Weber’s work, thus, encouraged social scientists to talk about class divisions in non-antagonistic ways. Social class was analyzed along a continuum - upper class, middle class, and lower class - without any notion of exploitation or conflict among these groups.

God this pisses me off so much. Its been a while since I’ve studied Weber, so I don’t remember if this is an accurate representation of his views, but this notion just fucking sucks.

Basically, she presents class as something that is not real. Class, when reduced to “upper, middle and lower” under capitalism, is an entirely aesthetic definition. Under feudalism, upper, middle and lower were real classes, wherein the upper class were those who owned land, the main form of wealth and representation of production, the middle class neither owned nor worked the land, but were free, and often educated and literate (guilds men, bureaucrats etc) and the lower class, who worked the land and were not free (peasants, slaves, serfs). This is a real distinction defined by the relationship of people to ownership of land.

But under capitalism, these terms are completely meaningless in terms of telling us what someone does for a living. A capitalist and a famous athlete, for example, are both upper class, despite one working for their wages and the other exploiting the labour of others. A doctor might be middle class, but they might also be upper class depending on how rich they are. A lot of people won’t even say the words “lower class” or “poor”, instead saying “working class”, completely bastardizing the term as an innuendo for poor, because they feel uncomfortable acknowledging that there are poor people.

So what makes one upper, middle, or lower class under capitalism? Whatever you think. Most people want to think they’re middle class, especially those who make significantly more than the average person (ie, people who make 100,000+ a year but are embarrassed to call themselves rich). Being middle class is about taking two vacations a year abroad, or having a laundry room, or having two cars and 2.2 children, or eating a fancy meal twice a month. Feeling middle class is being middle class. Being lower class is living in a “working class area”, not being able to afford a good house, struggling to pay bills. More material than middle class, but still nothing of value. Being upper class is anything between a proletarian making 80,000 dollars a a year in their tech job, and Elon Musk. The divisions are undefined and ever changing - the difference in upper, middle and lower class is only ever a cultural attitude.

So when Bodie says that Weber encouraged social scientists to examine society on a basis of upper, middle and lower class, you should disregard the word “scientist” from their job title, because there is nothing scientific about this approach. They analyse vibes and prestige aesthetic, which can never be proven or disproven, therefore it is impossible to say that they are definitively wrong. Nothing about the upper-middle-lower class model is based in material, provable, measurable reality, which is the realm where science tends to take place.

This is not a social science at all; it is pure idealism

For liberals, the “problem” with marxism is that Marxism ignores the superstructure of society and only looks at the base. They will then point to the existence and influence of the superstructure as a refutation of Marxism.

I have literally never seen a liberal ever even comprehend the idea that the superstructure of a society is shaped by its base. That is what Marxism actually is. Do they think Marx did not understand gender, racial or religious discrimination? Or course he did. He talks at lenght about these things.

Some of Marx and Engel’s most famous texts, like “the origin of private property, the state and family”, for example, studies the emergence of the patriarchy.

But he does so from a material standpoint. That is what grounds his analysis at every point.

We must understand that the value of the Marxist philosophical project is that it is never content to simply accept the existence of things as they are by relying on notions of some “human nature”, “god”, or any such ideological nonsense.

It is similar to how you cannot truly understand how computers work, in all of their intricacies, without understanding how a transistor works. Liberals are people who refuse to acknowledge the transistor. For them, their computer is the magic box which dispenses treats.

As a poli sci major, there are two broad camps of people in the field, when it comes to Marxism.

First are the people who do shit you’re complaining about, where they “refute” Marxism without understanding a Damn thing about it.

And then there are the people actually doing Marxist analysis. The people actually doing Marxist analysis are mostly comparativists in the subfield of political-economy (Yes, it still exists, just as a sub-field of a sub-field of poli sci).

And the way these groups interact is the first group nods their heads in agreement with the Marxists. But only so long as it’s called “political economy” and not Marxism. The minute you call it Marxism, they start trying to tear it down, even when they were just agreeing with it, five minutes ago.

It’s always the exact same middle-school reading of Marxism, holy shit. Somehow none of these experts figures there’s something wrong with comparing an inflammatory political pamphlet for a party and a fully fleshed out technical publishing.

I wonder why these geniuses never criticize the actual technical works Marx did 🤔 it’s ALWAYS just the manifesto for a party, and that’s it.

Anyway, a rule of thumb: this person doesn’t take their own work seriously, so I’m not gonna take their work seriously either.

Oh Christ. JANINE FUCKING BRODIE?

I have personal beef with this woman. She’s one of those liberals that will repulse you from becoming a liberal, purely based on how up their own ass they are.

e: corrected her professional name

My issue with figures like Weber and Foucault and Bourdieu is that, to varying degrees, they don’t just obfuscate class analysis but they actively mystify it by turning it into something abstract.

One of the greatest ways that people, whether big figures in academia or the media or just laypeople, strawman Marx is by beginning from the presumption that Marx sought to detail every little thing in political economy and then they proceed to do things like going “Aha! Marx was a fool for he did not account for the individual who draws exactly half of their income by being employed and the other half from owning some sidehustle business. He doesn’t even have a name for a person who straddles his so-called classes. Ridiculous!” or “Aha! Marx failed to account for the fact that power exists outside of people’s relationship to the means of production. How shortsighted of him!”

But the thing is that Marx took a systemic analysis. He wasn’t trying to create special little titles for each minor graduation between proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie/bourgeoisie. He wasn’t particularly concerned with how an individual might straddle these categories because ultimately it doesn’t bear much relevance to his analysis whatsoever. Likewise he didn’t go into great detail about gender relations under capitalism because he was occupied with the system itself and in writing volumes of Capital.

I don’t think that Marx ever argued that his analysis of capitalism was the Theory of Relativity for political economy. When it comes to sociological matters there’s always going to be edge cases and odd little intricacies that cannot be accounted for in the way that a hard science can (mostly) do. That’s because people are complex and societies are astoundingly elaborate. There’s plenty that can be gained from understanding things outside of what Marx wrote and even from looking beyond Marx’s model, sure, but at the end of the day class conflict is the engine of society and it determines how we structure our lives and our world.

Real “If you ignore all the things that cause the gender pay gap, the gender pay gap goes away” energy.

Marx was not intersectional as we would call it today because he existed before 3rd. Wave Feminism. However, he absolutely included things like oh, I don’t know…literal fucking slaves? as part of the proletariat.

We’re gonna need a bigger re-education camp.

Edit: okay I was being facetious but I’ll serious post. No, slaves aren’t technically proles. I was just going in a blind rage over this person essentially calling Marx “class reductionist” (without using that term because it’s a communist one) when the dude was literally an abolitionist at a time where chattel slavery wasn’t seen as morally abhorrent.

It’s such a bad-faith interpretation I can only assume the author and the prof who recommended them are deeply unserious people. They are classist, asshole, professional managerial personnel. It’s like “I’m speaking” manifested into a peer-reviewed study from pseudo-intellectual academic snobs with degrees from the reputable school of wherever the fuck.

The author portrays an evolution of social and economic theory that passes from Marx to Weber to Foucault. In other words, Marx without Lenin. The tactic is diversionary rather than disinformative. Insofar as you will discuss Marxism, it will be in the context of critiques of Marx made by academics operating in capitalist countries. I don’t mean to say that Weber’s or Foucault’s theories are entirely wrong headed, just that as long as you are occupied with them you will be ignoring the strains of Marxist theory that have underpinned any actually successful Marxist political project.

If you want to pick nits though, this passage made me squint:

Democratic government was the result of a political revolution of a new class-the commercial and industrial capitalists or, as Marx called them, the bourgeoisie.

Here the author is stating without citation that Marx believed democracy was achieved by bourgeois revolution. Big if true. Perhaps a certain kind of democracy within a certain class? Where did Marx make this claim?

I agree with everything @wrecker_vs_dracula@hexbear.net said. However, I also want to add this.

Social theory is more fun for academics than economic theory, but economic theory is actually where most social theory stems from. Even Foucaoult and Weber do not discount the real affect of the material base on the superstructure, but rather attempt to document the changes and reactions within the superstructure, that in turn partially influence the base, but are not driven by it. That being said, the more esoteric, and narrative-driven the claim, the more likely you will be cited and used in undergrad classes (like this particulsr essay!). Nobody wants to be the professor that assigns pricing tables and labor value calculations to the poly-sci students. They’ll just cheat anyways.

It is also very clear that the good doctor is engaging in an Western academics conception of Marx, maybe having read one or two books by Marx, maybe a book by Engels, and maybe a compilation by another Western academic or sociologist who specializes in Weber, or maybe even Weber himself. But it is pretty clear she is on the whole unfamiliar with what Marx actually said about things, as Marx himself was not a vulgar materialist or even a materialist determinist, but rather felt that all good political economic analysis has to start at the base, and can only proceed from there, as the economic base is the primary driver that either rewards or punishes individual or cultural ideological shifts.

After-all Marx advocated struggling against the current form of production to create a new one, he clearly believed in the ability for the base to be altered by the superstructure, just that the base has to exist to reward the new superstructure that comes into being or else it will wither and die. You can’t just start a utopian commune in capitalism and expect it to remain unaltered by the capitalist mode of production, which will inevitably alter the superstructure to something that can be used by capitalism.

A search for the essay online shows that it’s meant to be an introductory social science text for undergrads. This explains why it’s not written with the expectation that it will have to present arguments. It’s good enough for Brodie to say “such and such writer was very important, but another writer disagrees.” It doesn’t do the work of properly explicating theoretical disagreements between thinkers, because that’s not the goal.

Your professor is gripped by what Friere called the “banking model” of education, wherein the job of the teacher is to simply deposit information into students so it can be retrieved later. I think you’re fine to just tell them “I am aware of the existence of Weber. He’s wrong.”

The starkly oppressive conditions of the emerging industrialization had been somewhat improved,

THEY SAID THE LINE!!!

broader historical contexts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism

later thinkers expanded on Marx’s original ideas to include intersectional critiques, read Settlers etc. etc.

Prestige could involve things as intangible as tastes and patterns of consumption that are socially valued, such as driving a Mercedes or being a celebrated athlete, a hip-hop artist, or a movie star. This kind of social power, while not entirely unrelated to social class, is not reducible to economic relations alone.

“Prestige could also involve things as intangible as… driving an expensive car or being a multimillionaire, things that can be seen as distinct enough from any economic relations such that I can use this as proof that gommunism stoopid.”

Cope-ine Brosciencedie is reaching new heights of mental gymnastics.

I need help putting words to my issues with it.

I read the first screenshot and was going to ask: how do you deal with nonsense like this? Looking forward to hear other people’s answers.

I just can’t get my head around where to start with rubbish like this. How do you even broach the subject when the subject is: ‘you published an academic article criticising Marxism on the basis of whatever you thought it was in a dream because you clearly haven’t read any Marx except maybe you misunderstood the Manifesto on the bus to college as a hungover undergrad because the editors and reviewers were equally illeducated; luckily for you, you are repeating the same thing that everyone else who hasn’t read Marx also believes so you are likely in for a lucrative career’.

Ok, so on one hand you have Marx’s analysis of class, and on the other hand you have a more granular examination of power from Foucault. These don’t seem like they’re mutually exclusive, just examinations at different two very different scales. But the way how it’s written it almost comes across like the author thinks they are? I don’t know Foucault at all, though; im only going off of how he’s being summarized here.

I’m not the brightest crayon in the box but is it just me or does Doctor Brodie somehow make politics and power some sort of vague, unsolvable mystery?

This is typical of a lot of liberal analysis. There aren’t any conclusions to be drawn, just devastating questions to ponder, and by reading about & pondering them without getting anywhere you are a good little intellectual deserving of treats. Every article I see about corporate malfeasance in The Atlantic or NYT has this exact same goes-nowhere style.

Calling Marx an economic determinist is like calling Newton a physics extremist: he just called it as he saw it, man.