Week 7: Durkheim and Marx on social change

Durkheim
Traditional > modern society via increased density of population and interactions which become more varied in urban settings- many different crafts, specialisation (see also Simmel on this)

Division of labour: mechanical to organic. Simple societies with little differentiationof activities to complex socs. with diverse interactions and skills e.g. the production line, globalisation

Change: the division of labour becomes abnormal- rewards non-commensurate with output e.g. celebrities, company directors in the current period. Unemployment: people cannot exercise their skills or aptitudes.

Anomie: consequence of the abnormal division of labour. Individual not recognised socially, lack of integration. Crime, suicide etc. Durkheim sees the role of the division of labour as one of social integration and hence crime and suicide rates are indicators of whether the division of labour is performing its integrating function


Marx
The capitalist mode of production: forces and relations of production

Capitalism, class and social polarization- increasing wealth and poverty, side by side. E.G. Third World as a manufacturer for the West.

transformation of urban society: ‘All that’s solid melts into air’ Capitalism is a dynamic system, ever changing, sweeping away tradition, everyday life etc. E.g. the Docklands development in what was an East London working class community (Poplar) based on the docks for employment (see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, for a discussion of this aspect of capitalism)

social crisis: overproduction- wages are driven down in the search for profit hence workers cannot become consumers fast enough to absorb all the products. Solution: world markets, globalisation- search for markets globally. ‘Capital batters down all Chinese walls‘ (Communist Manifesto).

Human consequences: Self-making individual becomes distorted by the needs of capital, unable to realise their potential, a cog in the system. The vampire analogy: (dead) capital feeds off the living labour of the proletarians: ‘the more it sucks, the more it lives’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p.224). The greater the capital, the less the human...capitalism leads to alienation and diminution of well-being. Elsewhere capital is a spectral presence that haunts our everyday activities by turning them into commodities e.g. leisure is sold to us (no longer ours!), downloads from the Internet are paid for although Internet communication is ‘free’, and so on. Hence our everyday lives are increasingly commodified. Marx sees our relationship to the social world as fetishistic, it is a sense that we are increasingly controlled by the world that we create and we can’t grasp it as a process, see how it came about. (Capital, Vol. 1, p.77)

fetishism of commodities - ideology Although workers produce the world they live in it looks as if capital produces them i.e. that it is in control.

Change: contradictions produce a confrontation, a class struggle leading to the abolition of capitalism and the class of owners.