Marxism and Realism

A Materialistic Application of Realism in the Social Sciences

Sean Creaven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138565395
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134562206
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book rethinks Marx's sociology as a form of realist social theory, extending Roy Bhaskar's philosophical realism into the social sciences. By constructing historical materialism as realist social theory, it becomes possible to resolve many long standing dilemmas in Marxist discourse, such as voluntarism versus determinism and humanism versus economism.

1 Critical realism and Marxism

The tasks of Marxism in philosophy and social analysis

In the Introduction to this book I have briefly set out the case for a realist (or emergentist) ontology of the social world and those theoretical and methodological perspectives which are consistent with it. This has been accomplished by presenting the conceptual and methodological defects of the more influential misadventures in social theory of recent years (i.e. individualism, holism and elisionism in their various guises) and by showing how analytical models rooted in sociological emergentism overcome these.

So it is that individualism fetishises the subject by placing him or her prior to the ensemble of social relations which are necessary to explain his or her thinking and conduct (e.g. Weber’s attempt to grasp social institutions in accordance with his typology of the value-orientations and ends of social action). So it is that holism reifies social relations by endowing these with powers of reason, intentionality and agency by virtue of which individuals are mere ‘bearers’ of their teleological or functional ‘needs’ (e.g. Parsons’ ‘system imperatives’ of adaptation, pattern-maintenance, goal attainment and integration). And so it is that elisionism de-centres both the social-structural and organismic-subjective properties of society – by treating these as ‘two sides of the same coin’ of social practices or routinised interaction – and in so doing locates the ‘over-plastic self in a world devoid of objective material constraints (e.g. Blumer’s and Giddens’ collapse of subject, society and nature into inter-subjective relations). Thus the burden of my critique so far has been to demonstrate that reductive-conflationary social theory in all its forms is inadequate, because it is an abstraction from the multilayered complexity of social reality and from the irreducibility and causal efficacy of its constitutive emergent strata.

In contrast to these ‘simplifying manoeuvres’, which seek to render social analysis less daunting by squeezing its object into a uni-dimensional space, the task of sociological emergentism is to grasp society as a ‘differentiated totality’, as the resultant of a plurality of generative mechanisms operative at different levels of the social and natural worlds. This implies a definite form of theory and method. Structural analysis will not alone suffice, because structural properties are reproduced and elaborated only by virtue of social interaction, and these systemic outcomes are by no means determined in advance of interaction. The problematic of ‘interaction’ or ‘praxis’ will not do either because the doings of agents are precisely ‘routinised’ or ‘structured’ in various ways by virtue of the existence of an objective social world, which from the point of view of every generation of people is ‘already made’. Nor can social theory make its appeal to subjects as its ‘ultimate constituents’, for although the individual is ‘author’ of his or her social behaviour, he or she is also forged in the space between physical, biological and social reality, and in this sense is the product of ‘a rich totality of many determinations and relations’.¹

It is this ‘Janus-faced’ nature of human-social reality which necessitates a methodological-theoretical approach which neither dissolves its hierarchically structured complexity nor simply reproduces a ‘chaotic conception of the whole’² in thought. For this reason I have argued that methodological dualism (the analytic abstraction of structure from interaction, and the analysis of the reciprocal effectivity of these strata over time in shaping systemic outcomes) and morphogenetic theorising (the activation or contextualisation of analytical dualism within a diachronic cyclical model of society, whereby anterior structural properties condition social interactions which in turn give rise to structural elaboration or reproduction) provide the sociologist with indispensable tools for the practical business of ‘doing’ research.

Yet realist social science is not fully adequate to the task its practitioners have set for it, of providing the theoretical and methodological tools for grasping the interface between the different strata which comprise the subject-matter of the human and social sciences. This is because scientific realism can only benefit from the incorporation of dialectical methodology into its analytical framework, in the absence of which it is necessarily incomplete or partial. Methodological realism investigates the ‘real object’ as follows. First, by moving from the concrete to the abstract (through finer and finer conceptual abstractions), proceeding in this way until its constituent elements or relations (which generate its manifold causal powers and empirical effects) are identified and delineated. Then, by retracing its steps until the ‘chaotic whole’ (concrete reality) is reconstructed in thought as a systematically ordered totality which distinguishes between its essential and inessential aspects and between its contingent and necessary relations with other objects.

Andrew Sayer summarises the approach as follows:

As a concrete entity, a particular person, institution or whatever combines influences and properties from a wide range of sources, each of which (e.g. physique, personality, intelligence, attitudes, etc.) might be isolated in thought by means of abstraction, as a first step towards conceptualising their combined effect. In other words, the understanding of concrete events or objects involves a double movement: concrete ⇒ abstract, abstract ⇒ concrete. At the outset our concepts of concrete objects are likely to be superficial or chaotic. In order to understand them we must first abstract them systematically. When each of the abstracted aspects has been examined it is possible to combine the abstractions so as to form concepts which grasp the concreteness of their objects.³

This is basically Marx’s method in Capital. Marx’s purpose here is to outline ‘a hierarchy of theoretical models, ascending by successive approximation from very abstract models representing the basic social forms present in modern bourgeois society up to fuller, more detailed models of this society’.⁴ Such an analytical approach is necessary for two reasons. First, because ‘concrete objects’ (and the structures which comprise them) are often unobservables. Second, because the empirical world (which is directly amenable to the senses) is the chaotic resultant of a plurality of generative mechanisms derived from various underlying structures, together with the multiple contingencies of their functioning in the open social system, and hence is a poor guide to the determinate causal powers of any of these structures.

Now, this method is already dialectical in the sense that it does not seek to decompose its objects of knowledge (unobservable structures or systems of structures) into ‘a chaotic collection of fragments … or a mere aggregate of unconnected happenings’,⁵ but instead attempts to grasp these as wholes of interconnected parts. The true is the whole’,⁶ as Hegel put it. And the whole can be grasped only by means of an analysis of the dynamic interplay of its parts, just as the parts can be understood only by examining their interplay with the whole, not least because the powers and characteristics of both are modified or even transformed by the interaction between them.

This method is also dialectical in the sense that it attempts to grasp objects or structures by differentiating between those elements or relations which define their essence and those which are simply contingent or phenomenal aspects of their organisation or functioning. Wholes have to be grasped as organic totalities, as Marx and Hegel both insisted, since this allows us to understand dynamic processes in terms of internally generated development. For example, it does not make any sense to define ‘value’ in abstraction from the relations between ‘many capitals’ and between employers and wage-labourers. The law of value can exist only by virtue of the internal and necessary social relations of commodity production, which in its turn gives rise to a specific pattern of economic motion (the boom-slump cycle, organic crisis, concentration-centralisation of production, etc.).

Finally, methodological realism is dialectical because its mode of operation is based foursquare upon ‘a dialectic between concept and fact’⁷ operative at each level of scientific inquiry. This is for the simple reason that the concepts which are applied to each aspect of a ‘unity-in-difference’ (the natural and social worlds) cannot be ahistorical givens or the product of a universal method, but must ‘be carefully scrutinised and grounded in the particular subject matter under investigation’,⁸ as the understanding of this is developed through the ongoing process of practical scientific activity, and the theoretical abstractions and methodological innovations which are derived from it. In other words, scientific realists, in common with Marx, recognise that science is ‘a dialectical process in the sense that its methods and concepts, as well as its theories, develop over time in dynamic interaction with one another and with the material world, allowing progressively more accurate descriptions of reality to emerge’.⁹ So, for example, the

various concepts of physics – such as mass, velocity and energy … did not arise automatically from experience, but were developed by a long and complex process of abstraction, and the same holds true for the very different concepts employed in cell biology or in meteorology or in any other area of science.¹⁰

Nonetheless there is one important way in which realist methodology neglects dialectics, and is the poorer for it. I refer to the failure of many contemporary scientific realists to acknowledge explicitly that dialectical thinking is necessary to scientific inquiry for the simple reason that the nature of reality demands it. Marx argues that dialectical thinking

includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of affairs, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historical developed … form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.¹¹

The basis for this view is Marx’s understanding, in common with Hegel, that objects or systems are often contradictory in themselves, invariably exist in relations of tension as well as compatibility with other objects or systems, and that it is this fact which makes historical change a possibility, whether in nature or society.¹²

As Hegel himself puts it, ‘contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only in so far as it contains a contradiction that anything moves’.¹³ The reason for this is simply that all processes of internal change or development to which structures or objects are subject are necessarily and simultaneously processes of self-cancellation and self-affirmation.¹⁴ This means that in order to understand the nature of concrete objects, one cannot simply examine the whole, nor its separate parts, but must instead study ‘the process of development through which the parts come to constitute the whole and, in doing so, become different than they were in their pre-existing form’.¹⁵

A dialectical method is therefore appropriate in scientific research because reality is dialectical.¹⁶ The basic idea is that if thought objects are to correspond to real objects which are dialectical they too must have a dialectical structure. Such a view is not in the least bit difficult to fathom and is entirely defensible. Consider the alternative. If reality is not dialectical there can be no impulse towards change in either nature or society; without contradictions as well as complementarities built into the structures of reality there can only be cyclical processes of simple reproduction or repetition at work in the world, not processes of molecular development interspersed by novel transformations.

Thus a non-dialectical worldview and method of cognition reduces the world to a dead collection of facts, devoid of life or movement; and it is this which is the basis of empiricist and theological views of unchanging ‘things-in-themselves’ as constitutive of the universe. Yet the proof of the necessity of a dialectical approach is precisely to be found in the historical development of scientific inquiry itself. For it can hardly be doubted that empirical science has uncovered ‘a world of dynamic, interconnected processes – processes which frequently involve elements which not only interact but are in conflict with one another, and thus give the system to which they belong an inherent tendency to develop’, and leading over time ‘to sudden radical changes in the system as a whole’.¹⁷ To admit of this however is to do no more than concede Engels’ basic argument: ‘Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished the proof with very rich materials, daily increasing’.¹⁸

By way of demonstration of the efficacy of dialectical method, I will consider a single example: the question of the appropriate analytical and theoretical tools for conducting sociological research. I have suggested that methodological dualism and morphogenetic theorising are indispensable for this purpose. This is true enough as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The basic morphogenetic model (of: structural conditioning ⇒ social interaction ⇒ structural elaboration/reproduction) is non-propositional as to why social systems ‘as a rule’ undergo continual change, even if the change is for the most part merely quantitative. Nor does it provide any overall guidance as to why social systems are sometimes transformed into different kinds of social systems with novel properties. This becomes a merely empirical question, contingent upon the precise characteristics of any given structure at any given point in time. Yet a voluminous output of historical research since the last war has revealed that specific kinds of structural mechanisms (specifically the interface between forces and relations of production and between social classes) have been deeply implicated in every major epochal transformation of social relations since the demise of the earliest preclass communities.¹⁹ Any collapse of social analysis, into the immediate process by which specific structural properties enter into and are reproduced or elaborated in a given society, is likely to lose sight of this elementary process.

In order to address issues such as these, it is necessary to grasp processes of societal change (whether molecular or macroscopic) as being animated by contradictions internal and necessary to social systems as preliminary to the empirical investigation of specific historical episodes or events. Dialectical thinking draws our attention to the fact that ongoing and thoroughgoing systemic change is a function of structural contradictions, which it is then the task of social analysis to identify and investigate. As John Rees puts it:

A dialectical approach seeks to find the cause of change within the system. And if the explanation of change lies within the system, it cannot be conceived on the model of linear cause and effect, because this will simply reproduce the problem we are trying to solve. If change is internally generated, it must be a result of contradiction, of instability and development as inherent properties of the system itself. Contradiction is, therefore, the form of explanation of how one type of … society succeeds another. … [But] it is only the form of an explanation, because the explanation itself will depend on the concrete, empirical conditions that obtain in each society. The exact contradictions and working out of these contradictions will vary accordingly.²⁰

By contrast, in the absence of a dialectical approach to structural dynamics, an account of social change can only be a theory of external causality (such as Parsons’ understanding of ‘structural differentiation’ as an adaptive strategy animated by extraneous ‘disturbances’ to the stable equilibrium of societies), or else a simple ‘just so’ narrative (which in effect collapses historical explanation into historical description).

A second ambiguity of the morphogenetic-static approach to socio-historical analysis is that, in insensitive hands, it can lend legitimacy to the peculiar idea that societies are static ‘moments’ or ‘points’ (of structural conditioning and structural elaboration/reproduction), interspersed by ‘processes’ of social interaction leading from one to the other. But this is simply not dynamic enough, even as methodology. For wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Critical realism and Marxism
• 2 Organisms, subjects and society
• 3 Subjects, actors and agents
• 4 Structure, power and conflict
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index