Structural Lie by Charles C. Lemert

Author:Charles C. Lemert [Lemert, Charles C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317251330
Google: 6DtACwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-22T06:00:49+00:00

Structuralisms in the Social, Cultural, and Human Sciences

Structuralisms, therefore, are found most often in sciences devoted to the study of fields of least certain structural values—political economy, cultural anthropology, social studies, literary theory, and semiotics (or, semiology). Though it is tempting to interpret this phenomenon as a perverse reaction to the scientific failures of the fields in question, the more likely explanation is that structuralisms are more robust in those sciences where the field is less open to interpretive certainty. Thus, structuralisms are commonly found in fields in which observable events require a strong structural assumption if their sense is to be discerned.

The first serious structuralism of the modern era was Karl Marx’s theory of commodity values, which appeared in its strongest form in Capital, I (1867). Marx’s structuralism serves as both the inspiration for and the model of a nearly pure structuralism in the social sciences—hence, it is important to understand his thinking well in order to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of all structuralisms.

Marx understood that there was a structural scandal at work in the modern world. In Capital, Marx asks and answers the ironic question he first posed in “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”: Why is it that “the worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces” (Marx 1978: 70–79)? His answer was first outlined in the 1848 “Manifesto of the Communist Party” where Marx, with Engels, set forth his basic structural principle in the famous opening line “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 2005: 1). In this remark he and Engels identified the scandal of modern industrial society, which professed values of human freedom and progress while, under the surface of a liberal ideology, the capitalist class was as ruthless in its exploitation of the worker as feudal lords were of the peasantry. Hence, as his thinking matured in the first volume of Capital into a full-blown historical and social analysis of the capitalist mode of production, so too did Marx’s structuralism.

In essays originally published as For Marx (1965), Louis Althusser proposed a substantial rupture between the younger, more philosophical Marx of the 1840s and the mature, more scientific Marx of the 1860s. There can be little doubt that Marx’s structuralism was more pronounced in Capital, I, but it is hard to justify Althusser’s claim of an epistemological break. Already in the 1844 essay “Estranged Labor,” where he first identified the scandal of modern capitalism, Marx held the view that the estrangement (or alienation) of the worker begins in the factory system of production wherein the worker no longer owns the means of production (the tools and resources owned and supplied by the capitalist class) and thus is cut off from the value produced by his labor (or, labor power). Therein begins the contradiction of capitalism, wherein the overt class conflict of other historical forms of production (notably feudalism and slavery) is hidden from view by a cynical ideology of human progress.

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