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7. What are your views on socialism and sociology?
That can be a loaded question. Socialism is differently defined, e.g., British socialism, Marxist socialism. This subject does not always have much relation to sociology, which is an academic pursuit. There are currently several conflicting schools of interpretation in sociology, and it is still an open question as to what the ultimate version will be. The arguments continue, but without changing anything, as if insulated from the rest of society. By comparison with socialism, sociology is caste.
I have always cultivated a respect for sociology, though I have been sad to find that this discipline is frequently just as career-oriented as other academic departments. What I mean here is that sociologists often study what is prescribed for their career and leave out all the rest. There are exceptions to that generalisation, but I have never met too many of them. I have resolved to answer the basic question further by invoking some ancestral reminiscences, perhaps to prove that I am not a stranger to socialism:
My paternal grandfather was an Irishman who served in the British navy during the First World War. He lived in Yorkshire, though his ancestors were Irish peasant farmers who did not view the ruling British with affection (see further Autobiographical Reflections). After the war, he shared in the economic slump that hit the north of England. Unemployment was rife, and he constantly worked an allotment to grow his food. He was an illiterate Roman Catholic, and laboriously taught himself to read and write, until he had mastered the Bible. He rejected that work and became a Marxist under the pressures of poverty. He read the Das Kapital of Karl Marx, which he regarded as the new bible for the working man.
The local Catholic priests singled him out for opprobrium; a leading ecclesiastic went to his home and conducted a ceremony of excommunication that did not refrain from cursing him and his family. His wife was still a Roman Catholic, and was deeply shocked by this event. He thereafter scorned Roman Catholicism. He was also averse to the British upper class and their lax social scruple.
This same grandfather was a staunch participant in the hunger marches that moved down to London during the 1920s and 30s, and most of which were backed by the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Many of the men who joined those marches had fought in the Great War, but now they were thin from malnutrition, and frequently wore ragged clothes and had string in their shoes instead of bootlaces. Even the middle class were often unaware of working class poverty, while the upper class was so typically aloof from everything except the immediate enjoyments of the day. Silver teapots and fancy jewellery, while the poor could easily contract skin diseases and lice. The unemployed had to get secondhand clothing from pawnbrokers, and scoured junkyards for new possessions. Garbage was used to light fires in the winter.
The refrain of some depressed men like my grandfather was: “we fought in your war (against the Germans), we won it for you, but now you do nothing for us.” They were addressing the British government and the “blue bloods,” i.e., royalty, who were not always in favour as icons of the aloof capitalism.
My father had to forego his rightful place at a college in order to help support the large family he had inherited. He went to work at a steel foundry in Middlesbrough. The factor that freed him from this unwanted commitment proved to be somewhat more undesirable. When the Second World War developed into the conflict with Japanese aggression, he responded to the patriotic enlistment campaign of the British government. Now so many of the British working class were again being recruited for the war effort. They were indispensable after all. Yet too many of them never came back.
My father volunteered for the RAF while still in his teens. He afterwards found himself fighting the Japanese “do or die” neo-samurai in the jungles of Burma. He was unprepared for the ferocity of that conflict. He saw too many dead bodies, including those of the Japanese soldiers who blew themselves up with hand grenades rather than surrender. For different reasons, the British combatants dreaded capture because of the atrocities occurring in prisoner of war camps. When he got out of that grim war, my father became a builder after marrying my English mother. During the early 1950s he was engaged in repairs to some of the colleges in Cambridge, this being his only link with the academic life he had earlier lost in the imposed career for survival.
Two generations later, the British are predominantly an affluent race in no danger of conscription or malnutrition. They are part of the much promoted “increased standards of living,” which include credit cards and all manner of technological gadgets that can be expensive. Members of less fortunate countries have been anxious to share in the benefits. Yet on close inspection, British society is riddled with problems such as crime, drugs, and floods. Hooded adolescent killers have shot down victims in broad daylight. Bad language now fills television screens, and Hollywood license has actualised into real life – or is it false life?
The vaunted march of civilisation is something to be strongly questioned. For instance, the interests of the British public are best served by an adequate system of law and order, not the weakened system created by the false economy of politicians. My views on crime and delinquency may be found in chapter 14 of Pointed Observations (2005). See also citizen sociology on this website.
In formulating questions and solutions, my citizen philosophy parts company with both Marx and Weber on many points. For instance, the insights of Marx into the industrial era of Europe were not matched by his version of “Asiatic despotism,” and there are clear flaws in his worldview as a whole. Max Weber was much more of a scholar of religion, but again there are drawbacks in his exposition. I request the right to a “citizen sociology” existing outside the closed ranks of professionals who never took part in hunger marches or similar feats of social complexity.
l to r: Karl Marx, Georg W. F. Hegel
When some people ask about socialism, they actually mean Karl Marx (1818-1883). Though sometimes described as a philosopher, he is more generally regarded as a contributor to sociology. Born in Germany, he arrived in Britain in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life. He is celebrated for his partiality to the Reading Room at the British Library. His major commitment was to economics. His Das Kapital was published in 1867 in Germany, but that was actually only the first volume, the last two (edited by Engels) being published after his death. Unlike the Professors of his day, Marx studied without an academic income; he lived in relative poverty in London. He had been well educated in Germany, but his hostility to religion is said to have curtailed his academic prospects. His parents were Jewish converts to Lutheranism.
Marx is well known for his opposition to Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the German academic philosopher who stressed the subject of Geist, a word often translated (perhaps inadequately) as “Spirit.” Marx assimilated many of Hegel’s concepts but gave these a rigidly materialist connotation, conflicting with his predecessor’s "Idealist" orientation. German Idealism is not beyond criticism. Hegel has been accused of glorifying the Prussian monarchical state, an angle associated with the conservative "Right Hegelians" who succeeded him. Whereas the contrasting "Left Hegelians" (including Marx) believed that the ideal society had yet to be achieved, and would be more radical.
The works of Hegel are notorious for difficult verbiage and different interpretations awarded them. His philosophy has an underlying Christian complexion, though of an unorthodox kind which Marx described as pantheistic. I do not concur with either Hegel or Marx in my worldview. Both Hegelian dialectic and the dialectical materialism of Marx (and Engels) have problems well known to diverse critics. The claim of Marx to a socialist science of history was fraught with setbacks in future historical events of the kind associated with Stalin.
Marx believed that his version of socialism was scientific. Indeed, he called his theory “scientific socialism.” Yet what he and his colleague Friedrich Engels actually created was a doctrine of class struggle, a theme reflected in their Communist Manifesto (1848). The application of the word scientific tended very much to impart a dogmatic flavour to subsequent Marxist victories.
The successors of Marx believed that rival opinions were unscientific, and therefore something to be easily dismissed. A spirit of authority and intolerance marked many aspects of Russian Communism. Numerous dissidents were sent to grim labour camps, and this trend paved the way for purges enforced by the Stalinist regime. However, it had already become obvious that events were not transpiring in the way that Marx had predicted, and a process of revisionism was applied to his theories. Dictatorships and failing economies severely contradicted the belief in a scientific socialism. Where was the real sociology?
Max Weber
Meanwhile, Max Weber (1864-1920) was far ahead of Marx in the study of religions. A German Professor of economics, Weber became associated at the very end of his life with the first German university institute of sociology at Munich. He is regarded as one of the founders of sociology. Religion was one of his major interests. Max Weber investigated not merely Protestant Christianity and Judaism, but also Chinese and Indian religions. His famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5, trans. 1930) gave a new slant to Calvinism and related ideologies, revealing how codes of frugality had contributed to the affluence of Western civilisation.
Weber also wrote in German The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (trans. 1951) and The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (trans.1958). There were such conclusions expressed here as: the caste system of Hinduism had prevented the growth of capitalism. These researches spurred the formative sociology of religion.
Weber advocated wertfreiheit or "value-freedom" in relation to science. This means that social science must be free from value judgments. Yet the subtleties of this matter have been debated.
"A central concern in the methodology of the social sciences is the extent to which it is possible or desirable for them to be 'value-free.' The claim that they ought to be value-free is associated with Weber: the question is whether insightful or useful descriptions of social phenomena can be given in terms that do not express the values of the author" (quote from value-free).
Beyond a certain point, value neutrality in science can be detrimental to necessary values for human life, as in the sphere of ecology, which definitely does inspire a set of values conducive to international survival.
"Weber's concept of science was also very much in the modern Western idiom of uniqueness. The singularity of Western civilisation was a dominant theme in his work, and it is arguable that his study of Eastern civilisations was merely supplementary and not co-existent. Weber emphasised that only the West had developed a growth economy, an experimental science, a technology based on science, a rational law, a lofty political structure (the modern State), and even musical harmony and orchestration. He found it an artificial accomplishment one is relieved to find, but the total units of his analysis were arguably in substantial disarray" (Shepherd, Meaning in Anthropos, 1991, p. 103).
Weber was evidently preoccupied with charting distinctive elements of Western civilisation, and the “values” of other religions and civilisations were at risk of compression. Scholarly knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, has increased substantially since Weber’s day, and not all of this data is easily arrayed under Weberian categories such as social stratification. However, this issue is a sideline by comparison with the pointers found in climate science, so strongly resisted by contemporary capitalist enterprises. Capitalist values are a doubtful index to global wellbeing.
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