What is Politics - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download What is Politics - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology What is Politics? What is the State I. Introduction Marxists have always held that the state plays a pivotal role in sustaining the class domination of ruling classes. Without the intervention of the state, especially its repressive interventions, the contradictions between classes would become so explosive that bourgeois domination could hardly survive for an extended period. The state, nearly all Marxists insist, fulfills an essential function in reproducing the class relations of capitalist society. This general approach can be called a class-centered functional view of the state. In one form or another it has been the core of traditional Marxist state theory. 1. BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE This kind of functionalist argument was a central part of the thesis in classical Marxism that the state was part of the “superstructure”. I do not want to dwell on this classical view, since it is not widely supported in contemporary discussions (at least in this form), but it is worth briefly explaining its logic. What is a Superstructure? 1. Superstructures support bases: without superstructures bases would collapse. 2. G.A. Cohen’s image: a roof holding up the struts. Without the roof, the struts fall down. 3. Bases explain superstructures: The explanation for the presence of the roof is the need to hold up the struts. The base explains functionally the form of the superstructure: the state exists and takes the form that it does because it is necessary to reproduce class relations. 4. Superstructures are not epiphenomenal: they have tremendous effects. This kind of explanation is called a functional explanation. We already encountered this kind of explanation in the brief discussions of race & class and gender & class. Since we will encounter it several times in the rest of the semester so it is worth giving it a little more attention now, Docsity.com 2 2. FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATIONS 2.1 The structure of functional explanations A functional explanation is an explanation in which the beneficial effects of a structure are an important part of the explanation of the structure itself. The classic examples come from biology: Q. Why do birds have hollow wings? A. Because these are necessary if they are to fly. Q. Why do giraffes have long necks? A. Because this enables them to eat the leaves of the acacia tree A consequence of something helps to explain its existence. One of my favorite examples in sociology is Mallinowski’s famous explanation of fishing rituals among the Trobriand islanders: Rituals occurs because they have the effect of reducing fear. The explanation of rituals is via their consequences. Since this reduction in fear is beneficial to the community, we can say that there is a functional explanation of the occurrence and persistence of rituals. Functional diagram of Mallinowski’s functional explanation of Trobriand islanders fishing rituals (from Art Stinchcombe: Constructing Social Theories): Fishing rituals Anxiety and fear in open-sea fishing Objective Danger of open-sea fishing Docsity.com 5 II. Basic Concepts for understanding politics & the state In this first lecture we will try to clarify the basic conceptual terrain that will be used throughout our discussions of politics and the state. Four interconnected concepts are particularly important: 1. politics 2. political power 3. domination 4. the state. These concepts are all hotly contested. The definitions which I will offer, therefore, should not be viewed as reflecting a general consensus within contemporary Marxism. Indeed, in certain respects, what I will have to say by way of definition is not even distinctively Marxist in that these definitions could be adopted within quite nonMarxist substantive arguments. 1. POLITICS 1.1 Practice. In order to define “politics” we must first define the concepts of “practice” and “political practice”. Practice is defined as human action analyzed in terms of its transformative effects on the world. This does not imply, it must be emphasized, that social action is no more than objective, transformative effects or that the subjective meanings of the actors are irrelevant to understanding action. Indeed, as we shall see, one of the critical issues in contemporary Marxist discussions is the relationship between conscious political practice -- those practices in which the subjective meanings are political as well as the objective effects -- and the unintentional political aspects of other kinds of practices. The point is that the subjective state of the actor is not part of the very definition of political practice. 1.2 Political Practice. What then is political practice? I will define political practice as human social action that transforms social relations. This is to be contrasted with: economic practice which transforms nature (into use-values) and ideological practice which transforms human lived experience (into subjectivity). 1.3 Reproduction as Transformation. “Transformation” is an encompassing term in these definitions. A social practice that reproduces a given social relation, which maintains it in a given form, would also be considered a political practice. A reproductive political practice, in a sense, transforms a social relation into itself. The assumption underlying this characterization of reproduction is that: Social relations never continue simply out of pure inertia. This is especially true in cases where social relations contain inherent antagonisms of interests (or what can be called contradictions); such relations do not continue unchanged simply by existing. Reproduction of antagonistic social relations should be viewed as an active process of blocking certain specific kinds of transformations. The implication here is that an antagonistic social relation like that of class exploitation requires specific processes for its maintenance, otherwise it would be transformed through struggle. Docsity.com 6 1.4 Type vs Aspect of Practice. In discussions of political practice it is important to distinguish the political aspects of social practices in general from political practice as a type of practice. To speak of the political aspects of any social practice (eg. the political aspects of economic practices) is to discuss the ways in which a given practice reproduces and transforms social relations, even if those transformations were not intended by the actors. To speak of political practice as a type of practice, on the other hand, implies that the intention of the actors is to produce such transformations. Actors are conscious subjects and may take social relations as the intentional object of their actions. Politics, then, is the term we use when discussing interactions among political practices in which the political aspects are intentionally pursued by the actors. 1.5 Multiplicity of Types of Political Practice. Understood in this way, politics can be identified with every type of social relation: ! gender politics produce and reproduce gender relations; ! classroom politics produce and reproduce the relations between teachers and students; ! class politics produce and reproduce class relations. Even if there are reasons to treat class politics as particularly central to understanding large scale social changes, it is incorrect to identify politics as such with class politics or to treat all other types of politics as simply reflections of class politics. It is also incorrect, under the definition of politics as interactions among conscious political practices, to restrict politics to the “public sphere”. Politics occurs within families and other intimate relations in the private sphere as well as factories, schools, and, of course, the state itself. What is more, it is a political question, not one given once and for all by the social relations themselves, precisely where the boundary between the public and private -- and thus the public and private spheres of political practice -- is drawn. While there may be good reasons in the study of politics to focus on the public arena of the formal “political system”, especially the state, the theoretical domain of politics is much broader than this. This definition of politics and of political practice is considerably broader than that implicit in many Marxist analyses. Sometimes the analysis of politics is restricted to practices oriented to the state; other times to practices that take political power or domination as their object (rather than transformations of social relations in general). Under such more restricted definitions, if one could imagine a society without a state, and certainly if one can imagine a society without domination, then there would be no politics as well. The withering away of the state, to use a venerable Marxist slogan, would also signal the withering away of politics. In the definition which I have offered, politics is an intrinsic feature of human social life, and while the hypothesized withering away of the state would certainly radically transform the terrain on which political practices occurred, politics as such would continue. If anything, one might expect, politics would loom larger in the daily life of average people, since the conscious Docsity.com 7 transformation of social relations would no longer be primarily delegated to experts and politicians but would be a central feature of everyday practices. 2. POLITICAL POWER 2.1 Power in General. All practices of whatever sort involve “power”, i.e. capacities to produce the transformations specific to the practice. “Economic power” in these terms refers to the capacity to transform nature, political power to the capacity to transform social relations, and ideological power to the capacity to transform subjectivity. 2.2 Instrumental & structural power. The expression “capacity to transform” has both an instrumental and structural meaning. The instrumental meaning is the simplest. To say that a particular individual or group has a great deal of political power is to say that they effectively control a variety of resources which enables them to effectively transform social relations. These resources constitute the “means of production” of political practice and the conscious use of those means of production to accomplish transformations is what we have called “politics”. In addition to this instrumental meaning of political power, however, it is important to specify a sense in which a group can be structurally powerful politically even if the individuals in the group do not consciously wield instruments of political power. This occurs when the unintended political aspects of social practices reproduce or transform social relations in ways which serve the interests of the group in question. For example, as we will see in more detail later, the economic practices of capitalists have systematic political effects. The patterns of investment and disinvestment impose constraints on the political choices of all groups in the society and thus deeply shape the possibilities of transforming social relations even if capitalists do not use their investments consciously as political weapons. Of course, capitalists may also use investments as a conscious political instrument -- as when investment strikes are consciously used to shape state policies. This would be an instance where economic power is being deliberately used to inhance political power. But even apart from such instrumental political uses of economic power, the control over investments by capitalists gives them structural political power. 2.3 Means & efficacy of Instruments of power. In analyzing any type of power, whether it be economic, ideological, political, it is important to establish both what constitutes the principle means of transformation used within the practice in question and the determinants of the efficacy of those means of transformation. This way of talking is most familiar in the case of economic power. Economic power is the capacity to produce transformations of nature: The “forces of production” constitute the means of production deployed in such practices, and the efficacy of those forces of production is defined largely by their technical productivity. The economic power of an individual or class thus depends both upon the extent to which it monopolizes the means of production -- the property rights -- and the productivity of the means of production which it controls. Docsity.com 10 practices of one person or group rather than over relations. Should this, then, still be viewed as an instance of political power? To say that A gets B to do something B would not otherwise do is to say A has the capacity to reproduce a particular social relation between A and B, a relation within which B will act in the proscribed way. The sanctions at A’s disposal are precisely what defines the relation between A and B, and A’s power (capacity) consists in preventing B from escaping that relation (this is what transforming a relation is). To say that a manager dominates workers by being in a position to force them to do particular tasks (which they otherwise would not do) is a shorthand for saying that workers are unable to transform the relation within which they must obey their bosses and that the costs to the individual worker of trying to escape the relation are greater than staying in it. This does not imply that workers are powerless within this relation, since they are formally free to quit and that they can collectively resist the domination of the boss in various ways. But they are, nevertheless, dominated situationally in so far as their capacity (power) to determine their specific activities within production are less than the capacity of their bosses.] 4. THE STATE 4.1 General definition. Domination is not just a problem of interpersonal relations as the metaphor of A getting B to act in particular ways suggests. Domination is inscribed in social institutions of various sorts. This is crucial, for it is the institutionalization of domination that makes it stable over time. The state, in these terms, is: (1) the most superordinate, (2) territorially centralized (3) institution of domination in a society. Political power may be unequally distributed within many arenas of social life -- in the family, in the factory, in the community. Each of these may be sites of domination. To the extent that these specific sites of domination in a given territory are themselves dominated by a centralized apparatus, that apparatus can be called a “state”. 4.2 Contrast with Weberian definitions and some Marxist definitions. This definition of the state is somewhat at odds with conventional definitions in both the Weberian and Marxist traditions. Weberian definitions of the state typically define the state as an apparatus which “monopolizes the legitimate use of force” over a territory. The definition above does not assert either that the state state monopolizes violence nor that its rule is legitimate. To be sure, it may well be the case that states generally do more or less successfully monopolize violence over a territory, and also that this monopoly of violence is generally viewed as legitimate by at least a significant part of the population (and certainly by the personnel of the state itself). But neither of these seems to me to be essential to the very definition of the state. Docsity.com 11 The essence is domination in territorially centralized institutions; it will be variable the extent to which that domination rests of violence and is legitimate. The definition is also somewhat at odds with most Marxist definitions, since it does not explicitly insist that states are apparatuses of class domination, but just political domination. While I in fact believe that states are apparatuses for class domination for reasons we will explore in subsequent chapters, I do not think that this should be built into the definition of the state itself. Rather it is a proposition which has to be argued on independent grounds. The basis for the argument revolves around the relationship between economic power and political power, and thus political domination. It is not, however, logically entailed by the very concept of the state. 4.3 Variability in the degree of stateness. Defining the state as the superordinate, territorially centralized apparatus of domination implies, as Pierre Birnbaum has suggested, that historically, empirical “states” vary in their degree of “stateness”. That is, they vary in both the extent to which domination is in fact territorially centralized, and in the extent of the domination that is so centralized. High levels of stateness occur when there are high levels of domination and territorial centralization; low levels exist where there are either high levels of relatively autonomous decentralized domination (eg. in feudal states) or low levels of domination altogether (eg. in radically democratic political systems). This is the sense in which genuine “democracy” as a social principle of the exercise of political power is anti-statist, and the radical extension of democracy as envisioned in classical Marxist theories of the revolutionary socialism in fact signals at least a partial dissolution of the state (i.e. a reduction of the stateness of state apparatuses). Important implication: the withering away of the state does not equal the withering away of politics and does not necessarily imply the withering away of domination 5. STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY The meaning of any theoretical object is shaped by other concepts with which it is contrasted. In the case of political practice, these contrasts involve the distinction between political, economic and ideological practices. In the case of the state itself, the contrast that is frequently introduced in Marxist discussions is between the state and what is called “civil” society. The concept of civil society is a particularly vague one in many discussions. Generally it is used to refer to those aspects of social life that have what could be termed strictly external relations with the state. That is, they exist autonomously from the state, have their own mechanisms of reproduction, but in various ways interact with state apparatuses. Primary examples of social relations “in” civil society are social networks of various sorts, secondary associations, what are loosely called communities, and families. Docsity.com 12 Critics of the state/civil society dichotomy have argued that because the state has become more and more implicated in everyday life, in production, accumulation, the family, and so forth, it no longer makes any sense to imagine a sphere of social relations constituted independently of the state. All aspects of social relations have internal relations with the state proper and therefore should not be analytically separated into a distinct sphere. These criticisms, in my judgment, conflate the important fact that all social relations and practices have political aspects with the problem of distinguishing the state as a specific apparatus from other institutional arenas in a given territory. In the terms of the definition of the state elaborated above, the state/civil society distinction hinges of the existence of arenas of political practice in which, at a minimum, situational power is not exercised by the state or state officials. If the state exercises situational domination throughout the society, then the state is not simply the most superordinate territorially centralized organization of domination; it has become the only organization of domination. This is the image embodied in the concept of the totalitarian state: the state directly penetrates all sites of social practice. So long as this is not the case, then there remains sites of political power, struggle and initiative -- sites of politics -- that cannot be subsumed under the state as such. This is what is meant by civil society. Docsity.com