William

Classes in modern society:

Proletariat, the working class: No property of means of production, living of off wage

• Do not own land, nor means of production, they thus have no means of subsistence.

• Proletariasation will go up, a reduction of the number of artisans and producers.

• Most people will become wage labourers, though perhaps a few can climb the social ladder.

• We are now usually said to have reached a point where the majority of the population has become dependent on a wage, but this has made the group that are proletariately have dispersed in different kinds of groups.

• Though these groups were never actually homogenous, this is but an illusion.

• This sort of science is usually called ”class composition”

• All wage labourers are involved in the production of surplus value.

• Working in a shop though, for example, is not the same as producing surplus value but really realises the surplus value into liquidation

• Marx wants to change society though; and so wants the people at the base of the production line to be the ones that actually lead the revolution.

Lumpenproletariat: the excluded

• The vagabonds, the beggars, the prostitutes; people at the margin of society.

• Marx was ambivalent about the lumpenproletariat

• Many kinds of authoritarian movements could recruit from this layer of society of socially outcast people: they will often do anything for a chance to belong; the lumpenproletariat is characterised by ostracisation and non-beloning.

• It is good to realise that the lumpenproletariat can be managed by anyone, and not only the capital class.

Peasants: own means of production, dispersed.

• During the early industrial revolution, the proletariat was actually a minority, and in the urban factories Marx saw only an image of the future.

• Then, most people were actually peasants, even though this has been turned on its head: now the peasant class has diminished and most peasants have become wage labourers, even if they still produce goods in similar forms to before.

Petty-bourgoisie: small enterprises, own their means of production

• Difficult category: consists of artisans and shop owners

• A class in-between labour and capital

• There is usually a deceisive question about whether this group tethers toward capital or labour.

Bourgoisie: there are 4 fractions of capital:

agricultural, financial, commercial, industrial capital.

The currently most powerful fraction is the financial sector of capital.

Most other fractions of capital have to operate within the framework of the financial fraction, which creates problems even within the capital class.

In eg. the 60s the most powerful fraction was the industrial one.

Everything is related to class struggle; but everything cannot be reduced to class struggle entirely.

Capitalism consists of class domination and exploitation in an objective sense.

How can it come about that a social minority can lead and oppress a suffering majority?

Thus, it cannot only be about class domination or exploitation.

What characterises early struggle is instead ”objective domination”.

This is domination by a set of structures which no one actually really controls, but which everyone has to follow to prevent their own damnation. There is no group or people who themselves prop it up, it is an anonymous system, which even the capitalists are subjected to.

Capitalists themselves will go bankrupt unless they follow the system of exploitation.

Even them are ”objectively dominated” by the system.

By objective we are talking about the objects themselves, we have moved from a pre-modern society where social relations were personal, but now, since the democratic revolutions, we no longer accept this personal dependence and desire proper human rights. This allows for a new type of economic system wherein impersonal dependence becomes the standard: workers are free just like capitalists, and this equality is necessary for capitalism, but we are dependent on social things, rather than social relationships.

You are not dependent on one particular capitalist, but you are dependent on the capitalist class as a whole.

No longer dependent on a person, but on a system.

Marx wanted to get rid of this kind of dependence, and have ”free individuality”: social product is communally owned and controlled. He does not however say anything about the particulars about this kind of principle.

Individuality is important to Marx: according to Marx the right society is a collection of free individuals.

The ”psyop conception” of socialism he calls ”socialism of the barracks”.

It is within capitalism that everything becomes equal to everything else; it is within capitalism where everything becomes uniform: ”How much money does x deliver?” is a question that can be put to literally anything. This is uniformity to the highest degree.

A capitalist society is one where production becomes a vast social process that requires insanse standards of uniformity. Just create this computer that I am writing one required over 1000 people.

It is in capitalism where society is collectivised more than in any other society.

This is the ”cogs in a machine” kind of metaphor taken to its extreme.

On the market however, we can have a kind of spontaneous experience as an individual. We can choose what to buy, we have a ”real” kind of freedom.

However, underneath, there is an insane amount of uniformity leading to me being able to buy that product.

We are not directly exposed to the sphre of production however, and so are ourselves alienated by it.

Contradictions within the capitalist mode of prodcution:

Production processes are socialised while the appropriation of the final product is privatised (or made individual).

The contradiction between capitals: there is a fierce struggle between capitalists who have to continue to work hard within the system in order to not burn out. Wars cannot be understood apart from the dynamic of competition between capitalists. Eg. what was WW1? A number of established capitalist countries in Europe had colonies, Germany did not, and so did not have access to the same kind of markets that the rest of Europe did, and so a key driver between this kind of geopolitical struggle was the geopolitical struggle between capitalists to have markets.

• We might not be able to reduce conflict to this, but we must understand this diametric.

The contradiction between capital and its natural conditions: capital is super fast, but nature is super slow, but capital requires the resources that nature has. (metabolic rift).

Capitalism is rational on the small scale, managers are insanely scientific in how they run their companies.

But on a global scale this becomes irrational, we see this in crisis.

One major part of capitalist crisis is overproduction and overconsumption: the workers do not get as a wage the full value of which they produce, there is a surplus. Who are the main buyers of products? Workers. Wage labourers. So they must somehow have enough money to buy goods without being able to make money to buy those goods.

Overaccumulation: Capital accumulates; people make too much profit, and capital expands, but the key challenge for the capitalist becomes where to invest their capital. It becomes impossible to spend the capital and reinvest it back. Thus we have financial markets or speculation, which can only go so far, which in the end creates tensions. This problem is solved through crisis. By creating crisis we have to let it occur to a certain extent so that we can destroy some capital. We have to have companies go bankrupt. So we can in a sense, relaunch the dynamic.

Questions:

There are recent phenomena where a segment of the population who are highly educated but are dependent on a wage and earn a lot. They get high positions in private companies or banks; which form a specific type of class-category. They do not identify as wage labourers at all, but are technically still that. They are a very visible and sometimes fairly powerful group (this is not Marx’s personal theory.) They are called the professional managerial class. Some people think they are too diverse to really be their own class.

Permanent revolution: in the dynamic of struggle, eg. if the working class works together with the petty bourgoisie and the peasants, the working class will gain a kind of confidence that will bring forward social demands past just getting rid of an absolutist state. Like what happened in Russia.

However, in Paris, the Paris Commune was led by working class people and so was a real working class revolution, and this went much better in regards to social rights compared to Russia despite not living for very long.

Technologisation can result in more surplus value because it will require less time to work.

For each tendency in capitalism, there are counter tendencies. You have to look at how both sides of the tendencies act together in order to get an inkling about the end of a process. There is always a certain sense of unpredictability in capitalism.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Founder of sociology as a scientific discipline.

When to the same class as Begson, Jean Jaures.

Durkheim thought deeply about how sociology can be a real science.

Was initially a professor of pedagogy, but wanted to sociology, even though this was not really a thing yet.

Thus, there has to be a certain object that the sociological method researches, just like any other science: and so he says, the object of sociology is peculiar type of facts: social facts.

What are social facts?

How is it possible that there is social order?

How is their social cohesion? How can things hang together in a more or less orderly fashion?

This was an important question tied to the experience of his age, rapid changes. France becomes a modern capitalist state.

Liberalism becomes a thing; now the individual is in a sense loose from their ties. Individuals become unconnected atoms, yet we still have order.

The emergence of socialism, the labour movement, and the concern of chaos. People were concerned with the mob. If people organise they will do dangerous things.

In this time, there was a concept of mass psychology (no longer considered scientific), where people in a group stop thinking for themselves when working as a mass. Your behaviour follows the current. One gets ”swept” away, and so they were concerned about how a mob might be able to turn violent.

These are phenomena that threaten social cohesion.

How can we then maintain a moral regulation that?

Durkheim speaks of anomie: the lack of moral regulation.

Nomos = law, so anomia would refer to the lack of law, in this case moral.

So when you are part of a society, there is a kind of social order which is very clear and which gives us a sense of certainty about how to live and what to do. However, when society changes, new institutions emerge, like the factory, where there is no moral regulation (compared to eg. a church). So how can we have moral regulation in an institution like a factory?

”The object of sociology as a whole is to determine the conditions for the conservation of societies.”

Most people who resisted sociology were philosophers, because the social domain was still in a sense governed by philosophers.

Rules of Sociological Method 1895:

• Sociology is a distinctive science, with a proper object, to be distinguished from biology and psychology.

• The social is a specifc reality

not: everything social (or socially constructed), including biology or psychology

but more modest: the social has its own specificity.

We have to start thinking of the facts themselves, not ideologies. Preconceptions however form an obstacle when studying. He distnguishes between scientific concepts and preconceptions.

• eg. if you live together as a couple before getting married, you can test whether you fit together, and your marriage will be more stable → this is not true according to social facts, statistics. There is a problem with our preconceptions and the way in which the data actually formulates.

Social facts: ”consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the indiviudal, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.”

This seems like things that are interesting to a psychologist, but Durkheim holds that there are ways of thinking and feeling that are external and thus not interesting to a psychologist at all.

To learn to become a sociologist is to learn to look at social facts as external to the agents. (eg. in the way that they ground themselves between indiviudals rather than in them).

The music we listen to is a social fact, our musical taste: it is something pre-given, it is external, and not necessarily based on our personal tastes.

Key characteristics of social facts:

External: to an actor, pre-given (not in the mind of the individual)

Constraint: certain coercive power

Social: they are created by the collective (which is not reducible to an individual)

Eg. public opinion, decision-making procedure, suicide rate, money, customs, religious beliefs, language, law.

Durkehim wrote on suicide, a very personal topic, but showed that suicide happens during very specific and clear conditions, which are external to the individual. If we look at the social facts eg. during covid, we saw a reduction in the suicide rate when we imagined it to go up. So we have to explain it sociologically. The lockdown brought suicide rate down, thus there was something that weirdly enough eased people’s desire to take their own life.

One explanation is the feeling of being part of a bigger whole, which gave us a reason not to kill ourselves, however, when we are in the aftermath of that effect, like in post-covid, then we usually find problems.

Language is not individual, it is something that is socially driven and continued.

”When I fulfill my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute my contracts, I perform duties which are defined, externally to myself and my acts, in law and in custom. Even if they conform to my own sentiments and Ifeel their reality subjectively, such reality is still objective, for I did not create them; I merely inherited them through my education.”

(in the text)

Society works through the indiviudal, but individuals emerge in a society. One lets society work through them, one let’s institutions enact society through them. Professional duties are for the professeer (eg. a professor) social facts. As an indiviudal we reproduce, affirm and reaffirm social facts.

Social facts should be treated as things, even though they aren’t really concrete things. To Durkheim there is no reason however that they should be different from any materially concrete objects. They exist in a material world after all. However, they are not things, but should be treated as such.

(Not an ontology of the ”social”.)

What matters is the attitude taken towards the facts, which we must look at from a distance, objectively.

We have to look at it from the outside, not in any kind of introspective method.

’things’ are known from outside ↔ ’ideas’ are known from inside

The human mind has to get outside of itself to study ’things’; data, observations etc.

Eg. crime rates: a social fact.

Philosophers might look at crime from an ethical perspective, but this is not a scientific sociological way of looking at crime. In order to approach crime as a social fact, what does a particular society during a particular epoch consider crime: different societies will consider different things a crime.

It is what is socially punished. This is something external to us which we can really study.

• The facts do not change, the numbers do not change.

• They exercise an external constraint on the individual: something is a crime, no matter how I as an individual consider it. It has nothing to do with intrinsic immorality but rather about how it is done.

A stereotype is a very good example of social fact. It is already there in the society and you adopt it whether you want to or not, just because you are part of that society.

”Society is not the mere sums of indiviudals, but the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics.”

Society is never reducible to individuals. The whole is more than the sum of indiviudals. Society can be so much more than just a bunch of individuals acting together.

In a technical, post-durkheimian term: we have emergence

something emergences on top of the pure individuals acting together in society, and this ”on top” becomes more than the sum of individuals. (this notion comes from biology).

In biology, if we have a heap of molecules that are equal to a human body, it is not the same as a human body. A body is more than the sum of its parts.

This is a common theme in Durkheim’s sociology.