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Neomarxism and Inequality

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Neomarxism and Inequality 31º Encontro Anual da ANPOCS, de 22 a 26 de outubro de 2007, Caxambu, MG ST 33: Teoria Social: a atualidade brasileira Neomarxism and Inequality Manuela Boatc ă, Ph.D. Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (KU) / IUPERJ, Brazil 2 Introduction From among many Neo-Marxist approaches, several strands of dependency theory as well as the more recent world-systems analysis have tackled the issue of social inequality as one to be analyzed on a global level, thus viewing class struggle as a conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy (rather than social strata within a state). Consequently, they have been among the first ap- proaches to radically critique classical notions of social inequality, by insisting that the nation-state was not the appropriate unit of analysis at which inequality relations are shaped. However, both perspectives have struggled with their marginal position within mainstream social theory and were thus unable to permanently influence the theorization of social inequality. Recent strands of postcolonial theory, especially the so-called Latin American modernity/coloniality perspective, have best incorporated the correctives formulated by the two neo-Marxist perspectives. The paper argues that the creative synthesis between postcolonial social theory on the one hand, and dependency and world-systems analysis on the other repre- sents one of the most promising models for assessing global inequality – both struc- turally and historically. To this end, I focus on the impact which the replacement of the standard conceptualization of inequality as social difference – largely premised on a class structure in a national context, with the one of colonial difference – cen- tered on the reorganization of differentiation criteria along racial and ethnic lines in European colonies as part of the inequality structure of the modern colonial world- system – exerts on the scope of theories of social inequality. It is argued that, by means of this apparent conceptual twist, both Latin American decolonial thought and Indian subaltern studies systematically factor race, ethnicity, and regional origin (alongside the classical dimensions of class, status, or social milieu) in the analysis of inequality relations and thus manage to account for the global consequences which the expansion of Western modernity has had for the hierarchization of races and of systems of economic, political, and religious organization both in the West (across the historical variability of the term) and in non-Western areas. 3 1. Challenges of the European self-image In terms of delimiting the starting-point of modern epistemology, both the hu- manities and the social sciences have long appropriated the 16 th century Copernican revolution in astronomy as indicator of a more general paradigmatic shift, to be re- peatedly used both as a metaphor for and as a marker of the modern world view (Tarnas 1997: 552). To Sigmund Freud, the Copernican turn was the first one of the three severe blows that “the universal narcissism of men” (Freud 1955: 6f.) had suf- fered at the hands of the researches of science: the initial cosmological blow dealt to the human self-love by the realization that the Earth was not the center of the uni- verse had been followed by the biological blow inflicted on humanity’s claim to divine descent by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, and completed by the (arguably) most wounding, psychological blow incurred by Freud’s own discovery of the unconscious, attesting to the fact that “the ego is not master in its own house” (Freud 1955: 11). Freud’s insight itself was considered a turning point in the intellectual devel- opment of modernity. For philosopher and psychologist Richard Tarnas, it marks the systematic engagement with processes of alienation that had begun with the Coper- nican turn as the actual onset of modernity – what he calls, and I quote, “modern hu- manity's birth out of the ancient-medieval, cosmic-ecclesiastical womb” (Tarnas 1997: 552). The cosmological alienation thus experienced was seconded, in Tarnas’s view, by the ontological one manifest in Descartes’ schism between the conscious human subject and the unconscious material universe and, finally, by the epistemo- logical one inherent in Kant’s recognition of the human mind’s subjective structuring of reality (Tarnas 1997: 525). Such hallmarks of modernity as the isolation of the modern ego in a disenchanted world, the Cartesian program of domination over na- ture and the derived notion of science as empiricism are therefore collectively traced back to the displacement of humanity from the cosmological center and the various levels of alienation stemming from it. From the point of view of postcolonial theory, this portrayal of the epistemo- logical trajectory of Western thought fails to account for another severe blow to the modern self-consciousness: the European “discovery” of America. While, as Walter Mignolo has pointed out, the limits of known geography had until that time coincided with the limits of humanity (Mignolo 2000: 283), both the material reality and the con- 4 cept of the New World emerging in the long sixteenth century called for a New (physical and cognitive) Geography that would extend humanity to the space of the colonized. As a result, there evolved a vast array of delimitation strategies situating the Others of the modern Occident on the lower ranks within the hierarchies of race, ethnicity, systems of belief, socio-economic organization, and methods of labor con- trol that would determine the relationship between the old and the new world and shape their respective self-definitions for centuries to come (Quijano/Wallerstein 1992, Mignolo 1995, 2000). 2. The Problem. Sociology of Inequality as a Case Study In labelling this breach in the European self-perception the geopolitical blow to Occidental narcissism, I contend that it was through its systematic omission from among the prerequisites of global inequality that the categories of analysis the Euro- pean social sciences have used for the study of social reality could claim universal relevance. Accordingly, the main challenge on the way to a social theory that will be both transcultural and “cosmopolitan” (Randeria 1999, Santos 2005) lies in “unthink- ing”/“indisciplining” the present theoretical models so as to make them reflect the im- pact that the geopolitical displacement of the 16 th century has had on European thought categories. The European modernity’s repertoire of promises is usually drawn from key moments in Western history and their symbolic role within a linear trajectory that, af- ter the “overcoming of feudalism”, only features positively connoted entries: the Ren- aissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Indus- trial Revolution thus embody the attainability of the humanism, rationality, equality, scientificity and progress. The ideals thus postulated consequently became the crite- ria by which the gradual reduction of social inequalities – the guiding principle of ra- tional social organization – should be measured. For the theorization of social ine- quality, this meant fitting Karl Marx’s theory of class antagonism and Max Weber’s complementary three-layered model of social stratification along the lines of class, status and party to the entire world. Thus a one-size-fits-all model was posited in which inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, religious denomination, age, and sexual orientation represent “new” categories, the theoretical importance of which has only 5 gradually and reluctantly been acknowledged by mainstream social science toward the end of the twentieth century. It was however only in the past decade that this classical notion of social ine- quality, derived from a unilinear understanding of social evolution, has been de- nounced as “methodological nationalism” (Smith 1995, Beck 2004, Heidenreich 2005). Besides, the criticism was triggered by research in apparently unrelated fields: On the one hand, ever more studies on gender issues have been arguing for the ne- cessity of factoring race, ethnicity and regional origin in the analysis of gender dispar- ity (Becker-Schmidt 2003, Klinger/Axeli-Knapp 2005), thus pointing to the insuffi- ciency of the standard dimensions of class, status, educational level, and religious denomination for explaining social inequality. On the other hand, dependency and world-systems studies that situate inequality on a global level and view class struggle as a conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy had long cautioned against positing nation-states as the unit of analysis for inequality relations, as do current stratification models which attempt to explain inequality in terms of the class- and status-derived categories of social milieu, life style and everyday life con- duct. 2.1. Dependency Theory Arising in Latin America in the early 1960s in reaction to the failure of the United Nations’ economic program to promote development, and the modernization school’s inability to explain the ensuing economic stagnation in the region, it started by taking a neo-Marxist position in explaining social change in developing countries. As such, it claimed that modernization theories represented nothing more than a cold war “ide- ology disguised as science” (Dos Santos 1971: 236) and was used in order to justify the intervention of the United States in Third World affairs. Understood by many as a continuation of and/or counterpart of earlier theories of “imperialism” (Giddens 1989, Portes 1976) as proposed by Lenin and J.A. Hobson, dependency theory addressed the issue of imperialism from a standpoint usually ig- nored by orthodox Marxism: that of the subordinate nations or of “the periphery” (Prebisch 1950). Thus, dependency theorists characterized modern capitalism as a center-periphery, (i.e. asymmetrical) relationship between the developed, industrial- ized West and the underdeveloped, agricultural Third World. Understanding this rela- tionship was, in their view, not an issue of mapping the transition from “traditional” to 6 “modern” – a distinction which the dependency school rejected.
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