The Psychology of Social Class, by Maurice Halbwachs

[p020] ~The Psychology of Social Class, by Maurice Halbwachs (Heinemann, 16s.) Maurice Halbwachs was without doubt a staunch defender of academic and scientific freedom, and so met his death in Nazi captivity during the second World War. Along with the dominant school in. French sociology (the followers of Emile Durkheim) he thought that the intellectual could arrive at an objective, scientific view of society by being uninvolved, ‘above the struggle.’ © crystallized as a separation between the individual and some ‘supra-individual’, social mentality, expressed in what’ were called ‘collective representations.’ These were sets of dominant attitudes or values standing outside the individual. As a con- sequence, the work of the Durkheim school is often dry, formal, abstract, with neatly trimmed symmetries between social organization and the dominant categories of thought. This has often appealed to Marxists as something very close to Marx’s own views of ideology and of the relation between ideas and social existence (e.g. V. Gordon Childe,-and to some extent George Thomson). In point of fact nothing could be farther from the truth. For Marxism the dominant factor in the relationship. between knowledge and ‘social being’ is the activity of red] men, in their contradictory relationships, on the basis of the material conditions in which they find themselves. Halbwachs comes nearer to this than any other member of the French school in -his detailed studies of the objective needs of the working class One of the ingredients of this view finally . and in the volume under review. But he shares the proclivity of so many of his colleagues: they scarcely mention Marx, and yet most of their own most penetrating ‘insights’ are little more than a re-hash of Marx’s own theories. Somehow, how- ever, these insights are ‘disembodied’, polished up and presented as self-contained pieces of cleverness, never as part ot the living whole of social conflict. Thus, instead of a study of the consciousness of the working class as expressed in struggle and in development, testing out theories and parties, developing its own forms of power, we have a formal ‘hierachy of needs’ according to which one may accurately predict the things workers will put first when presented with alternatives. Certainly it is important to know precisely the meaning of insecurity and financial. position for the working class, but these have scientific meaning only when they take on practical significance for the creation of a revolutionary consciousness, a prerequisite of which is an accurate understanding of the working class’s own real situation. Thus Halbwachs, like all ‘progressive’ non-Marxist sociologists, can give us, very often, accurate and penetrating comments ow class attitudes (though, as has been indicated, many of these are far trom original) and yet it is in considering the working class as a force in history, rather than as a sociologist’s specimen, that he falls short of scientific analysis. This is precisely the contribution of Marx to sociology, and it is the transition from abstract formalism to the unity of theory and practice. C. SLAUGHTER Soviet Finance