Rhuthmos

A New Sociology for Social Justice Movements

Michael Burawoy — 2015-02-16T19:02:12Z

Sommaire

This paper was presented to the Scientific Council of Attac, Paris, September 18, 2014. It derives immediately from a talk of the same title given at the Forum of the International Sociological Association in Buenos Aires, August 1, 2012. Many of the ideas in this paper were developed in dialogue with graduate students in the sociology department at Berkeley – Marcel Paret, Adam Reich, Mike Levien, Julia Chuang, Herbert Docena, Andrew Jaeger, Zach Levenson, Gabe Hetland and Alex Barnard. They also originate in an imaginary conversation between Gramsci and Polanyi that has stretched over the last decade, conducted most recently with my friends and colleagues in South Africa – especially, Jackie Cock, Eddie Webster and Karl von Holdt. It is now available in M. Abraham (ed.), Sociology and Social Justice, London, Sage, 2019.

The propertyless masses especially are not served by a formal “equality before the law” and a “calculable” adjudication and administration, as demanded by “bourgeois” interests. Naturally in their eyes justice and administration should serve to compensate for their economic and social life-opportunities in the face of the propertied classes. Justice and administration can fulfil this function only if they assume an informal character to a far-reaching extent… Every sort of “popular justice” – which usually does not ask for reasons and norms – as well as every sort of intensive influence on the administration by so-called public opinion, crosses the rational course of justice and administration … In this connection, that is, under conditions of mass democracy, public opinion is communal conduct born of “irrational sentiments.” Normally it is staged or directed by party leaders and the press.

Max Weber

Max Weber was only too clear that the rise of formal rationality, whether in the form of bureaucracy, the law, or mass democracy, does not compensate subject populations for their economic and social oppression. Rather, formal rationality that extends equal rights to all perpetuates the injustices they experience. The only way this might be challenged, says Weber, is through informal means, what he sometimes called “Kadi-justice,” but these informal means, whether they be public opinion or communal action, are manipulated and staged from above. Weber was very suspicious of what today we would call social movements which he saw as arising from an “incoherent mass” driven by “irrational sentiments.” His theory of collective action belongs to the first wave of social movement theory that stretches from Durkheim and Weber to Smelser and Parsons for whom collective action was an irrational response to social change.

The second wave of social movement theory, drawing on Marxism, viewed social movements as rational in their pursuit of interests outside parliamentary politics, and they were successful insofar as they managed to develop resources, including an appropriate strategic framing, to achieve their goals. Here sociologists were in pursuit of a general theory of collective action – a theory true across time and space – that took the social, political and economic context as a background variable. It was only “new social movement” theory, associated with such writers as Alain Touraine, that considered the context – in his case postindustrial society or the programmed society – as defining the form of collective action.

Today, we need to move toward a third wave of social movement theory that centers a new context, namely “neoliberalism” – a nebulous concept that expresses the invasion of markets into all arenas of social and political life. In order to understand contemporary movements for social and economic justice it is necessary, therefore, to define “neoliberalism.” Here I will take Karl Polanyi's (2001[1944]) The Great Transformation as my point of departure. But first let me explore the way marketization propels movements for social justice.

From Marketization to New Social Movements

Social justice and democratization are especially pertinent themes in Latin America, which for so many years was ruled by military dictatorship. The transition to democracy, fought for bravely by so many has been a major and indisputable advance. But democracy has not fulfilled its promises, not least because the fall of political dictatorship was followed by another dictatorship, the dictatorship of the market through structural adjustment. In its wake came wave upon wave of injustice and inequality that have inspired Latin Americans, sociologists among them, to battle for a deeper democracy. We see this, for example, in the schemes of participatory budgeting in Brazil, in the piquatero movement and factory occupations in Argentina, in the ethnic democracy of Bolivia, in the student movement of Chile. There has been a relentless struggle to counter market fundamentalism with new forms of participatory democracy.

This Latin American history of the last 30 years is now being replayed across the world. Responding to the silent encroachment of markets, not least in the Arab world, where the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, sparked uprisings across the region in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Bahrain. Calling for “bread, freedom and social justice” these uprisings may have been revolutionary in their demands but they have not delivered the outcomes they sought. All eyes were fixed on Egypt, where national rebellion gave rise to a frail democracy that was then hijacked by the military. Difficult though it has been to overthrow dictatorships, the real problems only begin after their overthrow, problems that Latin America has been wrestling with for more than three decades.

In part inspired by these movements, the indignados of Southern Europe have stood up to the regimes of austerity, imposed by ruling parties aided and abetted by regional and international financial agencies. In 2011 and 2012 we witnessed a wave of remarkable protests that might be allied to trade unions in Portugal, to more anarchist politics in Spain, to Grillo populism in Italy to a massive General Strike in Greece but also the neo-fascist Golden Dawn – different responses to economic insecurity, unemployment, debt, and dispossession.

The Occupy Movement made this explicit. Lodged in public spaces it targeted the 1% that runs the world economy. The movement started in Zuccotti Park, targeting Wall Street, the home of finance capital, and spread across the US, travelled to Europe, Latin America and Asia. In India, for example, peasantries fought against their dispossession by collusive arrangements between finance capital and the Indian state to form of Special Economic Zones, many of which now lie moribund. In China today the engine of growth is no longer the flood of cheap migrant labor to the towns but land appropriation and real estate speculation for the urbanization of rural areas. Again protests, perhaps less known, are spreading across rural China even if so far they have not been very effective in arresting the formation of a rentier class. Similar struggles are familiar in Latin America, where the expansion of international mining has not only displaced populations but also polluted water and air.

Finally, we must pay attention to the student movement, most spectacularly emanating from Chile, that has been struggling against the marketization of education at all levels. Here, in this most unequal of societies, students are the vanguard of a society throttled by accumulating private debt. We see similar struggles in England, where students have faced soaring fees, but also spreading across Europe as financialization and regulation begin to corrode what were once strongholds of public education. We are here assembled in Argentina, the heartland of the public university, the legacy of Cordoba Revolution of 1918 which opened public education to all : open admissions, no fees and democratic election of administrators. It still holds today, if not elsewhere, in Latin America where student movements are strong but, often, at the cost of the degradation of higher education.

Do these and other social movements have anything in common that would justify talking about them as an expression of a particular historical epoch ? Or should they be considered in isolation, reflective only of local or national rather than global contexts ? In this paper I try to link them to the rise of marketization, an uneven process that spans the globe, but first can we detect any convergent set of repertoires that allow us to talk of a singular wave of protest.

Common Political Repertoires

These new social movements may be responses to social injustice stemming from different forms and dimensions of marketization, but they gain expression and consciousness in the political arena. Their pursuit of political goals, however, is marked by their economic origins. Let us consider some of the features they share.

First, they have in common what differentiates them. They all have a national specificity, whether it be a struggle against dictatorship, against austerity or against the privatization of education. They are framed by national political terrains, which exhibit regional patterns – Southern Europe, Middle East, Latin America, South-East Asia, etc. Yet, at the same time, these movements are also globally connected whether through social media or traveling ambassadors. Movements have become an inspiration to each other even if their frame of reference is usually national.

Second, they derive from a common inspiration, the idea that electoral democracy has been hijacked by capitalism, or more specifically finance capital. Governments are beholden to finance capital which effectively paralyzes electoral democracy – capitalist in content and democratic in form. In Zygmunt Bauman's (2000) terms there is a separation of power and politics, so that power is concentrated in the hands of the capital-state nexus, while electoral politics is reduced to an ineffectual ritual.

Third, the movements reject formal democracy to adopt direct democracy, sometimes called prefigurative politics that involve horizontal connections as much as vertical struggles. The General Assemblies of participatory democracy have been the cellular foundation of many of these movements. The challenge, then, is to bring unity and broader vision to these autonomous, and often separatist struggles. They have had varying success in connecting themselves to wider publics in more than ephemeral moments.

Fourth, while much has been made of virtual connections, these make concrete real space more rather than less necessary. To be effective virtual communications requires its complement – the assembly points of public space, Zuccotti Park in New York, Catalunya Square in Barcelona, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Ankara, etc. These assembly points were crucial to establish dense and creative communities, and the planning of new and novel actions. Social media becomes an auxiliary if essential tool of communication.

Finally and fifth, the occupation of public spaces has made the social movements vulnerable to a severe repressive backlash from police, often, but not always, backed up by the military. This repression is consistent with the destruction of the public more generally and the valorization of the private, but it has prompted a continuing cat and mouse game between movements and police. These movements will not go away. They are a form of “liquid protest” that disappears here only to reappear elsewhere. We have to look at them as part of a connected global movement, connected by social media that provide the vehicle for continual reorganization and flexibility. Fear of coercion has been replaced by despair and anger.

The conjecture of this paper is that these social movements can, indeed, be understood in terms of a differentiated response to marketization that has become a feature of our era. We need, in other words, a new sociology of movements that attends not only to the political repertoires they deploy but also to the pressures of marketization to which they are a response. Second, such a sociology should advance a unifying vision for these movements, a vision they so badly need that knits them together in a common project. Finally, third, as a result of the very marketization we study, sociology now finds itself subject to pressures of commodification. We have to drop the pretense that we are outside society, and explicitly recognize that we are part of the world we study and have no alternative but to take sides. If we don't sociology will become irrelevant and disappear. Marketization is undermining the conditions of our own existence just as it is destroying society, and we need to connect the two before it is too late — sociology becomes a social movement. We take up each of these challenges in turn.

A New Sociology of Social Movements

Just as Charles Tilly (1978) said the world is teeming with grievances, so now we can see the world is teeming with social movements. The problem is not their existence but their persistence which can be understood only by exploring their origins and their context. We need to turn to the society from which they emanate ; we need to (re)turn to theories of collective action that see them as rooted in the wider society. Alain Touraine and his collaborators insisted on rooting “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s in post-industrial society, giving movements the possibility of fabricating their own worlds. These were movements that transcended the pursuit of material interests characteristic of the old social movements (specifically the labor movement). The “new” social movements of today, however, have to grapple not with post-industrialism but with the devastation of society wrought by market fundamentalism, which affects the whole planet and not just particular societies although their expression is usually inflected through a national sieve. To understand the connection between today's social movements and unregulated marketization I propose to turn to Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation.

Written in 1944, explaining the continued existence of capitalism but without denying its problematic character, The Great Transformation can be considered a revision of The Communist Manifesto written a century earlier. Polanyi argues that the experience of commodification is more profound and immediate than the experience of exploitation, which as Marx himself argued was hidden from those who were supposed to rebel against it. In effect Polanyi takes Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, namely that market exchange obscures its ties to production, more seriously than Marx who thinks such illusions will dissolve in class struggle. For Polanyi, the source of resistance lies with the market rather than production. The expansion of the unregulated market threatens to destroy society which reacts in self-defense, what he calls the counter-movement against the market.

One of the virtues of Polanyi's theory, like Marx's, is that it links the micro-experience of people to the world systemic movements of capitalism through a series of mediating levels. The lynchpin of the connection lies in the idea of the fictitious commodity – a factor of production which when subject to unregulated exchange loses its use value. For Polanyi labor is but one such fictitious commodity, the others are land and money. Today these factors of production are subject to an unprecedented commodification that even Polanyi never anticipated.

When labor is subject to unregulated exchange, i.e. when it is commodified, when it is hired and fired at will with no protection, when the wage falls below the cost of the reproduction of labor power and when the laborer cannot develop the tacit skills necessary for any production, so the use value of labor also falls.

For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human brings would perish from the effects of social exposure ; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. (Polanyi, 2001 [1944] : 76)

The issue, therefore, is not exploitation but commodification. Indeed, as Guy Standing (2011) has eloquently demonstrated the problem today is the disappearance of guaranteed exploitation, and in its place the rise of precarity, not just within the proletariat but climbing up the skill hierarchy. Precarity is part of the lived experience behind all contemporary movements – from the Arab Uprisings to the Indignados, from the Occupy Movement to Student movements.

One of the conditions for the commodification of labor power is dispossession from access to alternative means of subsistence, that is to the elimination of all social supports – including minimum wage legislation, unemployment compensation, and pensions but also access to land. Just as the separation of labor from land provides for the commodification of labor so it also provides for the commodification of land, which according to Polanyi also threatens the viability of the human species. “Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed” (Polanyi, 2001 [1944] : 76).

The economic argument could be easily expanded so as to include the conditions of safety and security attached to the integrity of the soil and its resources – such as the vigor and stamina of the population, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of defence materials, even the climate of the country which might suffer from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dust bowls, all of which, ultimately, depend upon the factor land, yet none of which respond to the supply-and-demand mechanism of the market. (Polanyi, 2001 [1944] : 193)

These prescient comments point to the inability of markets to defend the integrity of nature that accords well with recent arguments that climate change represents one of the biggest market failures of our time. When it comes to the plunder of nature, the destructiveness of markets has led to a host of struggles, especially in the Global South, from landless movements in Latin America to popular insurgency against Special Economic Zones in India, protests against land speculation and expropriation in China. Throughout the world the mining of natural resources has generated militant opposition from communities whose livelihoods are threatened. It takes place within cities, too, against such processes as gentrification and the attempt to build global cities, both of which involve the expulsion of the marginal from their homes. We have to extend the commodification of land to the commodification of nature more broadly, the commodification of water that generated waters wars in countries as far apart as South Africa and Bolivia, protest against market solutions to climate change, so-called carbon trading, and most recently against fossil fuel extraction through fracking.

Polanyi regarded money as a third fictitious commodity. For Polanyi money is what makes market exchange possible, but when it itself becomes the object of exchange, when the attempt is to make money from money then its use value as a medium of exchange is undermined. “Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society” (Polanyi, 2001 [1944], p.76). Polanyi was especially concerned that fixed exchange rates between currencies organized through the gold standard would create economic rigidities within national economies while going off the gold standard would create chaos and radical uncertainty. Today, we see how finance capital again becomes a prominent source of profit, making money from money, whether it be through micro-finance, whether it be loans to nation states, whether it be student loans or mortgages or credit cards. The extraordinary expansion of debt eventually and inevitably brings about bubbles and just as inevitably their popping. The creation of debt only further intensifies insecurity and immiseration, feeding the protest of the 99% across the globe.

There is a fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge – that Polanyi did not consider. The theorists of postindustrial society, preeminently Daniel Bell (1976), recognized knowledge as an ever-more-important factor of production giving pride and place to the university as its center of production. But Bell did not anticipate the way the production and dissemination of knowledge would be commodified, leading the university to sell its knowledge to the highest bidders, biasing research toward private rather than public interests, cultivating students as customers who pay ever-increasing fees for instrumental forms of knowledge. The university reorganizes itself as a corporation that maximizes profit not only through increasing revenues, but cheapening and degrading its manpower by reducing tenured faculty, increasing the employment of low-paid adjunct faculty (which the university itself produces), outsourcing services, all the while expanding its managerial and administrative ranks. The protests emanating from the university, from Chile to Quebec – be they from students or faculty – center on its privatization and the distortion of the production and dissemination brought on by commodification.

Contemporary social movements, therefore, can be understood through the lens of these four fictitious commodities – through the creation of the fictitious commodity through different forms of dispossession, through the reduction of the fictitious commodity to an object of exchange than annihilates its commonly understood purpose, and through the new forms of inequality commodification produces. Any given movement may organize itself in the political realm, but its driving force lies in the experience of the articulation of these different commodifications. There is no one-to-one relation between social movement and a given fictitious commodity, but each movement is the product of the relation among fictitious commodification. For the last 40 years we have been experiencing the intensified commodification extended ever more deeply into human life. The wave of protests that have arisen to challenge this round of marketization, however, do not yet add up to a Polanyian counter-movement that would contain or reverse marketization. For that, there needs to be a far greater self-consciousness and vision among the participants, calling for a sociology for social movements.

A New Sociology for Social Movements

Touraine's (1988) theory of social movements was also a theory for social movements. At the center of his recast sociological theory were social movements, making history themselves, what he called historicity. The sociologist was no longer outside society, studying its inherent laws of change, but inside society heightening the self-consciousness of movements in the fashioning of history. This reflected a period – post-industrialism – in which there was confidence in human agency to direct history whether via the state or civil society. There was an underlying optimism that the galloping wild horse of capitalism could somehow be tamed and directed to human ends. That has all disappeared. We are now living in an era in which markets run amok, devastating all that stands in their way. A sociology for social movements must begin by understanding this period of unconstrained marketization.

We need, therefore, to situate Polanyi's fictitious commodities within a wider framework of the history of capitalism. The essence of The Great Transformation lies in an argument about the dangers of the expansion of the market, namely that it leads to a reaction from society that can be of a progressive character (social democracy, New Deal) but also of a reactionary character – fascism and Stalinism. Thus, Polanyi's history has one long expansion of the market, starting at the end of the 18th century, destroying society along the way, leading to a defense of society, secured through a counter-movement directed by states that regulate the market, arising in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s – states that include regimes of social democracy and New Deal as well as fascism and Stalinism. He couldn't imagine humanity would dare to risk another round of market fundamentalism. Yet, that is just what happened, starting in the middle 1970s, developing on a global scale, leaving few spaces of the planet unaffected. The rising concern with globalization expresses the global reach of markets.

But it is important to understand that this is not the first wave of marketization. Indeed, examining Polanyi's own history suggests it is not the second but the third wave. Where he saw a singular wave spreading over a century and a half, we can now discern two – one that advanced through the first half of the 19th century and was turned back by the labor movement in the second half, and a second wave that advanced after WWI and was reversed by state regulation in the 1930s extending into the 1970s, which in turn inaugurated a third wave of marketization that has yet to be contained. These waves of marketization become deeper over time as their scale increases, but they also involve different combinations of the fictitious commodities. The counter-movement to first-wave marketization in the 19th century was dominated by the struggle to decommodify labor. In England (about which Polanyi writes) this assumed the form of the factory movement, cooperatives, Owenism, trade union formation and the Labour Party. The local struggles, spread, melded together and compelled changes in state policy.

Three Waves of marketization and their Counter-Movements

The success of labor led to a crisis of capitalism, resolved through imperialist strategies and World War I which was followed by an offensive from capital, leading to the recommodification of labor. The assault of the market spread to the loosening of constraints on international trade through currencies pegged to the gold standard that, in turn, led to uncontrollable inflation and the renewal of class struggles. The upshot was a variety of regimes that sought to regulate markets through the extension of social rights as well as labor rights.

These regimes whether social democratic, fascist, or Soviet lasted until the middle 1970s at which time they faced a renewed and mounting assault from capital not only against the protections labor had won for itself but also against state regulation of finance, marked by the end of Bretton Woods. Indeed, we can see how the offensive against labor across the planet, but especially in the North, led to a crisis of overproduction that did not lead to a renewed Keynesian politics but to the financialization of the economy via the creation of new moneys that could be extended to individuals in the form of credit (credit cards, student loans, and above all sub-prime mortgages), but also to enterprises and countries generating unprecedented levels of debt. The bubble burst when the debtors – whether individuals, enterprises or countries – could no longer deliver on their interest payments. There were few limits to what finance capital could commodify – from minerals to water, from land to air – creating the environmental catastrophe that the planet now faces. The solution to create new markets in the rights to pollute and destroy the atmosphere – the so-called carbon markets – has not proven to be a solution but a way of making money from the deepening the ecological crisis.

Third-wave marketization has gone far deeper than second-wave marketization in the commodification of labor, nature and money. Moreover, to turn something into a commodity, requires first that it be disembedded from its social and political moorings. Labor had to be dispossessed from its supports in the state, peasants have had to be dispossessed from access to their land, people had to be dispossessed of access to their own body (so that their organs can be sold). This dispossession requires, in short, the escalation of violence perpetrated by states on behalf of capital, and direct deployment of violence by capital. Violence is at the heart of third-wave marketization in a way that Polanyi never anticipated.

Moreover, Polanyi did not and could not have anticipated a fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge. Today what used to be a public good – knowledge produced, for example, in the university was available to all – is fast becoming a private good. The production and dissemination of knowledge in the university has been commodified as a result of the forcible withdrawal of public funding. With important exceptions in such countries as Brazil, India and China, the university has had to become self-financing by selling the knowledge it produces to industry (the growth of the collaboration of bio-medical sciences and pharmaceuticals), by seeking funds from donors and alumni, and above all by an exponential increase in student fees. The major universities around the world are sacrificing their accountability to local and national interests as they are subject to world ranking systems that force them to follow the standards of the richest universities in the US. This program of rationalization brands the university as worthy or not of investment, working hand in glove with the commodification of the production and dissemination of knowledge which, in turn, generates new strategies for the commodification of labor, nature and finance.

The question now is whether the expansion of the market will generate its own counter-movement. It certainly generates multiple reactive movements, but when and how they will add up to a counter-movement is an entirely different matter. For that we need to develop a sociology that establishes their inter-connection – a sociology built on the relation between capitalist accumulation and market expansion. What I have offered here are the building blocks of such a theory – the specificity of third-wave marketization as the underlying cause of social movements, and third-wave marketization understood as the articulation of four fictitious commodities – labor, nature, finance and knowledge.

Sociology as Social Movement

In underlining the fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge – I am pointing to the transformation of the conditions of production of knowledge. What relative autonomy the university possesses is rapidly evaporating in the face of its commercialization. We in the academy can no longer pretend to stand outside society, making it an external object of examination. Academics are irrevocably inside society and we, therefore, have to decide on whose side we are. Those disciplines that are best able to exploit market opportunities are the ones to benefit – the bio-medical sciences, engineering, law and business schools – and they become the more powerful influences within the university at the potential cost of the social sciences and humanities.

The social sciences, however, do not form a homogeneous block. Ironically, economics has created the ideological justification of market fundamentalism – the very force that is destroying the university as an arena for the independent pursuit of knowledge. Political science, concerned with political order, now aspires to be an extension of economics, reflecting the increasingly collusive relation between markets (and especially finance capital) and nation states. Of course, there are dissidents within both fields, and they play an important role, but the dominant tendency is the endorsement of market fundamentalism through the embrace of utilitarianism. Sociology, too, has not escaped efforts to turn it into a branch of economics, but the anti-utilitarian tradition within sociology from Marx, Weber and Durkheim all the way to Parsons, Bourdieu, feminism, and postcolonial theory are so well entrenched that economic models have made few inroads.

Nor is this surprising as sociology was born with civil society, an arena of institutions, organizations and movements that are neither part of the state nor of the economy. But we should be careful not to romanticize civil society as some coherent, solidary whole as though it were free of exclusions, dominations, and fragmentations. It is Janus faced – it can aid the expansion of the market and state, but it can also obstruct or, at least, contain their expansion. This is where sociology is situated – its distinctive standpoint is civil society – examining the economy and state from the perspective of their consequences for civil society as well the ways in which civil society supports the economy and the state. Like civil society sociology looks two ways. On the one side it examines the social conditions of the existence of markets and states. On the other side, along with such neighboring disciplines as anthropology and geography, it can also take a critical stand against the unregulated expansion of the state-market nexus.

In the context of the rationalization and commercialization of the university, sociology is the one discipline whose standpoint, viz. civil society, behooves it to cultivate a community of critical discourse about the very nature of the modern university, but also conduct a conversation with publics beyond the university, making it accountable to those publics without losing its commitment to its scientific research programs. As the membrane separating the university from society becomes ever thinner, failure to counter-balance the commercialization of the university will end with the destruction of the university as we know it. It is in this sense that we must think of sociology as a social movement as well as scientific discipline, calling for a critical engagement with the world around. To sustain this dual and contradictory role the discipline must develop its own mechanisms for internal dialogue, mechanism that appear at the local level within the university, at a national level but most importantly at a global level. Building such a global sociology requires the development of a global infrastructure that fosters dialogue and outreach, that produces a third-wave sociology to meet the theoretical and practical challenges of third-wave marketization, and to halt the Third World War that is being waged on communities across the planet.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK : Polity Press.

Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. New York : Basic Books

Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation : The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston : Beacon Press.

Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat : The New Dangerous Class. London : Bloomsbury Academic

Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York : McGraw-Hill

Touraine, Alain. 1988. Return of the Actor. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

L'avenir de la sociologie

Michael Burawoy — 2015-02-15T17:45:45Z

Sommaire

Article de Michael Burawoy « The Future of Sociology » publié dans Brym R. (ed.), New Society, 7th Edition, Scarborough, Nelson Education, 2014, traduit par Carolyne Grimard et Marc-Henry Soulet. Cette traduction a déjà paru dans SociologieS, accompagnée d'une introduction par Marc-Henry Soulet accessible ici. Nous remercions Michael Burawoy et la revue SociologieS de nous avoir autorisé à la reproduire ici.

La marchandisation du monde

Une vague de marchandisation déferle sur le monde. Des entités, autrefois composantes des corps humains, des communautés et de la nature, sont aujourd'hui arrachées de leurs espaces originels. Appropriées par de nouvelles classes de marchands, elles sont vendues dans des chaînes de magasins partout à travers le monde. Ce n'est toutefois pas la première vague de marchandisation ; ce n'est en effet pas la première fois que les marchés ont élargi leur portée en transformant les biens communs et les services publics en nouvelles marchandises. La révolution industrielle du XIX^e siècle a provoqué une expansion similaire lors de la marchandisation du travail et de ses produits. La révolution financière du XX^e siècle a transformé l'argent en une marchandise à part entière, jusqu'à menacer la viabilité des marchés. La transformation écologique qui nous atteint aujourd'hui va encore plus loin ; la terre, l'eau, l'air et les gènes sont transformés en marchandise, menaçant par là même l'existence humaine.

Jusqu'à maintenant, chaque vague de marchandisation a mis en branle un contre-mouvement, érigeant des institutions assurant la régulation, la canalisation et la contention de la commodification. Pourtant, chaque vague a également balayé les remparts construits contre la vague précédente. Sont ainsi aujourd'hui en voie de démolition les droits acquis par le mouvement ouvrier occidental contre la marchandisation du XIX^e siècle (comme le droit de former des syndicats), ainsi que les droits sociaux garantis par les États contre la marchandisation du XX^e siècle (la mise en place de standards minimums de sécurité économique, par exemple). Au final, rien ne semble à l'abri d'une troisième vague de marchandisation ; y aura-t-il un contre-mouvement assez fort pour contenir son pouvoir destructeur ?

Derrière cette troisième vague se cachent des prédateurs, de connivence avec les États-nations et parfois même avec des organisations multilatérales, tels la Banque mondiale et le Fonds monétaire international, qui imposent leur volonté aux plus désespérés et aux plus démunis, aux travailleurs et aux étudiants, aux petits agriculteurs et à la classe moyenne. La dernière instance qui résiste à cet ouragan économique est la société elle-même – ou plus précisément la société civile – composée d'associations portées par des formes d'autorégulation collective, de mouvements forgés à partir de la volonté collective et de publics dont la reconnaissance et la communication sont réciproques. La société pourra-t-elle relever le défi ? Quel peut être le rôle de la sociologie ?

La sociologie contre le marché

S'il existe un dénominateur commun aux diverses traditions sociologiques, c'est bien leur volonté de ne pas réduire la société au marché. Que ce soit la critique du capitalisme de Karl Marx, la critique des formes anormales de la division du travail d'Émile Durkheim, la critique du rationalisme de Max Weber ou encore celle de l'utilitarisme de Talcott Parsons, chaque tradition s'est opposée au réductionnisme du marché, à partir de points de vue différents toutefois. Aujourd'hui, il est encore plus important pour la sociologie de continuer ses traditions d'opposition à ce réductionnisme du marché dans la mesure où la commodification menace de détruire la société elle-même et, avec elle, l'existence humaine. Face à ces défis, les sociologues ont développé quatre postures professionnelles :

Les sociologues-experts contribuent à l'élaboration de politiques qui s'orientent du côté de l'État contre le marché en utilisant ce qui reste de l'autonomie de l'État pour réguler les forces du marché. Dans les pays du Nord de l'Europe, où l'on dénote un héritage permanent de politiques et de prestations d'aide à tendance sociale-démocrate, cette approche est sensée.
Les sociologues académiques rappellent l'importance de fonder leur discipline sur des bases scientifiques fermes avant tout usage pratique. Pour eux, c'est en pataugeant d'emblée dans des mers tourmentées que l'on découvre l'impossibilité de nager. Les sociologues académiques peuvent comprendre les dangers de la marchandisation généralisée, mais ils attendent patiemment que l'orage passe en gardant espoir qu'il n'ait pas balayé avec lui le reste de la société.
Les sociologues critiques s'opposent aux deux groupes précédents en dénonçant les déviances morales de leurs prédécesseurs, en se plaignant notamment de ceux qui agissent de concert avec l'État et le marché, ainsi que de ceux qui s'activent à écrire des articles scientifiques. Les sociologues critiques sont en diminution. Tout comme les sociologues académiques, ils vivent en communautés isolées, cherchant à préserver leur pouvoir critique, agissant comme si leurs mots avaient le pouvoir d'arrêter les tempêtes à distance. Néanmoins, leur message est souvent incompréhensible et peu écouté.
Les sociologues publics refusent de collaborer avec le marché et l'État. Ils affirment que la science sans les politiques est aveugle, tout comme la critique sans l'intervention est vide de sens. Ils s'engagent directement dans les communautés, institutions et mouvements sociaux, en écoutant et s'exprimant, en observant et en participant, en apprenant et en écrivant afin de défendre la société contre la marchandisation qui sévit. La troisième vague de marchandisation appelle l'avènement de la sociologie publique. La sociologie publique semble répondre à un besoin réel aujourd'hui, mais elle ne peut aller de l'avant qu'avec l'héritage des sociologies experte, académique et critique. Sans le savoir sociologique accumulé dans notre discipline – et présenté dans ce livre –, la sociologie publique ne peut exister. La sociologie publique dépend également du savoir critique qui préserve l'honnêteté des savoirs académiques, l'éloignant de l'insignifiance et de l'auto-référentialité. En même temps, le savoir critique insuffle à la sociologie publique des valeurs et des orientations qui motivent son engagement auprès des publics. La sociologie publique n'existe pas si elle ne peut contribuer au changement social. Elle ne peut alors faire fi de l'expertise. Elle peut l'examiner du dehors, la poussant dans des directions appropriées, s'opposant aux tentations de l'exercice du pouvoir. La sociologie publique doit être la conscience de la sociologie experte.

Ensemble, les sociologues publics, académiques, critiques et experts forment une discipline orientée d'abord et avant tout vers la société civile – à l'opposé des politologues qui ont pour objet l'État et les économistes le marché. L'existence même de la sociologie dépend de la santé de la société civile, marquant de ce fait son engagement à l'égard du futur de l'humanité aujourd'hui menacé par la connivence entre l'État et le marché. Le paradoxe est alors le suivant : la sociologie n'a jamais été aussi importante, toutefois ses bases n'ont jamais été aussi précaires.

La Grande Transformation

Pour mieux saisir l'avenir de la sociologie, on doit comprendre le contexte de cette troisième vague de marchandisation à l'intérieur de laquelle elle est contrainte d'opérer. Pour ce faire, je ferai référence à l'ouvrage classique de Karl Polanyi, La Grande Transformation (1983 [1944]).

Karl Polanyi (qui, pour l'anecdote, a vécu en banlieue de Toronto du début des années 1950 jusqu'à sa mort en 1964) s'est voué à la compréhension des dangers et des potentialités du marché. Il a démontré que les marchés qui se complexifient trop engendrent des contre-mouvements sociaux. La « grande transformation » ne caractérisait donc pas l'évolution des marchés, mais bien la réaction à cette évolution.

L'idée la plus importante, mais la moins développée de Karl Polanyi, était les « marchandises fictives » – ces entités qui perdent de la valeur lorsqu'elles sont sujettes à des échanges et à une commodification sans restriction. Il existait selon lui trois marchandises fictives : le travail, l'argent et la terre.

Lorsque le travail est excessivement « commodifié », les individus perdent leur capacité à travailler. Par exemple, dans un marché du travail parfaitement libre, où ce ne sont que l'offre et la demande qui déterminent les coûts du travail, l'absence de lois encadrant le salaire minimum, le travail des enfants, les mesures de sécurité et la durée de la journée de travail, entraîne la mort prématurée de certains travailleurs en raison d'accidents, de problèmes de santé ou encore de famine. Typiquement, lorsque les nouvelles lois sur les pauvres sont instaurées en Angleterre en 1834, révoquant certaines formes de protection du travail et d'assistance aux pauvres, le désespoir qui a suivi a entraîné une réaction spontanée sous la forme de mouvements sociaux. C'est ainsi qu'est apparu le mouvement ouvrier pour restreindre la durée des journées de travail, la création d'associations d'entreprises, par exemple de pompes funèbres, la création de syndicats et de coopératives ou encore des expériences comme des communautés utopiques. La commodification du travail au XIX^e siècle a ainsi mené à une auto-reconstitution spontanée de la société.

De manière similaire, lorsque l'argent est excessivement « commodifié », il perd sa capacité à faciliter les échanges. La marchandisation complète de l'argent a commencé au début du XX^e siècle et se poursuit encore aujourd'hui. Bien avant la crise financière mondiale amorcée en 2008, d'importantes lois états-uniennes régulant les institutions financières ont été mises à la poubelle, encourageant ainsi les banques à investir l'argent de gens ordinaires de manière extrêmement risquée. Durant cette procédure, le 1 % d'États-uniens les plus riches a multiplié de beaucoup sa richesse. En parallèle, lorsque les hypothèques et autres crédits ont commencé à piquer du nez, des millions d'États-uniens ordinaires ont perdu leur maison. C'est en réponse à cette crise que le mouvement Occupy Wall Street a rapidement émergé, afin de protester contre l'accroissement des inégalités économiques.

Enfin, lorsque la terre est excessivement « commodifiée », elle perd sa capacité à assurer la subsistance des humains. Lorsque la terre est clôturée et vendue comme bien immobilier, comme on peut le voir dans de nombreux endroits de ce monde, les moyens d'existence des petits fermiers sont menacés. La terre n'est toutefois pas la seule à être « commodifiée » ; bien d'autres éléments naturels le sont aussi. Par exemple, au milieu des années 1990, le gouvernement bolivien a décidé de vendre à une compagnie privée l'accès à l'eau et son système d'approvisionnement. La compagnie a rapidement fixé des prix si élevés que de nombreux Boliviens en situation de pauvreté ne pouvaient y accéder. La disponibilité de l'eau – au regard de sa valeur humaine comme source de vie – a diminué alors que la commodification de l'eau a augmenté. Les Boliviens en situation de pauvreté se sont logiquement révoltés contre les conditions insoutenables de leur existence.

Karl Polanyi a écrit sur les deux premières vagues de marchandisation ainsi que sur les réactions qu'elles ont suscitées – la marchandisation du travail au xixe siècle (et l'accroissement des droits des travailleurs qui en a résulté) et la marchandisation de l'argent au xxe siècle (qui a conduit à la Grande dépression de 1929 à 1939, ainsi qu'à la hausse du New Deal aux États-Unis, du nazisme en Allemagne et du stalinisme en Union soviétique). Il croyait qu'après les horreurs de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, la majorité des gens comprendrait l'importance de la régulation des marchés. Il avait tort. Au milieu des années 1970, une troisième vague de marchandisation a débuté, se distinguant par une commodification de la nature, en plus de la commodification antérieure du travail et de l'argent. Plus spécifiquement, comment caractériser cette troisième vague de marchandisation ? Quelles réactions sociales pouvons-nous observer ?

La troisième vague de marchandisation

La première vague de marchandisation a généré un contre-mouvement s'opposant à la commodification du travail, alors que la deuxième a généré un contre-mouvement s'opposant à la celle de l'argent. La troisième vague, quant à elle, engendre un contre-mouvement empêchant la commodification de la terre et plus largement celle de la nature. Bien sûr, la terre a été commercialisée bien avant cette troisième vague. Pendant un moment, la commodification de la nature de manière générale ne faisait pas encourir le risque de destruction de la planète ; aujourd'hui la menace est réelle. Les habitants de logements modestes ou les squatteurs se défendent maintenant contre les gouvernements locaux qui essaient de les chasser de la ville. Les résidents issus de la classe moyenne s'opposent au développement de tours. Les peuples indigènes refusent d'abandonner leurs terres au profit de grandes plantations commerciales. Les fermiers luttent contre des digues qui ruineraient leurs terres. Les activistes se battent pour la qualité de l'air, contre le déversement de déchets toxiques, ainsi que contre la privatisation de l'eau et de l'électricité. La liste est longue. Bien sûr, la commodification du travail et de l'argent continue d'être importante, générant du coup ses propres contre-mouvements, mais la réaction à la commodification de la nature définira la réaction à cette troisième vague de marchandisation et du coup l'avenir de l'humanité.

Cette troisième vague se caractérise aussi par sa taille ; elle est mondiale de par ses causes et ses ramifications. La réponse à la commodification du travail lors de la première vague de marchandisation était principalement locale, bien qu'elle aspirât à devenir nationale (à travers la création de syndicats nationaux, par exemple). La réponse à la commodification de l'argent sous la deuxième vague se situait, elle, au niveau des États-nations (à travers les banques centrales), mais elle aspirait éventuellement à être mondiale (à travers la création du Fonds monétaire international et de la Banque mondiale, par exemple). La réponse à la commodification de la nature lors de la troisième vague de marchandisation sera initiée par la société – d'abord au niveau local pour ensuite s'élever presque immédiatement au niveau mondial. Parce que les effets engendrés par les changements climatiques, les accidents nucléaires, la privatisation de l'eau et la propagation de maladies infectieuses sont mondiaux, la réponse à cette troisième vague sera in fine à l'échelle mondiale.

Les vagues successives de marchandisation se distinguent aussi par les modes de destruction des défenses érigées contre elles. La deuxième vague a détruit les remparts construits par le travail jusqu'à ce qu'il ait pu générer un contre-mouvement s'y opposant et a pris le visage de la protection sociale (l'État-providence). La troisième fait reculer le travail et les droits sociaux. Et ceci, presque partout, alors que les syndicats déclinent et que les salaires des travailleurs, les budgets de la sécurité sociale, les pensions et l'aide sociale stagnent ou baissent. Sur quelles bases les prochaines défenses seront-elles construites – défenses qui devront repousser la dégradation de la nature tout en remettant sur pied le travail et les droits sociaux ? Plus grand sera le défi pour l'humanité et les communautés, plus grande la réaction doit être. Puisque face à cette troisième vague, nous devrons développer la défense des droits de l'homme – la défense d'une communauté se reconnaissant mutuellement comme êtres humains – qui intègrera donc nécessairement les droits du travail et sociaux.

Bien sûr, les droits de la personne pourraient être plus spécifiques ou encore restreints en fonction d'intérêts particuliers. Par exemple, la démocratie électorale est devenue un droit fondamental qui, pour certaines personnes, peut justifier l'invasion, le meurtre et l'assujettissement à l'étranger. De manière similaire, les marchés ont été légitimés au nom des droits de la personne à une liberté de choix et de protection de la propriété privée, ignorant même ce que cela signifie pour ceux qui ne peuvent choisir ou qui n'ont pas de propriété. Les droits de la personne qui sont universels, ce qui inclut les droits du travail et les droits sociaux, doivent viser la protection de la communauté humaine entière. De tels objectifs impliquent d'abord de reconnaître et de traiter les autres comme une fin en soi et non pas comme un moyen. Les droits de l'homme sont ainsi un terrain de luttes complexes à l'intérieur duquel des groupes émettent des revendications sur la base de leurs intérêts particuliers, mais en fin de compte ces droits renvoient à la protection de l'humanité en galvanisant des luttes à caractère mondial et en s'érigeant contre cette nouvelle forme de marchandisation. Maintenant que j'ai décrit les principales caractéristiques de cette troisième vague et de son contre-mouvement, reste à caractériser leurs significations pour la sociologie.

Les trois vagues de sociologie

De chaque vague de marchandisation émerge une sociologie différente. Cette discipline est elle-même issue du XIX^e siècle et de la société civile, en réponse à la première vague de marchandisation. La sociologie a débuté en tant qu'entreprise morale défendant la société dans son combat contre le marché, particulièrement contre la destruction de la communauté, alors que de nouvelles populations prolétarisées, destituées et dégradées faisaient de la ville leur nouvelle demeure. D'abord et avant tout, c'était une démarche critique, mais elle était aussi utopiste puisqu'elle imaginait la vie en dehors du marché. Par exemple, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels ont postulé que le communisme devait surgir des cendres du capitalisme. Auguste Comte a conçu un ordre familial dirigé par les sociologues. Émile Durkheim a imaginé une solidarité organique construite à partir d'une organisation corporatiste. Et au Canada anglais, les principes religieux du mouvement évangélique social ont influencé la sociologie dans ses débuts.

Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim et les autres précurseurs de la sociologie s'opposeraient certainement à ma catégorisation. Ils se percevaient comme des scientifiques fidèles à ce qui est et à ce qui pourrait survenir en vertu des lois de la société. Pourtant, d'un point de vue contemporain, pour chacune des découvertes scientifiques qu'ils ont apporté à la compréhension de la société, leur science était en partie spéculative, particulièrement en ce qui concerne son avenir, et fortement imprégnée de préoccupations morales visant à contrecarrer la dégradation causée par le capitalisme au xixe siècle. Au cœur de leurs idées utopistes reposait la critique de la division du travail et des transformations qu'elle a induites.

La deuxième vague de marchandisation, apparue après la Première Guerre mondiale, a remis en cause les droits du travail obtenus par les syndicats et les partis politiques. Comme Karl Polanyi le défendait, les ravages engendrés par les traités et échanges internationaux ont menacé les conditions d'accumulation du capital et ont suscité des réactions de protectionnisme par l'État. Dans les pays qui ont réagi à cette deuxième vague avec des régimes autoritaires, notamment l'Allemagne et l'Union soviétique, la sociologie a disparu, mais dans ceux qui ont apporté une réponse social-démocrate, un nouveau type de sociologie a émergé. Cette sociologie a collaboré avec l'État afin de défendre la société contre le marché. S'est ainsi développée, au Royaume-Uni, aux États-Unis, en Suède, au Canada et ailleurs, une sociologie orientée vers les politiques. Même dans les colonies s'est développée une expertise sociologique, bien que cette dernière ait plutôt été appelée anthropologie. C'était l'âge d'or de la recherche financée par l'État et orientée vers les problèmes sociaux.

Là où la sociologie est demeurée relativement séparée de l'État, comme aux États-Unis, elle s'est développée en une forte branche académique, vouée à l'expansion de programmes de recherche spécifiques principalement préoccupés par la stabilité sociale. La stratification y a mis en évidence une mobilité basée sur les accomplissements réalisés en termes de hiérarchie professionnelle. Les études sur la famille ont souligné les avantages présentés par les familles nucléaires fonctionnant bien. Les études sur le crime et la déviance se sont concentrées sur la régulation et le contrôle. La sociologie du travail était principalement préoccupée par la pacification du mouvement ouvrier et par la maximisation de l'extraction de sa valeur. La sociologie politique a, quant à elle, souligné les bases sociales de la démocratie électorale ainsi que le confinement de son extrémisme. C'est le fonctionnalisme structurel qui en a résumé le cadre théorique général – la délimitation de pré-requis fonctionnels demandait de garder en équilibre tout système social, ainsi que les mécanismes permettant aux institutions sociales de répondre à ces conditions préalables. Au cours de cette période, les sociologues ont accordé de l'importance à la recherche empirique, aux nouvelles méthodes de collecte des données, à l'analyse, ainsi qu'à l'élaboration de théories à « moyenne portée » qui ont trouvé leur niche dans la charpente du fonctionnalisme structurel. Cette approche était une réaction face aux précédentes traditions davantage spéculatives qui avaient été promues par un désir d'une réforme morale. Elle voulait effacer toute trace de moralité dans la sociologie.

La première vague de sociologie a inventé les utopies. Dans la seconde, la sociologie académique et la sociologie experte se sont opposées à ces pensées utopistes, clamant que l'utopie était presque ou déjà à portée de main. De fait, aux États-Unis et en Union soviétique, le structuro-fonctionnalisme et le marxisme-léninisme ont respectivement pris par mégarde l'utopie pour réalité. C'étaient des traditions sociologiques rivées au présent, préoccupées seulement par l'aplanissement de ses petites irrationalités. La sociologie critique développée en réaction aux présupposés d'accord et de consensus a rétabli un intérêt pour la lutte et le conflit, tout en imaginant un monde au-delà du capitalisme.

Quel type de sociologie appelle la troisième vague de marchandisation ? Comme nous l'avons déjà vu, cette troisième vague fait reculer la défense étatiste de la société, lançant une offensive contre le travail et les droits sociaux. À la différence de la deuxième vague, qui avait provoqué une réaction anti-marché de la part de l'État – faisant émerger de manière variée le protectionnisme, la planification économique, les garanties de salaire, l'État-providence et la propriété publique des moyens de production – la troisième vague, elle, trouve son origine dans l'État. Bien que ce dernier soit encore un État régulateur, il s'agit toutefois d'une régulation pour plutôt que contre le marché, allant à l'encontre de tout ce qui a été accompli lors de la deuxième vague. La société subit ainsi un double assaut provenant à la fois de l'économie et de l'État. Incapable de gagner en influence auprès de l'État ou du marché, la sociologie s'oriente vers la société. En d'autres mots, l'intérêt propre de la sociologie se trouve dans la constitution de la société civile, où elle existe à peine, ainsi que dans sa protection qui est menacée – d'où l'affirmation d'une entrée dans l'âge de la sociologie publique.

Aujourd'hui, la sociologie ne peut limiter ses engagements à des publics locaux ou nationaux, mais doit se préoccuper de l'union d'une société civile mondiale. Par ailleurs, la troisième vague de sociologie en appelle d'une science assez différente de la science spéculative du XIX^e siècle ou encore de la science académique, axée sur les politiques, qui a émergé au milieu du XX^e siècle – cherchant à combiner la rigueur scientifique avec le développement de valeurs alternatives. Nous ne luttons plus pour une science paradigmatique unique, mais plutôt pour une discipline à l'intersection de multiples programmes de recherches, établie sur les valeurs de différents publics, élaborant des cadres théoriques intégrant leurs anomalies et leurs contradictions. C'est ce que j'appelle une science réflexive, une science qui n'a pas peur de réfléchir à ses valeurs fondamentales ni même à les articuler publiquement, mais qui est malgré tout une science (voir tableau 1).

Alors que la sociologie se mondialise, les emprunts au-delà des frontières nationales sont de plus en plus possibles et importants. Par exemple, après sa révolution anti-autoritaire de 1974, le Portugal s'est inspiré de traditions critiques et académiques provenant des sociologies états-unienne et française, les mettant à profit pour une société civile vibrante. Ce petit pays est l'un des meneurs en matière de sociologie publique, en lien avec les sociologies experte, critique et académique. La sociologie publique a prospéré dans d'autres pays comme au Brésil, en Afrique du Sud et en Inde, basée sur des sociologies académiques nord-américaine ou européenne sélectives, et refaçonnée en luttes anti-autoritaire ou anti-coloniale.

Tableau 1 : La sociologie contre le marché

{{}}	Première vague de marchandisation	Deuxième vague de marchandisation		Troisième vague de marchandisation
« Marchandise fictive » prédominante	Travail	Argent		Terre (« nature »)
Lieu de réponse prédominant	Local	National		Mondial
Droits dominants protégés	Du travail		Du social	De la personne
Orientation dominante de la sociologie	Utopiste et critique		Experte et académique	Publique
Mouvement dominant de la pensée scientifique sociologique	Spéculatif		Positiviste	Réflexif

Les emprunts mondiaux présentent à certains égards autant de risques que de promesses. La domination de la sociologie académique aux États-Unis peut ainsi entraver la capacité des sociologies nationales à répondre aux préoccupations locales. Face au dilemme d'avoir les États-Unis sur le pas de leur porte, de nombreux sociologues canadiens, à la fin des années 1960 et au début des années 1970, ont mené des attaques hostiles contre l'américanisation de la vie académique. Lorsque l'on s'éloigne de la vie académique, le dilemme peut être encore plus grand. La pression d'écrire en anglais pour des publics académiques éloignés est un désavantage non seulement pour les sociologues en périphérie, mais menace inévitablement la vitalité d'une sociologie publique locale. Sari Hanafi a exprimé ce dilemme à propos du Moyen-Orient : publiez mondialement et périssez localement ou publiez localement et périssez mondialement. Peut-on surmonter cet abime pour constituer une sociologie publique qui ne soit pas isolationniste mais mondialement connectée ? Voilà le défi.

Conclusion

La sociologie prend un virage public en réponse à une troisième vague de marchandisation, car la sociologie vit et meurt avec la société. Lorsque la société est menacée, la sociologie l'est également. Puisqu'on ne peut plus compter sur l'État pour contenir le marché, les sociologues doivent tisser leurs propres connexions avec la société en développant des sociologies publiques. Nous devons faire plus que de servir la société passivement : nous devons maintenir et constituer cette société. Pour cela, la sociologie a de nombreux partenaires et alliés potentiels, de plus en plus, eux aussi, agressés par l'État et le marché. C'est à l'intérieur de ce contexte contemporain plus large qu'une sociologie publique peut être une âme dirigeante et une force directrice.

Toutefois, on ne peut penser le contexte actuel en le détachant de son passé. On ne peut pas compartimenter en périodes singulières les trois vagues de marchandisation et leurs configurations sociologiques correspondantes. Chaque vague laisse un héritage à la suivante. Les vagues de marchandisation se creusent à mesure qu'elles procèdent régressivement du travail à l'argent puis à la nature, chacune incorporant la marchandisation de la période précédente. De la même manière, chaque contre-mouvement mène progressivement des droits du travail aux droits sociaux (incluant les droits du travail), puis aspire ensuite aux droits de la personne qui englobe les trois.

Le développement de la sociologie procède différemment. La sociologie experte et la sociologie académique, avec leur valeur de neutralité et leur approche scientifique, se sont constituées en réaction contre les sociologies critiques et utopiques, saturées de morale et de spéculations. La sociologie publique tente de synthétiser l'engagement des valeurs de la première période avec les avancées scientifiques de la seconde. Néanmoins, même dans ces cas, on ne devrait pas penser en termes de sociologies distinctes, mais plutôt en termes de reconfiguration des quatre éléments de la sociologie, au sein desquelles le poids de la sociologie académique, experte, critique et publique alternerait. Une sociologie publique ne peut réellement prendre son l'envol, de manière soutenue, si elle n'est pas propulsée par la sociologie critique ou enracinée dans la sociologie académique.

Le rythme et l'espacement des vagues de développement sociologique varient d'un pays à l'autre. Pour le monde capitaliste d'aujourd'hui, les vagues sont davantage séparées dans le temps, alors que dans des pays comme la Russie, l'Inde et la Chine, les vagues sont rapprochées en raison d'une commodification du travail, de l'argent et de la nature survenue quasi simultanément dans les dernières décennies. Nonobstant ces variations nationales, on peut caractériser l'époque actuelle par la concentration des impacts cumulatifs de la marchandisation du travail et de l'argent au sein de la commodification de la nature. Par sa subsomption de toutes les marchandisations, celle de la nature devient le problème planétaire le plus criant, générant des mouvements sociaux reliés par le principe même des droits humains.

On ne sait toutefois pas si ces mouvements peuvent renverser la troisième vague de marchandisation ou s'ils auront pour résultat d'élargir ou de réduire les limites de la liberté humaine. Il est même possible que la sociologie succombe à la commodification – une commodification de la production de connaissance à l'université et, ailleurs, une commodification de la diffusion des connaissances par les médias de masse ou encore une commodification de la consommation de connaissance alors que les frais de scolarité augmenteront sans cesse. Inversement, la sociologie publique pourrait participer au rapprochement des organisations, mouvements et publics à travers le monde, contribuant à l'érection d'une société civile au-delà du contrôle du marché et de l'État. Le monde a besoin d'une sociologie publique engageant des publics de toutes les parties du globe : une sociologie qui repose sur les épaules d'une sociologie académique dynamique, inspirée par une sociologie critique essentielle, tout en demandant à la sociologie de l'expertise de rendre compte des actions politiques.

Bibliographie

Hanafi S. (2011), « University Systems in the Arab East : Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally », Current Sociology, vol. 59, n° 3, pp. 291-309.

Polanyi K. (1983 [1944]), La Grande transformation. Aux origines politiques et économiques de notre temps, Paris, Éditions Gallimard.

Marxism after Polanyi

Michael Burawoy — 2014-10-09T05:00:00Z

Sommaire

This text was originally published in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar, Marxisms in the 21st. Century, Johannesburg, South Africa, Wits University Press, 2013, p. 34-52. We would like to thank Michael Burawoy for allowing us to publish it on RHUTHMOS.

What should we do with Marxism ? For most the answer is simple. Bury it ! Mainstream social science has long since bid farewell to Marxism. Talcott Parsons (1967 : 135) dismissed Marxism as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century – a version of nineteenth century utilitarianism of no relevance to the twentieth century. Ironically enough, he penned these reflections in 1968 in the midst of a major revival of Marxist thought across the globe – a revival that rejected Soviet Marxism as a ruling ideology, a revival that reclaimed Marxism's democratic and prefigurative legacy. The revival did not last long but suffered setbacks as revolutionary hopes were vanquished by repression and dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. With the final collapse of the Soviet order in 1991, and the simultaneous market transition in China, the gravediggers pronounced Marxism finally dead and bells tolled across the world.

Facing such anti-Marxist euphoria, the last hold-outs often appear dogmatic and anachronistic. Marxists have, indeed, sometimes obliged their enemies by demonstrating their religious fervor in tracts that bear little relation to reality, defending Marxism in its pristine form, revealed in the scriptures of Marx and Engels. The disciples that followed Marx and Engels – Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Fanon, Amin, Mao – were but a gloss on biblical readings of origins. Today's epigones do not place Marx and Engels in their context, as fallible beings whose thought reflected the period in which they lived, but as Christ-like figures and thus the source of eternal truth. In their view the founders can speak no falsehood.

Adopting neither burial nor revelation, a third approach to Marxism has been more measured. Many in the social sciences and beyond have appropriated what they consider salvageable, which might include Marxism's analysis of the creative power of capitalism, the notions of exploitation and class struggle, the idea of primitive accumulation, or even Marxist views of ideology and the state. These neo-Marxists and post-Marxists often combine the ideas of Marx and Marxism with those of other social theorists – Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Beauvoir, and so on. Indeed, these latter theorists had themselves absorbed many Marxist notions, often without acknowledging their debt, even as they expressed their hostility to Marxism. The neo-Marxists treat Marxism as a supermarket. They take what pleases them and leave behind what does not, sometimes paying their respects at the checkout, sometimes not. They have no qualms about discarding what does not suit the times.

The fourth approach, the one adopted here, is that Marxism is a living tradition that enjoys renewal and reconstruction as the world it describes and seeks to transform undergoes change. After all, at the heart of Marxism is the idea that beliefs – science or ideology – necessarily change with society. Thus, as the world diverges so must Marxism, reflecting diverse social and economic structures and historical legacies. However, Marxism cannot simply mirror the world. It seeks to change the world, but changing such a variegated world requires a variegated theory, a theory that keeps up with the times and accommodates places.

Marxism as an evolving tradition

If Marxism is an evolving tradition, what do all its varieties share that make them part of that tradition ? What makes Marxism Marxism ? What is its abiding core irrespective of the period, irrespective of the national terrain ? What do all branches of Marxism have in common ? If we think of the Marxist tradition as an ever-growing tree, we can ask : What are its roots ? What defines its trunk ? What are it branches ? [1]

The roots themselves grow in a shifting entanglement of four foundational claims : historical materialism as laid out in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, the premises of history as found in The German Ideology, notions of human nature as found in the Philosophical Manuscripts, and the relation of theory and practice as found in the Theses on Feuerbach. The trunk of the Marxist tree is the theory of capitalism, presented in the three volumes of Capital, and revised by inheritors over the last century and a half.

Then there are the successive branches of Marxism – German Marxism, Russian-Soviet Marxism, Western Marxism, Third World Marxism – some branches dead, others dying, and yet others flourishing. Each branch springs from its own reconstruction of Marxism, responding to specific historical circumstances. German Marxism responded to the reformist tendencies within the German socialist movement of 1890–1920 as well as capitalism's capacity to absorb the crises it generates ; Russian Marxism sprang from the dilemmas of the combined and uneven development of capitalism on a world scale, and of the battle over socialism in one country ; Western Marxism was a response to Soviet Marxism, fascism and the failure of revolution in the West ; and Third World Marxism grapples with the dilemmas of underdevelopment as well as colonial and post-colonial struggles.

When we examine this tree we see that Marxism may have begun as a small-scale project that did indeed link people across national boundaries – think of the First International. As classical Marxism garnered popular support it became tied to national politics (Russian, German, French, and so on) from which it expanded into regional blocs – Soviet, Western and Third World Marxism. What is the scale of Marxism today ? Even though its popular base has shrunk, I will argue that Marxism can no longer respond only to local, national or regional issues ; it has to embrace global issues, issues that affect the entire planet. To reconstruct Marxism on a global scale requires, I argue, rethinking the material basis of Marxism through the lens of the market, but not in terms of its geographical scope (since markets have always been global as well as local), nor even in terms of neoliberal ascendancy (since markets have always moved through periods of expansion and contraction) but in terms of the novel modes of commodification.

In brief, there have been three waves of marketisation that have swept the world : the first spanning the nineteenth century, the second beginning after World War I, and the third beginning in the mid-1970s. Associated with each wave is the commodification of a leading force of production, successively labour, money and nature. These are Karl Polanyi's (1944) three fictitious commodities whose commodification, he claimed, destroys their use value. Thus, when labour is subject to unregulated exchange it loses its use value – it cannot be productive ; if money is subject to unregulated exchange the value of money becomes so volatile that businesses go out of business ; and if nature is turned into a commodity it destroys our means of existence – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land upon which we grow food, the bodies we inhabit. Each wave of commodification spawns a countermovement that is built on a distinctive set of expanding rights (labour, social and human) organised on an ever widening scale : local, national and, presumptively, global. Finally, to each countermovement there corresponds a distinctive configuration of Marxism – classical Marxism based on the projection of an economic utopia ; Soviet, Western, and Third World Marxism based on state regulation ; and finally, sociological Marxism based on an expanding and self-regulating civil society.

{{}}The periodisation of Marxism may be tied to the periodisation of capitalism but the periods themselves are continually reconstructed as a history of the evolving present, a history that makes sense of the present as both distinct from and continuous with the past. Marx (1967) saw only one period of capitalism, Lenin (1963) saw two and Ernest Mandel (1975) saw three. We, too, see three, not based on production but rather on the market as the most salient experience of today. Here I do, indeed, break with the conventional Marxist claim that production provides the foundation of opposition to capitalism. This is no longer tenable in part because production is the locus of the organisation of consent to capitalism and in part because in the face of the global production of surplus labour populations, exploitation is rapidly becoming a sought-after privilege of the few. Exploitation continues to figure centrally in the dynamics of accumulation, but not in the experience of subjugated populations. In the Marxian analysis the experience of the market appears as the ‘fetishism of commodities', a camouflage for the hidden abode of production, but it is much more than that, shaping multiple dimensions of human existence.

Reconstructing Polanyi

In making the market a fundamental prop of human existence I draw on Karl Polanyi's theory and history of capitalism. Written in 1944, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation examines the political and social consequences of the rise of the market from the end of the eighteenth century to the Great Depression. The market, Polanyi argues, had such devastating consequences that it generated a countermovement to protect society. The countermovement, however, could be as destructive as the market it sought to contain. Thus it included fascism and Stalinism as well as the New Deal and social democracy. Indeed, Polanyi concluded that such were its consequences that never again would humanity experiment with market fundamentalism. He was wrong – market fundamentalism struck our planet once again in the 1970s, threatening human existence and annihilating communities.

The reason for Polanyi's false optimism lies in his failure to take the logic of capitalism seriously. While he embraces Marx's early writings on alienation, he rejects Marx's theory of history, whether understood as a succession of modes of production, the self-destroying dynamics of capitalist competition, or the intensification of class struggle. But in rejecting the idea of laws of history, Polanyi also jettisons the logic of capital, in particular its recurrent deployment of market fundamentalism as a strategy for overcoming its internal contradictions. This, of course, is where David Harvey (2003, 2005) steps in regarding ‘neoliberalism' as an ideological offensive of capital against the gains made by labour in the period after World War II. [2]

Recognising the contemporary wave of market fundamentalism leads to questioning Polanyi's homogenising history of capitalism as a singular wave of marketisation giving way to a singular countermovement – what he calls the ‘great transformation'. Referring specifically to the history of England, Polanyi recounts in detail the way the Speenhamland system protected labour from commodification until the passage of the 1834 New Poor Law that banished outdoor relief. The year 1834 marked, then, the establishment of a pure market in labour that, through the nineteenth century, generated movements against commodification – from the Chartist movement of 1848 that sought to give workers the vote, to the factory movement that sought to limit the length of the working day, to the abolition of the Combination Acts that sought to advance trade unions, to demands for unemployment insurance and minimum wages. These struggles were not about exploitation, argues Polanyi, but about the protection of labour from its commodification. Society was fighting back against the market.

In Polanyi's history, the commodification of labour was but part of a long ascendancy that continues from the end of the eighteenth century through World War I to the Great Depression. Facilitated by the commodification of money, itself ensured through the regulation of exchange rates by pegging them to the gold standard, the market expanded into the realm of international trade. Opening up an unregulated global market in trade with the fluctuating value of national currencies so destabilised individual national economies that states successively went off the gold standard and undertook protectionist policies. Protectionist regimes took the form of fascism in countries such as Italy, Germany and Austria, took the form of the New Deal in the US, took the form of Stalinism with its collectivisation and central planning in the Soviet Union and took the form of social democracy in Scandinavian countries. In Polanyi's eye the upward swing in commodification ultimately gives way to a countermovement that could lead to socialism based on the collective self-regulation of society but was just as likely to give way to fascism and the restriction of freedom.

Knowing that Polanyi was wrong about the future, calls into question his account of the past. Thus re-examining Polanyi's argument reveals that there was not a singular upward trajectory in marketisation but at least three waves of marketisation (see Figure 1). The first takes us from Speenhamland to World War I and is primarily driven by the commodification of labour, followed by its protection, whereas the second wave takes us from World War I to the middle 1970s. The second wave originates with the commodification of money (and a renewed commodification of labour), leading to a countermovement involving the regulation of national economies. The third wave, known to many as neoliberalism, begins in 1973 with the oil crisis and initiates a third wave of marketisation featuring the recommodification of labour and money, but also the commodification of nature. We are still in the midst of the ascendancy of this third wave of marketisation. Along the way we have passed through structural adjustment administered to the failing economies of the South and shock therapy adopted by the post-Soviet regime and its satellites in East and central Europe. Successive economic failures of state-regulated economies served to energise the ascendant belief in the market. The succession of financial crises in Asia and Latin America during the 1990s, culminating in the financial crisis of 2008, served to consolidate the power of finance capital. [3]

What is unique about the third period, however, is the way the expansion of capitalism has given rise to environmental degradation, moving towards ecological catastrophe. Whether we are referring to climate change or the dumping of toxic waste, the privatisation of water, air and land, or the trade in human organs, the commodification of nature is at the heart of capitalism's impending crisis. The countermovement in the third period will have to limit capitalism's tendency to destroy the foundations of human existence, calling for the restriction and regulation of markets and a socialisation of the means of production which would be as compatible with the expansion of freedoms as with their contraction.

Figure 1 : Three waves of marketisation

Polanyi's single great transformation, from ascendant marketisation to countermovement, gives way to three waves of marketisation each with its own real or imagined countermovement. Each wave of marketisation is marked by a leading fictitious commodity. As well as incorporating a new fictitious commodity, each wave of marketisation recommodifies that which had been commodified before, but in new ways. Labour, for example, is commodified, decommodified and then recommodified in successive waves. We should not think of the three waves as compartmentalised and separated from each other, but rather as a form of dialectical progression or, perhaps better, regression.

The rhythm and experience of these waves is different in different parts of the world. Polanyi himself recognises how the first wave of marketisation in the nineteenth century had especially destructive consequences in the colonies where there was, he argues, no capacity to resist the annihilation of indigenous societies. Much as he exaggerated the destruction of the working class in nineteenth-century England, he also exaggerates the destruction of indigenous communities in South Africa. [4] We now know that colonialism actually limited land dispossession, so as to create the basis of indirect rule as well as labour reservoirs for industry. Still, in his exploration of colonialism, Polanyi does raise the question of the differential consequences of marketisation according to position in the world capitalist order.

No less important is the historical context. Thus Russia and China today, emerging from a period of state socialism – itself a reaction to second-wave marketisation – face the simultaneity of all three waves of marketisation, that is, simultaneity in the commodification of land, labour and money. In the Russian case, marketisation, at least for the first seven years of the post-Soviet era, was accompanied by an unprecedented economic decline just as in China it was accompanied by unprecedented economic growth. In Russia, wanton destruction of the party state was inspired by market fundamentalism and the belief in a market road to market capitalism, whereas in China the market was incubated under the direction of the party state. The staggering pace of Chinese economic development is a resounding confirmation of Polanyi's own argument that markets require political organisation.

In short, each wave of marketisation is marked by successive articulations of the commodification of labour, money, and nature with corresponding countermovements of different scales and defending particular rights. Each wave differentially affects countries according to their history and placement in the world economy. Moreover, as I will now show, each wave also reflects particular contradictions of capitalism, and a particular vision of socialism as well as the defense of a particular set of rights. This movement of history gives rise to a succession of Marxisms : classical Marxism, followed by Soviet, Western and Third World Marxism, which in turn give way to what I call sociological Marxism. Let us take each in turn.

First wave : classical Marxism

In the first wave of marketisation, during the nineteenth century, the focus is on the commodification of labour – first the separation of labour from means of subsistence so that it can be bought and sold in a labour market, and then strategies by capital to reduce the cost of labour power through deskilling, employing multiple members of the family, and creating a reserve army of labour. This led to struggles that emanated from production, from factories – struggles for labour rights such as limitation of the length of the working day, protection against unemployment, the right to organise into trade unions, the extension of the vote, the development of cooperatives, and the development of political parties. The countermovement is of a local character, building toward national working class organisation to secure state enforcement of labour rights.

To this corresponds the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels and of the golden years of German social democracy, the Marxism of Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Bernstein. It is based on the idea that capitalism is a system of exploitation that is inevitably doomed because the relations of production will finally and definitively fetter the forces of production. Competition among capitalists leads to the accumulation of wealth at one pole of society and its immiseration at the other pole, which in turn gives rise to, on the one side, the deepening crises of overproduction and the recurrent destruction of the means of production and on the other side, the simultaneous intensification of class struggle. What classical Marxism shares is the view that capitalism is doomed by its own laws to destroy itself, thereby giving way to socialism.

The debate between Luxemburg (1970) and Kautsky (1971) (see also Goode, 1983) is precisely when the final crisis will occur, when the forces of production will finally be fettered or whether, as in the view of Bernstein (1961), there is no final crisis because capitalism will evolve into socialism. Despite differing views, they all shared the belief that the rise of socialism was guaranteed because capitalism was doomed. As a result socialism remained largely unexamined. It was presumed to develop on the basis of the self-destruction of the capitalist mode of production through the concentration of capital and the collectivisation of labour. In this view socialism is an economic utopia and the negation of capitalism. Classical Marxism depended on laws of history – the succession of modes of production, the dynamics of capitalism that sows the seeds of its own destruction, and history as the history of class struggle – that will inevitably lead capitalism toward socialism.

Classical Marxism suffered from three fatal flaws. First, its theory of class struggle was wrong – class struggle does not necessarily lead to its intensification but rather, through the concessions it wins, the working class becomes organised within the framework of capitalism. Second, its theory of the state was undeveloped – the state is organised to defend capitalism against capitalists as well as workers. The state recognises and enforces the material interests of workers, in a limited but crucial way, through trade unions and parties, but it also regulates relations among capitalists so that competition does not destroy capitalism. Third, and finally, its theory of socialist transition hardly existed – except in the case of Bernstein who saw it as an evolutionary process based on the inevitable expansion of electoral democracy – thereby confusing the end of competitive capitalism with the end of all capitalism, missing the way the state could contain the ravages of the market and the deepening of class struggle by creating an organised capitalism. Classical Marxists saw the signs of organised capitalism but they mistook it for socialism. In fact, organised capitalism laid the foundations of the second wave of Marxism.

Second wave : Soviet, Western and Third World Marxism

In the Polanyian account marketisation develops a new burst of energy after World War I, partly in reaction to socialist movements. But now the extent of marketisation involves not just labour but international trade and its regulation by currencies tied to the gold standard. The ever-fluctuating exchange rates that were associated with rampant inflation in Germany and the great crash in the United States led countries to protect their national currencies, and go off the gold standard. Thus, the countermovement now took the form of national regulation of economies. In Germany and Italy it took the form of fascism, in Scandinavia social democracy, and in the US the New Deal. After the civil war and with the declaration of the New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union was also taken up with marketisation, but would abandon such policies in 1928 with the inauguration of forced collectivisation in agriculture and central planning. Markets entered a period of retreat across the world and under the influence of Keynesian economics the state assumed regulatory functions. This continued until the middle 1970s when a new round of marketisation began to assert itself.

If the countermovement to the market in the nineteenth century emerged on the ground of local struggles, reflecting the coincidence of exploitation and commodification of labour, and the need to advance labour rights, the countermovement to the commodification of money – the source of second-wave marketisation – came from policies of national protection. The commodification of money, concretised in the uncertainty of currency exchange rates, created such economic chaos that national economies withdrew from the international economy. They developed coordinated policies to regulate banking but also to advance the social rights of labour through welfare states that supported those who could not gain access to the labour market through the provision of benefits for childhood, sickness, old age, job loss and so forth. Whether it be fascism, Stalinism or social democracy, social rights for labour underpinned support for the new regime. Thus, second-wave marketisation gave rise to national protection of both capital and labour, and the regulation of the commodification of money.

If the first wave of Marxism is characterised by the contradiction between capital and labour, the second is typified by the clash of the realm of production and the realm of exchange – overproduction under capitalism which called for state administration, and shortage under state socialism which called for the creation of markets (see, for example, Baran 1957 ; Sweezy 1946). [5] Far from being a utopian construct as in the first period, the notion of socialism in the second period was all too real – based on national economic planning and the protection of social rights.

Marxism, rather than projecting an imaginary socialism that would follow a hypothetical collapse of capitalism, now had to rationalise and legitimate an actually existing socialism. Marxism becomes an ideology that justifies a new form of class domination, the class domination of a party elite, sometimes referred to as the nomenklatura. The impending communist transformation and the critique of capitalism became the rallying cry of communist parties all over the world. This Soviet Marxism lost all semblance of a dynamic science, and instead became a dogma ; a degenerate branch of Marxism.

It gave rise to a reaction within the Marxist camp – what is known as Western Marxism – that simultaneously contested the Soviet Union's claim to socialism and grappled with the failure of revolution in the West, that is, why the working class was absorbed into capitalism rather than overthrowing capitalism. Here we find, on the one hand, the writings of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School which underline capitalism's powers of mystification, and, on the other side, Antonio Gramsci who explores the way advanced capitalism, and the civil society that accompanies it, organised the consent of the working class through the expansion of social rights, including certain labour rights (see for example, Gramsci 1971 ; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972 ; Lukács 1971 ; Marcuse 1955, 1958, 1964). Western Marxism, together with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired a regeneration of Marxism that examined the question of capitalism's durability and flexibility in the face of the crises and struggles it produced. [6]

Third World Marxism is the third tributary of second-wave Marxism – pointing to the way imperialism creates underdevelopment, calling for insulation from world capitalism and again proposing autarchic forms of state socialism. Leaving China aside, Cuba expresses this form of Third World Marxism, while dependency school theoreticians, such as Andre Gunder Frank (1966) and Samir Amin (1974), wrote from this standpoint. In the African context, Frantz Fanon (1967) is a towering figure. Taking dependency as his point of departure, Fanon analyses the balance of class forces within the anti-colonial struggle. Fearing the ascendancy of a ‘native bourgeoisie', parasitic on international capitalism, pursuing its own power, compensating for its insecurity with conspicuous consumption, Fanon considers the possibility of a national liberation struggle forged out of the melding of dissident intellectuals and a revolutionary peasantry. Such a struggle for a participatory democratic socialism, averred Fanon, was the only hope for Africa.

Apartheid South Africa generated its own rich and distinctive second-wave Marxism that sat at the crossroads of Soviet Marxism, Western Marxism, and Third World Marxism. On the one hand, the South African Communist Party was in thrall to the Comuunist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and followed its twists and turns, even while responding to local conditions, developing the notion of internal colonialism and ‘colonialism of a special type'. Thus, Jack and Ray Simons (1969) wrote the first great Marxist history of South Africa, showing how class and race intertwined in the formation of the South African working class. Harold Wolpe (1972) inaugurated a very different tradition of Marxist analysis, drawing on French structuralism of the 1970s to problematise the very concept of race by rooting it in the articulation of pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production. This led to a new Marxist historiography, associated with such figures as Colin Bundy, Martin Legassick, Duncan Innes, David Kaplan, Rob Davies, Dan O'Meara and Mike Morris, that focused on the distinctiveness of the apartheid state and its relation to the capitalist class. At the same time others, such as Charles van Onselen in the tradition of E.P. Thompson, and Edward Webster in the tradition of Harry Braverman, produced highly original work on the formation of the working class by entering into its communities and its work processes. This second-wave Marxism tradition lapsed in the new South Africa, giving way to a third-wave Marxism, aimed at a critique of the post-apartheid order, and embracing the social movements that have given it expression. The essays in this book exemplify this latest wave of Marxism.

Third wave : sociological Marxism

Second-wave Marxism was concerned with building socialism on earth via a state regulated economy that ranged from social democracy to the Soviet model of planning, forms of African socialism and the Yugoslav self-managed economy. When markets were not rejected they were seen as an adjunct to the socialist project. Thus, Johanna Bockman (2011) has argued that the early thrust of neoclassical economics was to enjoin markets to a socialist project, whether this was the use of markets to help solve pricing problems of state planning or the organisation of self-management economies. The harnessing of neoclassical economics to capitalism is a more recent phenomenon distinctive to third-wave marketisation, posing once again the question of the meaning of socialism.

If classical Marxism postulated the self-destruction of the capitalist mode of production, projecting an unexamined utopian communism to follow, and if Soviet Marxism acted as a state ideology to represent an actually existing state socialism, the third wave of Marxism focuses not on the economy or the state but on civil society. Here we build on the second-wave Marxism of Gramsci who was the first to centre the importance of civil society as an institutional space distinct from, though connected to, state and economy. Just as Lenin's writings straddled first- and second-wave Marxism, so we can say the same is true of Antonio Gramsci and hence his enduring importance. Many of Gramsci's formulations, being in opposition to Soviet Marxism, prefigure the society-centred third-wave Marxism. Gramsci's concern with the relation of state and civil society is, however, too limiting ; we need to add Polanyi's concern with the relation of market and society. [7]

In contrast to Gramsci, Polanyi and Fanon, third-wave Marxism thinks of civil society in global as well as national terms – a civil society that defends humanity against mounting ecological disasters that in the final analysis assume a global scale. The commodification of nature, whether this takes the form of privatisation of water, of land or of air, generates crises that affect the entire planet. To be sure, in the short run some will be better equipped to survive disasters of earthquakes, hurricanes and floods than others but in the end we will all suffer – the prototype is disasters such as Chernobyl or the impending catastrophe of climate change. These will call for global solutions based on human rights that protect the foundations of human existence, which in turn require shutting down the capitalist mode of production that systematically destroys the environment in pursuit of profit.

In the third wave of marketisation the commodification of nature may represent the new threat to humanity, but it coexists with a recommodification of labour, as we see everywhere in the development of informalisation, flexploitation, and precarity, and with new forms of commodifying money, as we saw in the financial crisis of the 1990s culminating in the financial crisis of 2008. Bailing out finance capital has not altered the tendency to commodification of money but further consolidated it.

The collapse of state socialism in East and central Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991 was, in part, the result of third-wave marketisation, but it also strengthened third-wave marketisation, giving it new energy and discrediting any alternative to market supremacy. As seen from within the Soviet orbit, the illusory potentialities of a market economy were inflated by the fragility and contradictions of state socialism. Always seeking to catch up with capitalism, its incapacity to sustain a dynamic economy led to its downfall. However, during its existence the Soviet order did generate alternative visions of a democratic socialism constituted from below – the cooperatives of Hungary, the Solidarity movement in Poland and burgeoning civil society in Soviet perestroika. This socialism from below rested on the idea of the collective self-organisation of society.

Socialism of third-wave marketisation will not emerge through some catastrophic break with the past as was the case with classical Marxism nor through state-sponsored socialism from above, but through the molecular transformation of civil society, the building of what Erik Wright (2010) calls real utopias – small scale visions of alternatives such as cooperatives, participatory budgeting and universal income grants that challenge on the one hand, market tyranny and on the other, state regulation. The role of such a sociological Marxism is to elaborate the concrete utopias found in embryonic forms throughout the world. The analysis focuses on their conditions of existence, their internal contradictions, and thus their potential dissemination. Sociological Marxism, therefore, keeps alive the idea of an alternative to capitalism, an alternative that does not abolish markets or states but subjugates them to the collective self-organisation of society.

Table 2 : Three waves of Marxism

The methodology employed by each wave of Marxism involves different relations between theory and practice. For classical Marxism theory dictated to practice : theory determined the inevitable collapse of capitalism and rise of socialism, so practice was only affected by knowing where one was in the historical trajectory. For Soviet Marxism practice – national survival at all costs – dictated to theory. Marxism was a thinly disguised ideology of the ruling party state. Sociological Marxism abandons theoretical certainties and practical imperatives and seeks instead to achieve a balance or dialogue of theory and practice. The point is not only to change the world now that we have understood it, but also to change it in order to understand it better. We search out real utopias that can galvanise the collective imagination but also interrogate them for their potential generalisability (see Burawoy and Wright 2002).

If classical Marxism offered a universality based on flawed laws of history, and Soviet Marxism offered a universality based on a singular dictatorial regime, sociological Marxism offers us no guarantees, only an eternal search and reconstruction, a universality that is always contingent, created from the concrete with the help of the abstract (see Hall 1986).

Toward a Global Marxism

To some, sociological Marxism is an oxymoron – after all, classical Marxism dismissed sociology as bourgeois ideology, and if Western Marxism borrowed from sociology, especially from Weber and Freud, it was not to elevate the idea of civil society. Gramsci himself was dismissive of sociology as concerned only with the spontaneous and thus the trivial. [8]

Why now sociological Marxism ? Simply put, sociology's credentials as critic of marketisation and statisation are unquestioned. Whether we turn to the writings of Weber or Durkheim, Simmel or Michels, Elias or Parsons, Habermas or Bourdieu, the critique of economic reductionism and instrumental rationality is central. Perhaps the state might have been seen as a potential or partial neutraliser but today that possibility seems to have evaporated. As the state seems to be ever more in thrall to the market, the defense of an independent ‘civil society' seems to become all the more necessary. The problem, however, with sociology – and we might say the same of Gramsci and Polanyi – is that the notion of ‘civil society' was contained within national boundaries. Today, we have to give the idea a transnational scope.

Marketisation – the commodification of labour, money and nature – is affecting all parts of the planet. No one escapes the tsunami, although some are able to mount more effective dykes. On the face of it, there needs to be a global solution but here we should proceed carefully as solutions can turn out to be as bad as the problem they seek to fix. What could be worse than a planetary totalitarianism, constituted in the name of preventing destruction of the environment. We might be better off knitting together national solutions that centre on society. However, here again we see problems as the state of societies is very different : in South Africa it is fissiparous, in China it is precarious, in Russia it is gelatinous. In every country we need to reconnoitre the trenches of civil society, map out the relations between society and state, society and market. Only in that way can we better understand the possibilities for global connections. Only in that way can we better understand the possibilities for real utopias.

As we think about a global civil society, we must also think of a global Marxism, that is, a Marxism that transcends but also recognises national and regional configurations. If first-wave Marxism was national in scope, and second-wave Marxism was regional (Soviet, Western and Third World), today we have the possibility of a Marxism that still recognises nation and region but also encompasses pressing experiences shared across the world, albeit unevenly. And if first-wave Marxism projected socialism as a utopia guaranteed by laws of history, and if second-wave Marxism became a ruling ideology, justifying socialism as Stalinism – utopia-become-dystopia – then third-wave Marxism constructs socialism piecemeal as an archipelago of real utopias that stretch across the world, attracting to themselves populations made ever more precarious by third-wave marketisation. The Marxist becomes an archeologist digging up alternatives spawned and wrecked by the storms of capitalism and state socialism.

{{}}Finally, and most ominously, we face the creation of another fictitious commodity, one that Polanyi never anticipated – knowledge. We live in a world where knowledge is ever more important as a factor of production, whose production and dissemination is ever more commodified. The university, once a taken-for-granted public good has become a private good subject to the dictates of the market. Students become fee-paying consumers in search of vocational credentials that guarantee them little but lifetime debt, faculties are diced and spliced into the casualised labour of teachers and researchers, non-academic staff are outsourced while administrators become highly paid managers and corporate executives. The university that cultivated citizens for a democratic polity and produced knowledge to solve societal problems, is being transformed into an instrument of the short-term demands of capital at the very time its contributions to the survival of the planet are most needed. The struggle for the university becomes a struggle not just for its own survival ; it has a central role to play in any countermovement to third-wave marketisation, a possible Modern Prince for the defense of modern society.

References

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[1] There have, of course, been other periodisations of Marxism, but most offer a story of collapse. Thus, Lichteim (1961) traces the birth and rise of Marxism and then the fall after the Russian Revolution. Writing in the aftermath of the European upsurge, Anderson (1976) focuses on the rise of a classical Marxism, followed by the retreat of Western Marxism into philosophy as it lost touch with its revolutionary mainspring. Kolakowski (1978) describes Marxism's fall from grace with the rise of the Soviet Union and Western Marxism, followed by its final degeneration with the student movements of the 1960s. Note that all these classic accounts were written before the collapse of communism, whose existence was taken for granted.

[2] Harvey identifies the wave of marketisation with accumulation through dispossession, a necessary accompaniment to commodification which Marx had only seen as part of the pre-history of capitalism, what he called primitive accumulation.

[3] Naomi Klein (2007) offers a magnificent panorama of capitalism's capacity to exploit the crises it generates through processes of primitive accumulation.

[4] Polanyi argues that it is the extreme form of dispossession (disembedding) that leads to working-class revolt whereas later historians, most notably E.P. Thompson (1963) argue that it was the strength of tradition founded in the skilled crafts, in other words a pre-formed working class, rather than its destruction, that accounted for mounting mobilisation.

[5] As regards the contradictions of the state socialist economy, see two non-Marxists : János Kornai (1992) and Alec Nove (1983).

[6] I refer here to a broad genre of works that would include Althusser (1969, 1971), Miliband (1969), Poulantzas (1973) and Williams (1961).

[7] I have developed this complementary relation in Burawoy (2003).

[8] In this regard Gramsci's critique of sociology applies especially well to Polanyi's invocation of ‘society' as a deus ex machina. For Gramsci, society or ‘civil society' is something that organises but is also organised by specific social and political forces.

La sociologie contre le marché

Michael Burawoy — 2014-08-15T04:00:00Z

Sommaire

La marchandisation du monde

La sociologie contre le marché

Les sociologues-experts contribuent à l'élaboration de politiques qui s'orientent du côté de l'État contre le marché en utilisant ce qui reste de l'autonomie de l'État pour réguler les forces du marché. Dans les pays du Nord de l'Europe, où l'on dénote un héritage permanent de politiques et de prestations d'aide à tendance sociale-démocrate, cette approche est sensée.
Les sociologues académiques rappellent l'importance de fonder leur discipline sur des bases scientifiques fermes avant tout usage pratique. Pour eux, c'est en pataugeant d'emblée dans des mers tourmentées que l'on découvre l'impossibilité de nager. Les sociologues académiques peuvent comprendre les dangers de la marchandisation généralisée, mais ils attendent patiemment que l'orage passe en gardant espoir qu'il n'ait pas balayé avec lui le reste de la société.
Les sociologues critiques s'opposent aux deux groupes précédents en dénonçant les déviances morales de leurs prédécesseurs, en se plaignant notamment de ceux qui agissent de concert avec l'État et le marché, ainsi que de ceux qui s'activent à écrire des articles scientifiques. Les sociologues critiques sont en diminution. Tout comme les sociologues académiques, ils vivent en communautés isolées, cherchant à préserver leur pouvoir critique, agissant comme si leurs mots avaient le pouvoir d'arrêter les tempêtes à distance. Néanmoins, leur message est souvent incompréhensible et peu écouté.
Les sociologues publics refusent de collaborer avec le marché et l'État. Ils affirment que la science sans les politiques est aveugle, tout comme la critique sans l'intervention est vide de sens. Ils s'engagent directement dans les communautés, institutions et mouvements sociaux, en écoutant et s'exprimant, en observant et en participant, en apprenant et en écrivant afin de défendre la société contre la marchandisation qui sévit. La troisième vague de marchandisation appelle l'avènement de la sociologie publique. La sociologie publique semble répondre à un besoin réel aujourd'hui, mais elle ne peut aller de l'avant qu'avec l'héritage des sociologies experte, académique et critique. Sans le savoir sociologique accumulé dans notre discipline – et présenté dans ce livre –, la sociologie publique ne peut exister. La sociologie publique dépend également du savoir critique qui préserve l'honnêteté des savoirs académiques, l'éloignant de l'insignifiance et de l'auto-référentialité. En même temps, le savoir critique insuffle à la sociologie publique des valeurs et des orientations qui motivent son engagement auprès des publics. La sociologie publique n'existe pas si elle ne peut contribuer au changement social. Elle ne peut alors faire fi de l'expertise. Elle peut l'examiner du dehors, la poussant dans des directions appropriées, s'opposant aux tentations de l'exercice du pouvoir. La sociologie publique doit être la conscience de la sociologie experte.

La Grande Transformation

La troisième vague de marchandisation

Les trois vagues de sociologie

Tableau 1 : La sociologie contre le marché

{{}}	Première vague de marchandisation	Deuxième vague de marchandisation		Troisième vague de marchandisation
« Marchandise fictive » prédominante	Travail	Argent		Terre (« nature »)
Lieu de réponse prédominant	Local	National		Mondial
Droits dominants protégés	Du travail		Du social	De la personne
Orientation dominante de la sociologie	Utopiste et critique		Experte et académique	Publique
Mouvement dominant de la pensée scientifique sociologique	Spéculatif		Positiviste	Réflexif

Conclusion

Bibliographie

Hanafi S. (2011), « University Systems in the Arab East : Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally », Current Sociology, vol. 59, n° 3, pp. 291-309.

Polanyi K. (1983 [1944]), La Grande transformation. Aux origines politiques et économiques de notre temps, Paris, Éditions Gallimard.