Marxist sociology

Study of sociology from a Marxist perspective

Statues of Marx and Engels in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Part of a series on

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Perspectives

* Conflict theory
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* Social darwinism
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Branches

* Aging
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* 1700s: Comte · Sieyès

1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias

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Part of a series on

Marxism
Outline

Theoretical works

* Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
* The Condition of the Working Class in England
* The German Ideology
* The Communist Manifesto
* The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
* Grundrisse
* Capital
* Critique of the Gotha Programme
* Dialectics of Nature
* The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
* What Is to Be Done?
* The Accumulation of Capital
* Philosophical Notebooks
* Terrorism and Communism
* The State and Revolution
* Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
* History and Class Consciousness
* Prison Notebooks
* The Black Jacobins
* On Practice
* Dialectic of Enlightenment
* A Critique of Soviet Economics
* The Long Revolution
* Guerrilla Warfare
* The Wretched of the Earth
* Reading Capital
* The Society of the Spectacle
* Pedagogy of the Oppressed
* Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
* Ways of Seeing
* How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
* Social Justice and the City
* Women, Race and Class
* Marxism and the Oppression of Women
* Imagined Communities
* Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
* The Sublime Object of Ideology
* Time, Labor and Social Domination
* The Age of Extremes
* The Origin of Capitalism
* Empire
* Late Victorian Holocausts
* Change the World Without Taking Power
* Caliban and the Witch
* An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
* Capitalist Realism
* Capital in the Anthropocene

Philosophy

* Alienation
* Dialectical materialism
* Ideology
* Philosophy of nature
* Philosophy in the Soviet Union
* Reification
* Marxist ethics

Critique of political economy

* Capital (accumulation)
* Crisis theory
* Commodity
* Concrete and abstract labor
* Factors of production
* Falling profit-rate tendency
* Means of production
* Mode of production
* Capitalist
* Socialist
* Productive forces
* Scientific socialism
* State monopoly capitalism
* Surplus product
* Socially necessary labour time
* Value-form
* Wage labour

Sociology

* Base and superstructure
* Bourgeoisie
* Class
* Class consciousness
* Classless society
* Commodity fetishism
* Communist society
* Critical theory
* Cultural hegemony
* Democracy
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Soviet
* Radical
* Democratic centralism
* Exploitation
* False consciousness
* Human nature
* Immiseration
* Imperialism
* Lumpenproletariat
* Metabolic rift
* Proletariat
* Private property
* Relations of production
* State theory
* Working class

History

* Class struggle
* Historical determinism
* Primitive accumulation
* Proletarian revolution
* World revolution
* Theory of historical trajectory

Aspects

* Aesthetics
* Archaeology
* Criminology
* Cultural Marxism
* Cultural Studies
* Ethics
* Film theory
* Geography
* Historiography
* Literary criticism
* Marxism and religion
* Sociology
* Philosophy

Common variants

|  Structural

* Autonomist
* Marxism–Leninism
* Guevarism
* Maoism
* Neo-Gramscianism
* Regulation school
* Third-worldist
* Titoism
* Trotskyism

Hegelian

* Budapest School
* Frankfurt School
* Humanist
* Neue Marx-Lektüre
* Open
* Praxis School

Both

* Black
* Classical
* Communization
* Feminist
* Leninism
* Neo
* Post
* Western

Other variants

* Analytical
* Austromarxism
* Hispanic marxism
* Centrist
* Eurocommunism
* Instrumental
* Marxism–Leninism–Maoism
* Nkrumaism
* Political
* Revisionist
* Situationist
* Socialism with Chinese characteristics
* Wertkritik

People

* Marx
* Engels
* Morris
* Lafargue
* Rubin
* Kautsky
* Plekhanov
* Du Bois
* Connolly
* Lenin
* Luxemburg
* Liebknecht
* Kollontai
* Stalin
* Trotsky
* Grossman
* Zinoviev
* Bloch
* Lukács
* Korsch
* Bukharin
* Ho
* Serge
* Gramsci
* Pashukanis
* Bordiga
* Benjamin
* Mao
* Basu
* Mariátegui
* Horkheimer
* Dutt
* Brecht
* Marcuse
* Kalecki
* Fromm
* Cox
* Lefebvre
* James
* Adorno
* Padmore
* Sartre
* Deutscher
* Beauvoir
* Sombart
* Nkrumah
* Sweezy
* Emmanuel
* Hill
* Bettelheim
* Draper
* Jones
* Hobsbawm
* Althusser
* Hinton
* Williams
* Freire
* Cunhal
* Lara
* Mandel
* Sivanandan
* Miliband
* Cabral
* Thompson
* Bauman
* Fanon
* Berger
* Castro
* Guevara
* Liebman
* Heller
* Guattari
* Mészáros
* O'Connor
* Wallerstein
* Mies
* Tronti
* Debord
* Amin
* Hall
* Nairn
* Parenti
* Negri
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* Dussel
* Harvey
* Laclau
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* Federici
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Journals

* Antipode
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Marxist sociology refers to the application of Marxist epistemologies within the study of sociology.[1] It can often be economic sociology, political sociology or cultural sociology. Marxism itself is recognised as both a political philosophy and a social theory, insofar as it attempts to remain scientific, systematic, and objective rather than purely normative and prescriptive. This approach would come to facilitate the developments of critical theory and cultural studies as loosely distinct disciplines. Marx himself has been considered a founding father of sociology.

The foundational basis of Marxist sociology is the investigation of capitalist stratification. An important concept of Marxist sociology is "a form of conflict theory associated with…Marxism's objective of developing a positive (empirical) science of capitalist society as part of the mobilization of a revolutionary working class."[2] The American Sociological Association (ASA) has a section dedicated to the issues of Marxist sociology that is "interested in examining how insights from Marxist methodology and Marxist analysis can help explain the complex dynamics of modern society."[3]

## Concepts and issues

[edit]

Marxist sociology is primarily concerned with, but not limited to, the relations between society and economics.[3] More specifically, key concepts in the sub-field include historical materialism, modes of production, and the capital-labour relation.[2] Marxist sociology is also concerned with the way in which police forces are used to control indigenous populations, enslaved peoples, and the labouring poor in the name of capitalism.[4]

Key questions asked by Marxist sociologists include:[1]

* How does capital control workers?
* How does a mode of production influence the social class?
* What is the relation between workers, capital, the state and culture?
* How do economic factors influence inequalities such as those relating to gender and race?
* What role do police play within Marxist socialism?

Within theoretical field, Marxist sociology is recognized as one of the major sociological paradigms and is associated with conflict and critical theory. Unlike Marxism and Marxist philosophy, Marxist sociology has put relatively little weight on creating class revolution,[1] pursuing instead the development of an objective, politico-economic study of society rather than a critical philosophy of praxis.[2] As such, it may be understood as a field of economic sociology.

The study of "socio-nature" emerged from this line of thought. Socio-nature is "a concept that is used to argue that society and nature are inseparable and should not be analyzed in abstraction from each other."[5]

## Historical development

[edit]

References for this section:[1][2][6]

Influenced by the thought of Karl Marx, Marxist sociology emerged around the turn of the 20th century. The first Marxist School of sociology was known as Austro-Marxism, of which Carl Grünberg and Antonio Labriola were among its most notable members.

Much of the development in the field occurred on the outskirts of academia, pitting Marxist against "bourgeois" sociology. For some time, this division was reinforced by the Russian Revolution that then led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Soon, however, sociology found itself a victim of the suppression of "bourgeois" science within the Soviet Union. While, after several decades, sociology was reestablished in the Communist states, two separate currents of thought evolved within Marxist sociology:

* Soviet Marxism: a Marxist-Leninist school that developed under 20th-century Communism (primarily the Soviet Union) to serve state interests. The school was heavily influenced by Marx's theory of historical materialism.
* Western Marxism: a Marxist school centered on the studies of Marxism in the West. It would become accepted within Western academia during the 1940s, and would subsequently fracture into several different perspectives, such as the Frankfurt School (critical theory)

Due to its former state-supported position, there has been a backlash against Marxist thought in post-Communist states (e.g. sociology in Poland). However, Marxist sociology is still dominant in sociological research that is sanctioned and supported by remaining Communist states (e.g. sociology in China).

## List of Marxist sociologists

[edit]

* Benedict Anderson
* Perry Anderson
* Giovanni Arrighi
* Zygmunt Bauman
* Himani Bannerji
* Michael Burawoy
* Simon Clarke
* Oliver Cox
* W. E. B. Du Bois
* John Bellamy Foster
* Paulo Freire
* Erich Fromm
* Antonio Gramsci
* Stuart Hall
* John Holloway
* Max Horkheimer
* Bob Jessop
* Boris Kagarlitsky
* Henri Lefebvre
* Marcel Liebman
* Michael Löwy
* Maria Mies
* Robert Miles
* Ralph Miliband
* Antonio Negri
* Evgeny Pashukanis
* Nicos Poulantzas
* Gillian Rose
* Göran Therborn
* Lise Vogel
* Immanuel Wallerstein
* Erik Olin Wright

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b c d Johnson, Allan G. (2000). "Marxist sociology". The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology: A User's Guide to Sociological Language. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 183–184 Marxist sociology at Google Books. ISBN 0-631-21681-2.
2. ^ a b c d "Marxist Sociology". Encyclopedia of Sociology. USA: Macmillan Reference. 2006.
3. ^ a b Jipson, Art. 2013. "About the Section on Marxist Sociology." American Sociological Association. Retrieved on April 21, 2020. Archived 2009-01-09 at the Wayback Machine
4. ^ Correia, David, and Tyler Wall. 2018. Police: A Field Guide. Brooklyn: Verso Books. ISBN 9781786630148.
5. ^ Bear, Christopher (2017-03-06), "Socio-Nature", in Richardson, Douglas; Castree, Noel; Goodchild, Michael F.; Kobayashi, Audrey (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 1–5, doi:10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0212, ISBN 978-0-470-65963-2, retrieved 2021-08-06
6. ^ Bottomore, Tom B. 1991. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (2nd ed.) at Google Books. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18082-6. p. 505–08.

## Further reading

[edit]

* Tom B. Bottomore, Marxist sociology, Macmillan, 1975
* Martin Shaw, Marxist sociology revisited: critical assessments, Macmillan, 1985

## External links

[edit]

* ASA section on Marxist sociology
* About the Section on Marxist Sociology
* Lucien Goldmann, Is There a Marxist Sociology?, International Socialism, Autumn 1968

* v
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* e

Sociology

* Outline
* History
* Timeline
* Index

General aspects|

* Public sociology
* Social research
* Social theory
* Sociological theory
* Sociological practice

Perspectives|

* Conflict theory
* Critical theory
* Structural functionalism
* Positivism
* Social constructionism
* Social darwinism
* Symbolic interactionism

Related fields
and subfields|

* Anthropology
* Comparative sociology
* Criminology
* Cultural anthropology
* Demography
* Historical sociology
* Industrial society
* Marxist sociology
* Political sociology
* Rural sociology
* Social anthropology
* Social movements
* Social psychology
* Sociolinguistics
* Urban sociology

| Sociology of|

* art
* body
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* culture
* death
* deviance
* disaster
* economics
* education
* emotions
* environment
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* health
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* Internet
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* peace, war, and social conflict
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* technology
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|

Major theorists|

* Sieyès
* Comte
* Martineau
* Tocqueville
* Marx
* Spencer
* Le Bon
* Ward
* Pareto
* Tönnies
* Veblen
* Simmel
* Durkheim
* Addams
* Mead
* Weber
* Du Bois
* Mannheim
* Elias
* Fromm
* Adorno
* Gehlen
* Aron
* Merton
* Nisbet
* Mills
* Bell
* Schoeck
* Goffman
* Bauman
* Foucault
* Luhmann
* Habermas
* Baudrillard
* Bourdieu
* Giddens

Methods|

* Quantitative
* Qualitative
* Comparative
* Computational
* Ethnographic
* Conversation analysis
* Historical
* Interview
* Mathematical
* Network analysis
* Social experiment
* Survey

Key themes|

* Society
* Globalization
* Human behavior
* Human environmental impact
* Identity
* Industrial revolutions 3 / 4 / 5
* Popularity
* Social complexity
* Social environment
* Social equality
* Social equity
* Social power
* Social stratification
* Social structure
* Social cycle theory

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