SATURD

sition to socialism.

Thus:

'This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and acceptance of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question in a practical way, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyists (those who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable Philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiated the dictatorship of the proletariat. . • • 'Opportunism does not carry the recognition of class struggle to the main point, to the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, to the period of overthrow and complete abolition of the bourgeoisie."

What is essential here, therefore, is to see that Marx's theory of class and class struggle is not a theory only of the structure and function of society, a way of explaining a given social order, after the manner of orthodox sociology, or even of the classical political economists.

It is, on the contrary, that section of Marx's theory which scientifically reflects the process by which 'the whole thing is smashed up'. It is concerned with the creation, consolidation and rendering more or less conscious, of the forces which effect the political changes necessary to abolish the classes made redundant by the development of production and place another class power.

The classes which are ch Mate writes about are definite, historically necessary, organs of an historical mode of pro(' Lenin, "The State and Revolution'.) quasi-groups have any members!

Schumpeter tells that, •... The ultimate foundation on which thé class phenomenon rests consists of individual differences in aptitude.' Even though Schumpeter refines this definition by qualifying aptitude as 'socially necessary, he only thereby renders it tautological, since it turns out to be a matter of aptitude for being in the given classes.

Contrast

There is here a stark and obvious contrast with the Marxist insistence on the historical - economic 'ultimate foundation' of classes, to which individual aptitudes conform through the division of labour and all the institution of the superstructure.

The spate of studies of "social mobility, particularly those concerned with the working class, show very clearly that bourgeois sociology accepts the class structure as 'given'. It does not go beyond the naive 'realism' of the American sociologist Cooley:

•... the relation between the employing and handlabouring classes is first of all a matter of personal attitudes' Lipset and Bendix in 1959 were able to conclude similarly:

(" Lenin, A Great Beginning, 'Collected Works', Vol. 29, p. 421.)

(3 Schumpeter, 'Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy'.)

(* R. Dahrendorf, 'Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, Routledge, 1959, p. 179)

.. the cumulation of disadvantagés at the bottom of the social scale is in large part the result of a lack of interest [!] in educational and occupational achievements's Talcott Parsons, always the most explicit of sociologists in his rejection of the claim for objectivity made by Marxism, proposes instead a starting-point justified on the purest pragmatic grounds. (It can be said in general that behind the mountainous 'theoretical' and abstract constructions of Parsons always stands the crudest pragmatism, in the philosophical sense. One reason why this goes unrecognized is that pragmatism itself is not seen as the basically 'subjective' philosophy which Peirce, James and Dewey made of it, whatever their differences.)

Marxism Parsons puts aside Marxism is a basis for examining the ole of ideas in society because ts explanations are almost uniformly couched in genetic, historical terms, as the Marxist theory itself is, and analytical generalizations as to the role of ideas cannot in principle be proved or disproved by such a method'.® KARL MARX origin and development in given struggle of material forces. That it should be this very historical 'specilicness', materially determined, which is the key to the 'role of ideas, is beyond the range of Parsons' 'conceptual apparatus.

The real result of the apparent 'value-neutrality' and refusal of any "philosophical' assumptions is to embrace an idealism which repeats the assertions of Schumpeter that reality is essentially a matter of what the observer decides.

KAUTSKY

But Parsons goes further, and transfers these subjective notions into the centre of the social reality under observation. For example, having decided to concentrate on the moral aspect of stratification, Parsons takes up the objection that this procedure might be involved. The normal reaction to a conspicuous error in ranking is at least in part one of moral indignation-either person thinks he is "unjustly"

disparaged by being put on a level with those who are really his inferiors, or his real superiors feel "insulted" by having him, in the relevant aspects, treated as their équal."

It is difficult to know where to start, so complete is the conceptual confusion: the words 'applicable' ', 'ordinary' "normal, "conspicuous error' "really, and 'real superiors? all refer precisely to what needs to be demonstrated, and not at all to some universally agreed reality. To paraphrase Marx's rhetorical question: if the social reality is directly reflected in the consciousness of the actors, what then is the need for social science?

The purpose of this digression is to indicate that the philosophical assumptions of sociology, even where they assert themselves, as in the vast majority of cases, through the mechanism. of proceeding without examining in any way what one's assumptions are, affect fundamentally the categories and criteria of selection and significance of what is called 'the empirical data'.

Compare and their implications are an essential basis for defining the working class, but no less essential is the actual struggle of the working class against the domination of these laws and produced by their opera'In the ordinary run of things,' writes Marx in 'Capital', 'the labourer can be left to the natural laws of producDirect force, i.e. the coercive force of the state, is used 'only exceptionally, when the proletariat through its struggle resists the dehumanizing effects of these laws of capitalist production in such a way as to threaten capitalist rule. Only social revolution can end the relation of wage-labour sold as a commodity to But the struggle towards this revolution has resulted at times in reforms, partial victories. A Marxist could not write a 'sociology' of class structure and class conflict without critically analysing these actual efforts of the oppressed classes to become something other than what their oppressors make them. ictory Marx, for example, describes the factory legislation of 19th century Britain as a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of the bourgeoisie.

This view was part and parcel of his notion of the working class as a force which would conquer its own emancipation and in the process abolish itself and class society.

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