Race, Ethnicity, Nation, and Class Within Theories of Structure and Agency
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Social Justice Spring-Summer 1993 v20 n1-2 p82(22) Page 1 Race, ethnicity, nation, and class within theories of structure and agency. by Edward J. McCaughan An inadequate comprehension of the relationship between social structure and human agency has caused a failure to understand the conflicts among race, ethnicity, nation and class. Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Lacan are among those who theorized on structure and agency. Theorists of the 1980s, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin, have helped to expand understanding of the influences of race, ethnicity, class and nationalism. © COPYRIGHT Social Justice 1993 to the contrary. African-Americans, Lations, and Korean-Americans in Los Angeles were the main CULTURAL HOMOGENIZATION AND THE protagonists in racially and ethnically charged reactions to UNIVERSALIZATION OF "WESTERN" VALUES AND last year’s verdict in the Rodney King case. Malcolm X’s behavior were presumed by liberalism and Marxism alike legacy has been embraced by a new generation of to be among the component results of "progress."(1) American Blacks. The aggressive, even violent, defense of Differences, and therefore conflicts, historically rooted in white, middle-class, male privilege has gained new class, racial, ethnic, or national structures, were gradually legitimacy in the U.S. and England after the extensive to fall behind, obsolete and exhausted by the long, efforts of Reaganism and Thatcherism to reconstruct inevitable march forward. Modernization theories, national political culture. The nations of the former Soviet hegemonic in North American social sciences and state bloc are splintering into apparently ever more hostile, often policy in the 1950s and 1960s, forsaw a linear progression, ethnically-based territories. The threat of racially and at home and abroad, toward a broadly "middle class" ethnically driven fascism is again a reality in much of consumer society in which the market and Europe. The Germans and French are increasingly liberal-democratic institutions would erode class, racial, polarized over the issue of non-European immigrant and national conflict, and, of course, triumph over populations. Indigenous peoples throughout Latin America communism. The great American "melting pot" would have achieved a new level of self-awareness and eventually relegate racial and ethnic divisions to history organization that has significantly altered the political books. Foreign investment and aid would set Latin terrain of several nations. Islamic movements and America, Asia, and Africa on the path toward governments are increasingly important in the Middle East, modernization, middle-class prosperity, and therefore Africa, and Asia. There is no end to the list of major world stability. events that underscore the degree to which interests, demands, and conflicts based on the tangled identities of Marxists certainly foresaw a more conflictive, painful, and class, race, ethnicity, and nation persist, indeed even bloody road ahead, since the material wealth and power of flourish, in a world system that liberals and Marxists both the national bourgeoisies and imperialists would first have presumed would become more homogeneous as systemic to be appropriated by the world’s toilers. With that structures were globalized.(2) The failure of both social accomplished, however, socialism could be constructed scientists and political activists to fully understand these and class differences eliminated, thereby naturally phenomena is in large part due to our inadequate grasp of resolving the "secondary" contradictions posed by racial or the relationship between human agency and social ethnic differences. There were, of course, as many structure. versions of the Marxist narrative as there were of the modernizationist scenario, some more structuralist and A good deal of sociological theory has aimed at accurately others more voluntarist. Today, relatively few Left conceptualizing the relationship between social structure intellectuals or activists would defend the disservice we did and the agency of the human subject. For the most part, to Marx with dogmatization that surely sent him spinning in this exploration has taken place within two distinct but his grave. Liberalism, on the other hand, and only slightly interrelated realms. Working within one realm, theorists reworked modernization scripts, are enjoying renewed have sought to explain the material basis of "objective" box-office appeal worldwide. Virtually the entire world has social structures such as, in Marxist terms, the mode of lovingly embraced capitalism and electoral democracy, or production and superstructure; and then, within those so liberalism’s booking agents and publicists would have objective social structures, they have sought to explain the us believe. Surely we are about to finally witness the range of agency or freedom available for social actors to globalization and universalization of Western culture, the challenge, deviate from, or change materially-based end of class, racial, and national conflict -- the "end of structures. Working within a different realm, other theorists history," in the now much over-hyped phrase. have focussed on the material basis of the structures of our "subjectivity" and of our cultural representations of the Yet daily events throughout the world indicate everything material world; then, within those structured cultural codes, - Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. - G A L E G R O U P Information Integrity Social Justice Spring-Summer 1993 v20 n1-2 p82(22) Page 2 Race, ethnicity, nation, and class within theories of structure and agency. they, too, have explored the range of human agency, such is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality, it as in the Saussurean distinction between the long-term, is the ensemble of the social relations" (in Tucker, 1978: structured langue of language and the parole of the 145). Both human nature and social structures are speaking subject. While it has been important analytically products of human activity upon and within nature. to separate these two alternate ways of thinking about structure and agency, it is even more important that we Another way to understand how Marx conceptualized the find ways of reuniting them so as to better understand how relationship between structure and agency is to look at his they interact in the real world to produce and reproduce writings on consciousness and ideology. From concepts the totality of "objective" and "subjective" social structure like "dominant ideology" and "false consciousness" in and human agency. Achieving that necessary reunion is earlier works such as "Economic and Philosophic certainly beyond the scope of this article, but it is a goal Manuscripts of 1844" and "The Communist Manifesto," toward which I hope to point. through the development of his notion of "commodity fetishism" in Capital, Marx provides the elements of a I will first review attempts by several of the dominant theory of ideology as it pertains to how human beings think figures in classical and contemporary sociology to theorize as well as to how we live. This can also be seen in the one or the other of these two realms of structure and objective and subjective meanings of "alienation" in Marx. agency. I will then focus on more recent efforts to theorize Marx again asserts material conditions (including nature) the formation of class, race, nationalism, and ethnicity as and social relations as the context in which thought and dynamic, historically contingent, and reciprocally ideology develop, but he stops well short of the economic determinant processes of formation and struggle. reductionism exhibited by so many of his students. Hopefully, we can begin to see how these are processes that, in practice, take place simultaneously within both the Interesting passages from Engels’ "Letters on Historical "objective" and "subjective" (cultural, representational, Materialism" indicate the degree to which he and Marx discursive) realms of structure and agency. Such an also understood the ways in which ideology also works on understanding is essential to the construction of the material context of human activity. For example, progressive political strategies and alliances capable of Engels wrote "[I]deological conception...reacts in its turn dismantling ancient and oppressive hierarchies of class upon the economic basis and may, within certain limits, and race. modify it" (in Tucker, 1978: 763). Similarly, Engels suggested that, "once a historic element has been brought Structure and Agency in Sociological Theory into the world by other, ultimately economic causes, it reacts, can react on its environment and even on the Marx causes that have given rise to it" (Ibid.: 767). In other words, while Marx and Engels were firmly materialist, they Marx focussed largely on the "objective" realm of structure were not simple reductionists; rather, they understood that and agency and only secondarily on the realm of culture ideas both emerged from and, in turn, could reshape and representation, which he understood as operating particular material and social conditions. within the "superstructure" that arose from the material base of a society’s mode of production. For Marx, if not for Much 20th-century Marxism has been marked by most 20th-century Marxism, nature, social structures, and economic determinism in the theoretical realm and human agency are thoroughly and dialectically intertwined. idealism or voluntarism in the political