Commentary

God is Society or The Collectivity that is ‘I’ Part 2.

~ Roger JG Albert

Emile Durkheim was the first European to actually hold a ‘chair’ in sociology.  Actually it was in education and sociology because there were no ‘pure’ sociology departments back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  He was born in 1857 and died in 1917 just before the end of World War I.  There is much in Durkheim that I disagree with but much that I consider brilliant.  I disagree with his reification of society and his notion that a society can either be healthy or ill.  He refers to sociology as social pathology, or the study of what makes society ill.  That’s a bit of a stretch for me.  I’ve been a sociologist for a long time but I’m not sure that ‘society’ exists.  Social relations exist in a myriad of interweavings and interdependencies, but society as a thing?  No, I’m not convinced.  But does that negate his whole ‘oeuvre?’  Not at all.  His Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is quite brilliant and for two important reasons.  First, he argues, based on his studies of Australian aboriginal clans (from his office in France), that religion and society are one and the same thing.  Clan and totemic organization are so intertwined as to be singly incomprehensible.  In a more general sense, he argues that gods are personifications and projections of the society itself.   Projections (which are a complex of moral and behavioural precepts) are then used to judge individuals in the society itself. This makes perfect sense to me.  He’s not the only one who argues similar things, but his argument is prototypical. The second reason is his emphasis on ritual as the application of ‘glue’ that holds us together in our social bonds.  Ritual brings people together in an attempt to strengthen social connections and interdependencies, even when these are built on a foundation of power imbalances and sometimes extreme inequalities.

So, what is the upshot of all of this?  Well, a most important one is that God (or gods)  and all of religious belief and ritual are socially-constructed.   So, as a Christian, when you pray to God you are praying to your society.  In our case, Christianity is fully compatible with the notion of individual responsibility and private property rights.  Christianity has been able over the centuries to adapt to the political and economic engines of the ages and it has served those political and economic interests well.  In saying this I disagree in a sense with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in their intractable denial of the existence of God.  I agree with them that there is no God ‘out there’ somewhere looking after each and every one of us.  But God does exist, in the minds, institutions and habits of people all over the world.  In a future blog I address the issue of self-esteem and complete surrender to God which is a driving idea for many Christians.  That notion makes complete sense from the perspective of Durkheim’s work.

Another important lesson arising from engagement with Durkheim’s work is his focus on ritual as a binding force.  As humans we are driven by ritual in our relations with others.  Durkheim argues that the less we are integrated into society by engaging in ritual which must always involve others(fully bound by its morality) the more we are susceptible to suicide.  These are critical concepts for sociology, at least my sociology.

The collectivity that is ‘I’

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

After reading Norbert Elias’ What is Sociology and having taught the subject for 36 years myself, I’m struck by what it takes to make a person(ality) and reminded of the complexity of the task.  As the symbolic interactionists among us are quick to point out, we, as individuals, are a product of our interactions with ‘others.’  Charles Horton Cooley even refers to the ‘looking glass’ self in emphasizing the notion that our person(alities) are socially created.  Thinking about it for even a moment makes that fact clear.  What language would you speak if you weren’t ‘created’ socially?  What kinds of things would you believe?  So, given that we have a certain bio-genetic reality which is  itself socially created (what is the sexual act if it’s not a social one?), we are ‘constructed’ in our interactions with others.  ‘Others’ here must be taken quite broadly to include not just people close to us, but also people (and I would also include other species of animal and even ‘things’ very broadly determined) far removed from us in time (grandparents, relatives, etc.) and space (neighbours, local people, etc.).  In fact, ‘others are no less socially created than we are, of course. Our person(alities) are virtually collective realities that wouldn’t exist outside of the collectivity or collectivities.  So, we probably shouldn’t refer to ourselves as ‘I’ but as ‘we.’ Of course the Queen does that when she refers to herself using the royal ‘we.’  She does it because she represents the state and so she includes all citizens of the Commonwealth when she refers to herself in the third person.  If I were to use ‘we’ to refer to myself, I would include all the people, including myself, in all of our interactions and interweavings, who had a hand in ‘raising’ me and making me what I am.  Which would mean that if I were diagnosed with bipolar disorder or any of the other thousands of ‘disorders’ that are found in the DSM-5, the psychiatric bible of disorders, I would have to say that ‘we’ have bipolar disorder.  Sounds strange, doesn’t it?  But what other conclusion can I reach?  This is the conclusion R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz (both psychiatrists) came to with regards to schizophenia and they were soundly criticized for it and symbolically beaten up by their ‘colleagues’ for even suggesting such a heresy.

And heresy it is.  The reason that this is such a heretical idea is that we have clung to the idea for a long time now that we, as individuals, are the agents of our own destiny.  We have individual ‘free will,’ not collective free will.  [I’ll switch to I now for emphasis.]  I am responsible for my own actions.  That way if I work hard and get rich, I can say it was all my doing, and if I fail, I must feel the shame of it all by myself.  Others can do the same when they think about me.  They can judge me as a success or failure and they can (without a doubt) attribute that to my own actions.  If I commit a crime, it’s my responsibility and not a collective one.  After all we don’t send families to jail for the crimes of one family member, we send just that one person to jail.  This is an ideology, a way that we justify and explain ourselves to ourselves and to others, based in the early days of the capitalist mode of production when the ‘individual’ was created, a crucial state of being for entering into contractual agreements.  Fernand Braudel argues this in his awesome three volume tome on early capitalism as does George Duby in his introduction to A History of Private Life, a book he edited that was published in 1988.  Others too have taken up the challenge of putting our individuality fetish into a social, historical and political context.  C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, published in 1962, traces our love affair with individualism to Locke and Hobbes (I would throw in Descartes too) but anchors his views in a clearly dialectical framework, with material life still leading ideas in the end.

I could go on for a long time on this topic.  In fact, I want to turn this discussion to Durkheim and Collins in my next post.  They argue (along with many others) that God is a symbol for society.  So, when we say that we are created by God, we are really saying that we are created by society.  Let’s see where that takes us.

Indiastries – The Prescient Misters Pohl and Kornbluth

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I love strange books with compelling titles and The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth fits the bill.  This book, first published in 1952 but with the seventh and last printing taking place in 1972, was printed in the U.S.A.  It’s based sometime in the future and looking back to it’s publication in 1952 from a 2012 vantage point is a bit  strange.  Pohl and Kornbluth obviously had to design a future that was credible to a 1952 readership still infused with memories of World War II and trying to deny the existence of the Korean War.  In some ways, that’s not too difficult a task, but in other ways the challenge is daunting.  For instance, the characters in the book still use phones like in 1952, board planes on the tarmack at airports and smoke incessantly, but space travel is common.  The book is about the marketing business and how it has evolved.  Lies are common and the bigger the lie the better.  Products are not simply advertized anymore.  Marketing businesses create products to sell not based on their utility but on their salability.  (How far is THIS from our current reality?) They are trying to sell people on Venus colonization.  How can they make Venus attractive to potential colonists?  It’s virtually uninhabitable.  I leave it to you to find a copy of the book to see how the main character in the book, Mitchell Courtenay, gets along.  What I want to highlight here is a simple paragraph on page 7 of my edition of the book which reads:

“Fowler Schocken inclined his head.  ‘Thank you, Matthew,’ And he meant it.  It took him a moment before he could go on.  ‘We all know,’ he said, ‘what put us where we are.  We remember the Starrzalius Verily account, and how we put Indiastries on the map.  The first spherical trust.  Merging a whole subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex.  Schocken Associates pioneered on both of them.  Nobody can say we were floating with  the tide.  But that’s behind us.”

Indiastries [my emphasis].  ‘Now that’s prescient,’ I thought to myself.  Pohl and Kornbluth project into the future a trend that was in its infancy in 1952 with post-war globalization and geopolitics, that is, the corporate drive to find cheaper raw materials and labour wherever they might be.  Of course, that’s a movement or trend that started long before epitomized by Christopher Columbus and his P3 venture, but did it ever take off after WW II.  Now, global business corporations scour the globe like bottom feeders, looking for the cheapest raw materials and the cheapest labour.  In the case of raw materials, its a little more difficult than with labour.  Raw materials are found where they lie in the earth.  It’s possible for hard rock mining companies, oil producers and other exploiters of the earth’s ‘natural resources’ to more to parts of the earth previously unexplored to uncover precious commodities like gold.  Canadian mining corporations are all over Mexico, Central and South America mining and exploring for minerals.  That doesn’t mean Canada has no gold left in ‘them thar’ hills, but the ‘business climate’ is much better in Mexico and the near absence of environmental regulation (or their enforcement) is just fine, thank you.  And labour is cheap, cheap, cheap. For secondary or value added manufacturers and businesses operating in the service sector, the ‘Third World’ is their oyster.  They’ve managed to cut deals with impoverished governments all over the world to set up export processing zones (EPZs) which are sometimes secured compounds, sometimes entire cities or regions, where powerful global corporations can set up shop, exploit cheap labour, pay no duties, no taxes, and face no environmental or health and safety regulations.  Corporations have flocked to the EPZs.  ‘Our’ corporations are abandoning North American, Japanese, European, Australian and South Korean labour and moving production to EPZs or other facilities in the ‘Third World’ at an exponential rate.  There is no turning this around.  China and India are big players in providing cheap labour for ‘our’ corporations making it hard to pick up any ‘consumer’ product these days that’s not manufactured there.  But make no mistake about it.  Those products are not Chinese or Indian products.  They are Nike, Apple, Dell, Monsanto, Nestlé, Wal-Mart, etc., etc, products produced by cheap labour in poor countries bypassing ‘expensive’ labour ‘here.’

So, Indiastries.  Looks like it’s well on the ways to reality. India harnessed as a whole by a single manufacturing trust. With how rapidly things are changing these days, how far down the road can that be? Pohl and Kornbluth were pretty prescient guys. Only problem I find with their scenario is who’s going to buy all these wonderful products made in India and elsewhere in the ‘Third World?’  Won’t be workers here because they’re putting us out of work as fast as they can.  We’ll see how it goes.

Teaching Sociology

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

This morning around 6 I woke up and in that wonderful half-sleep just before I get up and feel the pain in my back wrenching me back to reality I thought about how many times I started the college term in the Fall of every year for the past 36 years with the same lecture.  It’s about how I teach sociology and how my students learn and don’t learn.  I teach sociology, but right now I want to focus on the teaching part of what  I do and not the sociology part.  I’ve also taught 1st year (freshman) French, Canadian HIstory, Anthropology and Sociology, but over the last 25 years or so, pretty much exclusively Sociology.  So I know that my teaching style is consistent across various subjects.  I teach using humour (at least I think I’m funny at least some of the time) and a highly critical approach to things.  After teaching for so long I know that some of my students, at least, appreciate my teaching style.  Funny thing is, I don’t think I can teach people how to teach like I do.  It’s not a teachable skill.  It’s a skill that comes from a confluence of life happenings, genetics, upbringing and experience. To know when to chide a student or make a joke or criticize the textbook is something I’ve learned over the years.  Most of the time, it works.  I don’t use notes when I teach.  Teaching for me is a dialogue between me, the text writers and my students.  I don’t think I could learn that at teacher’s college.  It depends on my personality as much as my knowledge.  It helps that I love what I do, that I have a deep connection to what I know and study and that I have respect for my students and their struggles.  Every year, with a new set of fresh students, I tell them that every one of them has the intelligence to make it through my course and do well.

But, I tell them, there are many reasons they might not do well.  Personal troubles are at the top of the list.  Disputes with family, friends and/or lovers can really sap energy and impair concentration.  Struggles with beliefs, with what’s right or wrong, good and bad although sometimes essential for learning can leave one confused and disoriented just at a time when there is a real need for concentrated activity in studying and listening in class.  Overwhelming concern with what others’ expectations are, whether articulated or not, push away the need to work on course material.  Worry about work, finances, children, husbands, wives, parents and health all contribute to poor academic performance.  This is fodder for another blog post in the near future, but for now, I just want to convey the reality that success in school is not just a result of hard work, nor is it the achievement of one person, the student.  Success in school and university is the result of the efforts of many individuals and institutions.  The sad reality is that we don’t, as a society, care much who succeeds and who ‘fails’ at school.  We need people to do both.  It’s somewhat of a contradiction that in a society so focussed in individuality and individualism we cannot care for the single person.  No wonder people feel abandoned, frightened and angry.  We just don’t give a shit about them.

That’s what I tell my students.

Countries are about to lose their reason for being (Part 1).

~ Roger JG Albert

Some of us, many of us, really have the sense that our country is one of the most important things that give us our identity as individuals and as cultures. But what is the origins of this thing we call ‘country’ or ‘nation-state?’ Does it ‘deserve’ our undying loyalty, love and respect?  I wrote a script for The Knowledge Network many years ago (1992 to be precise) in which I address these questions and other related ones with regard to Canada.  If I were to write it today, I wouldn’t change much, but I will update this commentary in a new post soon.  Now, read on and comment if you like.

Is Canada a Capitalist Society?  Interesting question and not as simple to answer as it seems, I think.  Generally, when this question comes up, people immediately think about Capitalism and Socialism or Communism.  Canada isn’t communist, that’s clear…but is it socialist?  Well, what does socialism mean?  Many people think of socialism as government ownership and control.  For some, socialism means no more free enterprise, no more freedom of choice and no more good life!   For others it means Medicare, EI,  Canada Pension and Social Services.  If socialism means government takeover of private business, then the W.A.C. Bennett Social Credit rabidly free enterprise government of  B.C. was one of the first socialist governments in Canada.  It took over B.C. Electric and made it into B.C. Hydro, took over responsibility for ferries in the province and monopolized the sale of alcohol.  Well, most people would never think of the Social Credit Party as socialist, but there you have it.  Just kidding of course…but it still leaves us with the problem of coming up with a way of deciding whether or not Canada is a capitalist society.  Is it mostly capitalist with some socialist policies?  Can we talk of shades of pink, or is it one or the other?  Well, maybe there’s another way of approaching the whole question.

 

Let’s stand way back and check out the view from there.  We are very accustomed in this part of the world to seeing things from the perspective of our countries.  I’m not saying that we’re nationalists, necessarily, but that our frame of reference is our country.  We think of “Canadian” society, the Canadian educational system, the Canadian political system, the Canadian legal system, the Canadian transportation system, etc.  We view Canada as an entity, a thing in itself.  We use Canada as “containing” our society.

 

There is another way of thinking about these things.  It is very difficult, though, because we take our conventional view of things completely for granted.  We have difficulty even conceiving of another way of seeing things.   It requires a real perceptual shift.  But let’s try this on.  Think of the concept of Capitalism as a basic reference point rather than the idea of Canada. In this conceptual scheme capitalism has time and space dimensions but I want you to think about it more as a set of institutions or way of doing things, organizing ourselves and thinking.  The primary institutions of modern capitalism are private property, business enterprise, the machine-process, the class system, wages, the division of labor, the market and the price system.   Taken together, these institutions, along with others, make up what we might call the economic basis of capitalist society.  I’m not talking about people here, but about the ways that have evolved by which we relate to each other in society.  The primary institutions are those concerned with how we organize ourselves to make a living…that being the basis for the rest of social organization.  We have to make a living as societies before we can do anything else.   In order to survive…and this is an evolutionary perspective…capitalism generates a whole range of other institutions, or it appropriates them, borrows, begs or steals them historically from previous societies.  These institutions  we usually define as being political, social, legal, educational, etc… And they evolve  themselves and together…like all the organs of your body evolve together.

 

From this perspective, the way we organize official learning, in classrooms with the teacher as authority and children conceived of as empty vessels to be filled with standardized knowledge is a basic educational institution of modern capitalism.  Whole organizations, plants and facilities we call  schools, colleges and universities are created to service this institution which itself serves to ensure the survival of capitalism.  What kids learn in school is more important than just math and social studies.  In the way the school is organized, in the way they are regimented and disciplined, kids learn their eventual place as workers within a capitalist society. It could hardly be otherwise.  An educational institution that would contradict the basic way that we organize ourselves to make a living wouldn’t last long.

 

Countries as we know them are political institutions that arose in conjunction with the rise of capitalism in Europe.  They are the products of the growth of capitalism:  they exist to regulate the flow of capital and labour; to provide infrastructures such as roads for the movement of capital and labor (not always successfully); to defend capitalism, or sometimes the interests of a group of capitalists in competition with another group; to provide a context for law and order and the right “climate” for investment, etc… Once in existence along with the institution of citizenship, countries tend to legitimize the notion that citizenship is a status more important than that of worker.    Citizenship, with all of its caveats and rights,  is the political/legal expression of your right to sell your labour on a market.

 

Canada, then, is by definition a capitalist institution.  It “fits” into a now global system of political institutions that exist to perpetuate capitalism…and make no mistake about it, capitalism is the more fundamental institution here.  It makes little sense to speak of “Canadian” capitalism or even of “Canadian” society, for that matter.  Canada, the political institution, is part of a global capitalist society.  It makes much more sense to speak of the role of the Canadian state in the perpetuation and  survival of the growing capitalist global system.  If the government takes over the operations of a losing propositions such as B.C. Electric, then it does so to ensure that capitalism can still grow and prosper.  Capitalism needs cheap power.  There’s no money in it, but it is nonetheless necessary.  Why not get workers, as citizens and taxpayers, to subsidize it?    If the government sets up systems to train potential workers (i.e., the school system), to support unemployed workers, to nurse them back to health, to provide them with pensions upon retirement, it relieves the pressure from the capitalist to do so, a pressure that the slave master or the lord of the manor had in totality with regard to the well-being of his slaves or serfs.  So, in a big way, the governments in our country help to manage the working class.  And through the tax system arrange to have the working class cover the expenses for its own management and even cover the costs of capitalist risk-taking itself, again through the tax system.

 

This may sound cynical and negative, but I don’t think it is.  Nor do I think that the system stinks and that all capitalists and politicians are lying, good for nothing exploiters of the working class.  I’d rather be a worker with only half of my waking life in the service of someone else than a slave with my whole being and life in the service of someone else.  Besides, capitalists and politicians are harnessed to the needs of capitalism as we all are…much as all the cells in a human body are harnessed for the survival of the body as a whole…and the whole thing will live just as long as it has not exhausted all the resources it has to keep it alive.  Countries are one of those resources that serve the ends of capitalist survival.  Canada is one of those resources.

Privatization, Apple and Wealth Beyond Imagination

~ Roger JG Albert

John’s question: Isn’t it fair to say that “capital” (as in, portable property not necessarily tied to wealth in the form of land) is inherently about privatization? If so, a capitalist society can do little other than drift toward further privatization, no?

My answer: Capital is a complex concept and Marx defines it in many ways including relating to it as crystallized labour.  Marx argues that more and more capital derived from human productive activity is finding its way into the coffers of the ruling class.  As Marx notes, the capitalist mode of production is based on the exploitation of labour-power by which surplus value is produced.  Profit comes from surplus value and becomes capital. This applies to individual capitalists but Marx intends that it should apply principally to the ruling class as a whole.  So, privatization, as much as anything means that the working class is getting less and less of ‘its’ share of the proceeds of social production.  It’s being appropriated by the ruling class which, for Marx, includes capitalists, of course, but also the state.  [The nature of the state and the ruling class is not by any means agreed upon by all Marxists. I may go into this in another post later.]  But that’s not how we’ve come to understand the concept these days, at least not entirely.  

Nowadays, we consider privatization as the simple movement of assets from the government to ‘private enterprise’ or business as in the case of the privatization of prisons.  The transfer of public land, formerly ‘tree farm licenses’ (TFLs) to business corporations is another example.  That kind of activity is proceeding apace.  Harper is smacking his lips, there’s so much potential here and, believe me, we’re nowhere near seeing the end of it.  But that’s not the whole story.

Essentially, capital is capital and it does not have to be concentrated in the ruling class, in the hands of a few, so to speak.  It can and will be collectively controlled according to Marx.  The irony for ruling classes throughout history has been that the more wealth gets concentrated in their hands, the harder it is for them to continue to accumulate capital. The margins get smaller and smaller the greater the concentration becomes.  Where are we now?

Well, the concentration of capital is proceeding apace globally.  Apple, my favourite computer company, has so much capital (in the form of cash) that it has to seriously consider what to do with it.  It’s giving a lot to shareholders.  It could lower its prices or pay its workers more in the sweatshops they work in all over the globe, but that would just be wrong…it would not be keeping the wealth in the right hands.  

Welcome to Duh Fodder Land!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

No doubt this will get off to a slow start, but my term is over soon and it will be my last so I can launch into this thing more vigorously.  Of course I won’t be able to avoid having my tongue firmly planted in my cheek the whole time.  If anything, there’s a need for more humour in this world.  As soon as I get my new video camera, I will do a regular rant and post it here.  Stay tuned!

Privatization of public assets: from Columbus to The Space Merchants

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

I was just marking one of my last exams ever and I got to thinking about privatization of public assets.  I guess it was because one of my students made a reference to something or other more or less related to the topic of this post.  Harper is the king of privatization.  Mark my words, the closure of Kingston Pen is just paving the way for the entry of private prisons in Canada.  They’re most popular in Australia, there’s some in the UK and the US has many private prisons (150 or so at last count accounting for some 17% of the American inmate population of 2 million people.  Don’t get me started on the contradictions inherent in private prisons or private, for-profit universities either, for that matter.  But then I thought back to a book I read years ago called The Space Merchants (available on Amazon).  The main theme of this novel is that everything at the time in the future in which this novel takes place is private.  No public.  Everything is privately owned and controlled.  The private market rules.  At the time I read this book I thought the theme a little far-fetched.  I don’t so much now.  In view of the way the governments in Canada have privatized public assets right from the beginning of Canada and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad to the most recent transfers of public lands in British Columbia to private ‘timber’ companies I think that the writing is now on the wall.  But you know, I got to thinking about Christopher Columbus.  He got involved in the first P3 that I can think of.  There may be earlier examples.  If you know of any, I’d like to know.  He got involved with  Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain.  The deal was that they would get the land and he’d get whatever else he could scrape together wherever he was.  Turns out it wasn’t a lot but he gave it a shot.  First public/private partnership.  We haven’t seen anything yet.  We haven’t even gotten past the stage of history when countries still exist, but as we go along more and more public assets and responsibilities will go to the private sector.  The process is irreversible.  As Karl Marx was on about, history is really the history of classes of course, but that’s build on a foundation, for him, of the replacement of labour by capital, systematically for the past 10,000 years and accelerating with the capitalist mode of production.  I think that his perspective could well include the privatization of everything because once capital has completely replaced or devalued labour to such an extent that it’s not worth getting out of bed in the morning, we could actually be living in a world where government services are not only privatized, but government itself is private.  Come on, just think about it.  Instead of having elections like we do now, we could just call for tenders and pick the lowest bidder.  Sounds reasonable to me.  Most governments these days are already for sale to the highest bidder.  Now it’s just a matter of formalizing that relationship.