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From International Socialism, No.47, April/May 1971, pp.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Capitalist Society and Modern Sociology
H. Frankel
Lawrence and Wishart, 65s.
Ever since the 1968 events, when thousands of social science students were at the front of the biggest protest movement modern capitalism had experienced for decades, a number of theoretical works have been needed to crystallise and explain to them the inconsistencies of the subject with which they had become temporarily disaffected. Books and pamphlets were and are needed to explain not only why they should join a revolutionary organisation .but why they should throw off the ideological shackles of a bourgeois semi-science. While linked, they are separate problems. Propaganda had, and has, to be pitched at the average social science student rather than to what some sociology students can become for short periods of time. With sociology becoming an integral part of educational courses, reaching right down to ‘O’ level and fifteen year old youth, the task of exposing it becomes ever more important.
Frankel’s book is aimed at precisely this task, despite its wide and wishful claim to be written for ‘thinking working men and women.’
The author provides a fair conclusion to his own achievement when he writes:
‘Sociology came into existence in a continuous attempt to counter the growing influence of socialism. Today it has become another academic discipline and as such offers to help train students in social work, education and business management. To the extent that it does this it succeeds in adapting people to the system. But it has also produced its opposite, valuable factual and ideological ammunition for socialism. This new material ... bears out the conclusion that the capitalist system is over-ripe for overthrow and that the most scientific sociological theory to help bring this transformation is Marxism’.
Frankel begins by ranging up various anti-Marxist theoreticians, from the Fabians and Bernstein, through Weber and Parsons up to Dahrendorf and Lockwood. Then in chapters four to seven he marshals a substantial array of useful statistics and concrete examples to substantiate the validity of a class analysis of modern western capitalism. The book ends with an exposure of the welfare state’s failure to mitigate class differences and an open appeal for a socialist transformation of the world.
But even in this conclusion and precis of the scheme of the book, you can sniff that he hasn’t fully matched up to the task. To begin the book with the debate on ‘reform or revolution’ would be all right if it was directed at the immediate periphery of the British left But that is not the way to approach the average sociology student. He or she is a very strange congelation of accumulated wisdom and bizarre jargon which works within the sociological assumption of a stable society. To such an individual, evidence of social conflict can be very easily annexed as accidental rather than organically connected with society. The only way this false consciousness can be broken is to work within existing sociological theory and erode it by. revealing its inner contradictions. The book would do better to begin with social role theory, reveal its partial one-sided truth, and reconstitute it in an outline of Marxist method. Only then could the debate on reform or revolution be put, and sociology’s shell would collapse along with the reader’s commitment to its premises.
Secondly, Frankel suffers from a shortcoming which was not shared by the demonstration movement of the late sixties. He is wedded to the CPGB’s brand of social democracy. This is apparent in many small ways, but most patently in this treatment of nationalisation and class relations since the second world war. He believes that nationalisation of industry can mean socialism, without specifying the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Furthermore, the treatment of class relations is far short of what it should be. He treats status distinctions within classes as an approximation to the division between unequal property right, and does not connect the laws of motion of the economy with the unfolding logic of class relations. Neither does he ever show the political process of breaking ruling class hegemony over the working class as the consciousness of the vanguard battling for supremacy over the consciousness of all other strata. By fighting a defensive battle against sociology he remains trapped in role theory’s inability to grasp the contradictory transition from class-in-itself to class-for-itself.
The reasons for these faults can be seen from his conclusion quoted above. Frankel believes that the best sociology is equivalent to Marxism. He should know that the relation between sociology and Marxism is the same as the relations between classical political economy and Marxism. A science which tries to explain society with the ideas of the ruling class cannot be a revolutionary science for the working class. Sismondi made that mistake with political economy. Frankel repeats the mistake with sociology.
Nevertheless, there is no reason for ignoring the book to preserve theoretical purity. The book should be read by every social science student and sociology lecturer. Frankel’s work poses social problems concretely, exposes the inadequacies of a number of sociological theories and indicates how the best sociology can be used against the worst sociology. It is a critical survey of sociological literature openly arguing for socialist revolution. There is no other book in this field. Merely for posing the problem the book deserves to be ordered through every library, especially in the colleges, to be sold on socialist society bookstalls every week, to be advertised on regular socialist society leaflets, and referred to during sociology course discussion.
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