CONFLICT THEORY:
(OR THE ART OF MAKING S** T
HAPPEN!)
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
PART ONE:
A QUICK REVIEW OF STRUCTURAL
FUNCTIONALISM
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
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Introduction to sociology lecture slides on social conflict theory topic. The theory is also known as Marxist Theory or jsut conflict theory
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CONFLICT THEORY:
(OR THE ART OF MAKING S** T
HAPPEN!)
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
PART ONE:
A QUICK REVIEW OF STRUCTURAL^ FUNCTIONALISM
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
PREVIOUSLY...
- (^) Divisions of Sociological Theory (Macrosociology vs. Microsociology)
- Four Foundational Theories (Structural Functionalism, Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, Weberian Theory).
- Structural Functionalism: various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve an important (or necessary function in society) - Antecedents: Auguste Comte (positivism), Harriet Martineau (feminist and translator of Comte), organicism (medical framework used as logic for Structural Functionalism). - Émile Durkheim (first practitioner of positivist science)
PREVIOUSLY...
- Émile Durkheim:
- (^) Industrialization shifted the bonds of solidarity from a mechanical solidarity (based on similarities and affect) to an organic solidarity (based on increased specialization of labor and growing interdependence).
- anomie: the sense of aimlessness and or despair (helplessness emanating from the absence of predictability in social life).
- (^) social facts: objects of study involving any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint, or which exists in society independent of its own individual manifestation.
STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM: LIMITATIONS
- (^) tends to accept status quo; no concept for social change
- built on belief that any given institution or phenomenon exists because it is functional for society
- fails to recognize inequalities in the distribution of power and resources and how those inequalities affect social relationships.
- fails to recognize race, class, and gender (and sexuality), which threatens social integration and gives rise to conflict.
PART TWO:
CONFLICT THEORY
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
SOCIAL CONFLICT THEORY
- aka Marxist Theory; Conflict Theory
- Arises in the 1960s as a response to structural functionalism.
- (^) Expansion of sociology in 1960s — central to “radical sociology” that attempted to accommodate class struggles, urban unrest, and various social movements.
- (^) THRUST: Conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force behind social change
- competition-driven (along all levels of society)
- (^) inequality exists as a political struggle against groups
- not all interests are shared, but rather they may be irreconcilable
KARL MARX
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) The Communist Manifesto (with Frederich Engels, 1848) Capital (1867 - 1894)
- (^) The conditions of industrial capitalism has alienated the worker from his labor.
- Four types of alienation:
- Alienation from the products of labor.
- (^) Alienated from the process of their labor.
- Alienated from their bodies and human potential.
- (^) Alienated from each other.
- Four types of alienation:
- We are all alienated from our labor. Those who own private property are able to use their wealth as a smokescreen to ignore their alienation.
THE BOURGEOISIE
- The bourgeoisie has collapsed a once complex, multi-classed system into two
categories:
- (^) p. 474, first full paragraph:
“In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.”
THE BOURGEOISIE
- The bourgeoisie has collapsed a once complex, multi-classed system into two categories:
- p. 474: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppressions, new forms of struggle in place of old ones. “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”
THE BOURGEOISIE
- (^) They move to consolidate power.
- Their pursuit of profits transform relations into market relationships that transform workers into commodities.
- p. 475: “It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
THE BOURGEOISIE
- They act out to create their world in their own image.
- (^) p. 476: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle, everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.. .” “All old national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations,” but industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are being consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.”
SOWING SEEDS TO THEIR OWN DESTRUCTION
- (^) The conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie are being undermined by the same forces that created the bourgeoisie in the first place. - Overproduction - The creation of the proletariat class (the proletarians).
ALIENATED LABOUR
- (^) p. 479: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all of its individual character, and consequently, all of the charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is not only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and the propagation of his race.”
THE PROLETARIAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
- p. 479: “The less skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more of less expensive to use, according to their age or sex.”
- Given your reading of Schlosser, would you agree here?
ALWAYS AT BATTLE
- p. 480, first full paragraph: “With [the birth of the proletariat] begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them.”
PART FOUR:
THE LEGACY OF CONFLICT THEORY
Sociology 1101: Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2021
LEGACY OF CONFLICT THEORY
- Critical Theory (aka The Frankfurt School; neo-Marxism)
- (^) Feminist Theory
- Postmodernism
- (^) Queer Theory
- (^) Critical Race Theory
SOCIAL CONFLICT THEORY: ADVANTAGES
- (^) praxis: practical action that is taken on the basis of intellectual or theoretical understanding.
- instrumental in understanding the rapid changes taken place during the 20th Century.
- (^) helpful in understanding both macro-level social issues (e.g. systemic racism and sexism) and also micro-level personal interactions (e.g. bosses and employees) FUNCTIONALISM VS. SOCIAL CONFLICT
- Crime and Deviance
- FUNCTIONALISM: Society defines crime to reaffirm people’s beliefs about what is right and dissuade them from deviating.
- (^) SOCIAL CONFLICT: Behaviors labeled criminal or deviant are defined by the dominant groups in society, because they have the power to do so.