The Marxian emphasis upon relations and contradictions within a totality yields, when property executed, a unity of analysis and synthesis. The initial response of the social scientist trained in the bourgeois framework of thought is to misinterpret this simply because of the difficulty posed by the relational and dialectical way of proceeding…
In the first place, disciplinary boundaries make no sense whatsoever from the Marxian standpoint. The technical division of labor is obviously necessary but its social representation is to be rejected. But at this point the Marxian challengers encounter a peculiar difficulty. We live in a world in which the bourgeois framework for organizing knowledge is hegemonic. Individually, we must appear expert in some discipline and to some degree conform to its rules if we are to be listened to or even to gain employment.1 The Marxian challenge has therefore to be mounted within the existing framework for knowledge which makes it appear that there is a ‘Marxist sociology’ or a ‘Marxist economics’ when in truth there is just Marxian analysis and that is that. The Marxian challenge thus attempts to be subversive of all disciplinary boundaries.
In the second place, Marx did not disaggregate the world into ‘economic’, ‘sociological’, ‘political’, ‘psychological’, and other factors. He sought to construct an approach to the totality of relations within capitalist society. There are many aspects of this approach which are problematic, however, and there are plenty of controversies within the Marxian tradition as a consequence. There are various schools of thought (including one which is very ‘economistic’ and ‘reductionist’) as well as a variety of good and bad works in the Marxian tradition. Obviously, it is difficult for the bourgeois social scientist to discriminate between the various schools of thought and the good and bad work; from outside they tend to all look alike. It takes great patience and a fair amount of sophistication to wade through the mass of Marxian argument, and on the first run-through the bourgeois social scientist is quite naturally going to hang onto the bourgeois categories to try and make sense of things. The inevitable result is misinterpretation. Consider, for example, the controversy within the Marxian tradition over the relations between ‘the economic base’ (comprising the ‘productive forces’ and the ‘social relations’ of production) and the ‘super-structural’ forms of politics, ideology, “consciousness, law, institutions, and the like. The arguments here are myriad and complex, but the one reduction which is disasterous for preserving the integrity of the Marxian meaning, is to equate the ‘economic base’ in the Marxian theory with the ‘economic factor’ as bourgeois social science typically treats it. The similar-sounding phrases express quite different meanings.2
—David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 2001, 2012 Routledge edition, pp. 90-91
Perhaps the clearest explanation of the concept of totality has been given by Bertell Ollman: ‘Few people would deny that everything in the world is related to everything else—directly or indirectly—as causes, conditions, and results; and many insist that the world is unintelligible save in terms of such relations. Marx goes a step further in interiorising this interdependence within each element, so that the conditions of existence are taken to be part of what it is’ (Ollman 2003, 139). Ollman makes his case in highly abstract form, but it can be concretised. Take ‘international relations’ or, to be more precise, take one of the subject areas which is discussed under this disciplinary head- ing: the relationship between the nation-state system (a ‘part’) and capitalism (the ‘whole’). As I have argued elsewhere, it is possible to work through the mediations from the two basic components of the mode of production, the exploitation of wage labour by capital and the competition between many capitals, to the nation-state system without reductionism, or recourse to theories of either historical contingency or intersecting but separate logics (Davidson 2016, 187–220).
—Neil Davidson in Historical sociology and world history: uneven and combined development over the longue durée, edited by Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin, Sussex University 2016, p. 35
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1. “I am particularly sensitive to this problem on a number of counts. My employment prospects are almost entirely enclosed within the professional framework of geography; yet my colleagues in this field typically dismiss my work as ’not geography’, but political economy, sociology, and the like. But I do not possess the professional credentials to be considered a bona fide critic in these fields. I notice, for example, that Social Justice and the City was not thought worthy of review in that prestigious Chicago-based journal of sociology. And I have also come to recognize that no matter what I do, the work of Castells poses a far more serious challenge to sociologists simply because it is a challenge mounted from within the field and a challenge which seems to demand a reconstitution of that field of study.
2. “Some of the best insights on this can be gained from a careful reading of Ollman (1971).” [Ollman, B. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge]
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