their “species being.”

The barrier to such a world of emancipation is capitalism itself, the incessant pursuit of profit through novel ways of exploiting workers. If they are to survive, capitalists have to compete for profit. They are as trapped by the market as workers who have to sell their capacity to work, their labor power, by the minute, by the hour. His critique of the forces that have hitherto imprisoned humanity led him to conceive of an alternative world of communism that supersedes capitalism – a world free of unnecessary products, from automobiles to nuclear weapons, a world free of unnecessary labor of control and surveillance, a world free of the excessive waste built into capitalism. Freedom from all of these would allow us to reduce the length of the working week, leaving us ample time and space to develop those rich and varied abilities in what he called the “true realm of freedom.” As is increasingly recognized, only such a radical transformation of capitalism can avoid the impending human extinction that will come with global warming.

Marx and his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, clearly saw the virtues of capitalism whose dynamism generated the technology – the forces of production – that made the reduction of the working week possible. Over time, again by its own logic, capitalism destroyed small businesses and concentrated ownership into the hands of large conglomerates and the state, creating the foundations of a planned economy – an economy that would be run and owned collectively, superseding markets and private property. Equally important, capitalism also creates its own gravedigger, in the form of a working class determined to overthrow capitalism and end alienation. The genius of Marx was to discover the laws that bring about the self-destruction of competitive capitalism: competition among capitalists would intensify the exploitation of labor, which would, on the one hand, lead to crises of overproduction and a falling rate of profit, and, on the other hand, assure the organizational ascendancy of the working class. In other words, as economic crises deepened, capitalism enlarged, deskilled, homogenized, and impoverished the working class, forging it into a revolutionary movement that would seize power and turn capitalism into socialism. The utopian and anti-utopian moments finally converge in the miraculous transcendence of capitalism.

Despite their homage to capitalism, Marx and Engels still underestimated its resilience. Their mistake was to believe that the end of competitive capitalism was the end of all capitalism; they failed to anticipate the transition to a new form of capitalism, organized capitalism, orchestrated by a regulatory state that counteracts the crisis tendencies of capitalism – regulating competition, limiting exploitation, and absorbing surplus. Today, there are forces within capitalist society trying to cast off the encumbering state – the very entity that protects capitalism from itself – thereby restoring capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies that are as likely to lead to some form of barbarism as communism. Marx’s anti-utopian thinking, founded in the atrocities of nineteenth-century textile factories as well as the slavery upon which the cotton industry depended, both of which fed the inexorable expanded reproduction of capitalism, has gained the upper hand as his utopia recedes from the public imagination. Yet we are living in a time when his utopian vision is so desperately needed. As Fredric Jameson (2003: 76) has said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

We seem, therefore, to be living more in the world conjured up by Max Weber, who mobilized his immense erudition to trace the origins of modern capitalism, precisely because he saw it as an all-conquering expression of a largely irreversible rationalization. Focusing on the obstacles to radical change, he was explicitly skeptical of all utopias, but specifically the Marxist variety. Any attempt at overthrowing capitalism would lead to a horrific world, a dystopia. For Weber the irony of history was the inverse of Marx’s optimistic thesis of capitalist self-destruction leading to emancipation. On the contrary, in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, individuals start out by acting freely but in the process unintentionally create iron cages for themselves, epitomized by his notion of bureaucracy, the most efficient organization ever invented but also the most indestructible form of domination. Weber was prophetic in anticipating the spread and resilience of institutions bound by rules, discipline, hierarchy, and linear careers. Seeking to overthrow bureaucracy only gives rise to a stronger bureaucracy, endangering liberal-democratic safeguards against its expansion. Socialism, Weber anticipated, would not be the democratic dictatorship of the working class but the authoritarian dictatorship of officials.

Even as he was anti-utopian, Weber, too, harbored a concept of his own utopia – although it was far less radical than the utopias of Durkheim and Marx. According to Weber, it was not possible to perfect the division of labor by securing to each their appropriate place, nor was it possible to abolish the division of labor through transcending capitalism. The best one can do is to treat one’s occupation with total devotion. His model was the seventeenth-century Calvinist who considered such devotion to one’s occupation as a necessary part of their calling to glorify God on earth. Facing predestination – not knowing whether one was among the damned or the elect – created a deep anxiety, only alleviated by searching for signs of a job well done. In the case of the capitalist, it entailed that most “irrational” of pursuits, accumulation for accumulation’s sake, profit for profit’s sake, money for money’s sake; in the case of the laborer, treating work as an end in itself, instilling the so-called work ethic. Thus, Calvinism gave rise to this spirit of capitalism – that crucial ingredient for the birth of modern capitalism.

The Calvinist is the prototype – or to use Weber’s term, the ideal-type – of the modern individual who makes a virtue of necessity through dedication to a life project pursued under uncertain external constraints. Weber makes a similar point in his two famous essays on science and politics, originally addressed to students in 1917 and 1919. Politicians driven by a cause must recognize the radical uncertainty of ever achieving their goal. He describes the inner tension between an ethic of absolute ends involving the single-minded pursuit of a cause irrespective of the consequences and an ethic of responsibility in which the politician takes those consequences into consideration. That’s the utopian moment. On the other hand, the politician operates in an institutional context of bureaucracy, party system, and economy that easily subverts the noblest of intentions. “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards” ([1919] 1994: 128).

Weber’s limited utopia of “vocation” is the pursuit of a goal whose realization is uncertain, recognizing the anti-utopianism of social constraint – the politician propelled by a mission without guarantees of success. There is a utopian perfection to every occupation – the machine operator, the window cleaner, the domestic worker, the artist, the doctor, the farmer, the manager – whose very unattainability drives commitment. That commitment gives meaning, even to the most mundane activities. As Weber said, it was also true of the scientist. Driven by the puzzles of a research program – puzzles that have meaning only to the cognoscenti – scientists never know whether or when insight will strike. Passionate devotion is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. It is as if breakthroughs lie in the hands of the Calvinist God outside the control of the humble scientist. This devotion to an elusive goal is no less irrational than the pursuit of profit for profit’s sake. In both cases any breakthrough, whether new technology or new discovery, is sure to be superseded and forgotten. The only satisfaction is of a job well done, a puzzle solved, a momentary elation, perhaps some honorific recognition. As Weber wrote, not only the intrinsic uncertainty of puzzle-solving but the very institutions of science often favor mediocrity over originality, and are often subject to hostile political regulation. The odds are against us; all we can do is to infuse meaning into our science.

When Weber is at his most bleak after Germany’s defeat in World War I, he is driven to assert a utopian moment in uncharacteristically strong terms: “man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible” ([1919] 1994: 128). The darkest days, the most pessimistic times, call out for utopian thinking. When anti-utopia is veering toward dystopia, then the antidote to despair is to remind ourselves how the world has been otherwise in the past and, therefore, how the world could be otherwise in the future.