Review of Marxism and Class Theory: A bourgeois critique by Frank Parkin (Tavistock, £4.95); Urban Politics by Peter Saunders (Pelican, £2.95); and The Dominant Ideology Thesis by Nicholas Abercrombie, Bryan Turner and Stephen Hill (Allen and Unwin, £12.50)
Frank Parkin is one of Britain’s foremost stratification
theorists, and readers of Solidarity might be familiar with his Class Inequality
and Political Order, which is available as a mass-market paperback. Marxism and
Class Theory is a more abstract work, but it just as readable and far more
provocative. “Given what now passes for Marxist theory,” he says in his
introduction, “almost any imaginable bourgeois alternative seems preferable” –
and this remark sets the tone for what follows. Parkin takes an almost sadistic
delight in demolishing the attempts of even “sophisticated” Marxists such as Poulantzas, Barran and Wright to deal with the realities of the class structure in
modern capitalist societies.
Marxist class theory, for all the changes it has undergone
in the hands of the academic Marxists who sprang to prominence in the sixties
higher education boom, has proved itself unable to cope with phenomena such as
the growth of white-collar employment, the shift to managerial control of
enterprises, the expansion of the state sector or the importance of ethnic
changes in society, says Parkin.
As a result, Parkin believes it should be abandoned. He puts
forward an alternative that draws heavily on the sociology of Max Weber. Class,
for Parkin, is a matter of “social closure” or “the monopolisation of specific,
usually economic opportunities” so as to exclude outsiders: it is based on
power rather than “relationship to the means of production” as Marxists would
have it.
There is not the space here to go into details, but it seems to me
that Parkin's schema, although flowing from a social democratic perspective that
claims trade unions and political parties to be agents pure and simple of the
working class in the class struggle – they're not – could form the nucleus of a radical
alternative to the Marxist orthodoxy the left has been flogging for so many
years.
One aspect of stratification that Parkin does not discuss at
length is housing, although there is nothing in his approach to rule out its
application in this area. Here it’s worth turning to another new sociological work,
Peter Saunders's Urban Politics, the
first half of which is a useful summary
of recent thinking on the relationship between housing and class, the latter being
conceived of in traditional Marxist terms.
This is an important topic for
the left, because it brings up the thorny problem of how community struggles
stand next to workplace struggles, something Solidarity has had little to say about lately. Saunders' politics are too concerned with the need for leadership
to inspire many readers of Solidarity,
but his book is a good starting point in spite of the rather long empirical study
that occupies its second half.
Finally, on a different but related subject that has received scant
attention of late, there is The Dominant Ideology
Thesis by Abercrombie, Turner and Hill, unfortunately ridiculously overpriced
at £12.50 in hardback. After noting the similarity of the cases put forward for
the existence of a dominant ideology by certain Marxists (Gramsci, Althusser
and Habermas) and various bourgeois sociologists, the authors argue that “ideology” is hardly the
major tool of social control it has been claimed to be.
What social theorists have identified as the dominant
ideology of modern capitalism is in fact incoherent and contradictory, and
(most importantly) remains largely uninternalised by subordinate groups in
society, even though the methods of ideological transmission developed under
modern capitalism are potentially far
more efficient than ever before, It is not ideology but the “dull compulsion of
economic relations”, backed up by the threat of state violence, which keeps
society in check, according to Abercrombie et al, and to claim otherwise is to
drift dangerously close towards disregarding the degree to which conflict does
exist in our society.
I’m unsure about their analysis on certain points – nationalism,
for example, would seem to be quite important as a “dominant ideology”, as
would certain ideas about sexual roles. But The Dominant Ideology Thesis does a
good demolition job on what is now orthodoxy. The issue is, moreover, of the
greatest importance for the libertarian left. The all-pervading influence of
the dominant ideology has been dragged up time and again, from Kautsky to the
Situationists, as justification for the direction of political activity by
elites with “correct” political ideas. Any ammunition against them is more than
welcome.
Very poor scan not checked against original.
Very poor scan not checked against original.
