What I do think is important, and is worthy of some energy, is pointing out how functionalism generally, and Marxist functionalism specifically, is inadequate social theory. It seems to me that the general critique of Parsonian structural functionalism offered in the sociology debates of the 1960s, that it provides a description of the social system as an unified and integrated organism in harmony, if not complete stasis, and thus is unable to account for conflict and change, is fundamentally correct. The problem in those debates was that the opposing side, the 'conflict' theorists, could not provide an account of stability and continuity in social systems. It was the inverse of structural functionalism, and simply turned Parsons on his head. Both structural functionalism and conflict theory had something to contribute to an understanding of how social institutions and social systems worked and changed, but as a global theory, both were severely lacking.
Take a classic work of Marxian functionalism, Bowles and Gintis _Schooling in Capitalist America_ [SCA]. This is a text which has been on my mind a lot lately, because of its status as a 'classic' of radical analysis of American education and because of Gintis' subsequent conversion to the cause of school vouchers. Gintis also seems to have won himself the status of bete noire among radical economists, so he is often mentioned on PEN-L and LBO-Talk as some sort of negative reference point.
It seems to me that there is actually an intellectual continuity between the Gintis of SCA and the Gintis of school vouchers. The portrait of education you find in SCA is one of seamless reproduction of capitalist relations of production; schools are designed and work to simply turn out the newest functionaries of the capitalist elite and an obedient, controlled mass of workers. Everything that appeared as a movement for progressive change, for democratization, for emancipatory pedagogy, proved, upon analysis, to be ruse for the more efficient, more thorough integration of schools into capitalism. Movements for "progressive education" were, in the final analysis, nothing more than a mask for corporate control of schools: "the essence of Progressivism in education was the rationalization of the process of reproducing the social classes of modern industrial life." [p. 199.] Amazingly, in a 300+ page book on American education, teacher unions are not even mentioned once. Instead, Bowles and Gintis return, page after page, to a single mantra: class conflict arises at the point of production, and the capitalist state mediates, diverts and blunts that conflict through schools, ensuring that class inequality and the rule of the capitalist class persists. All who work in education, from the classroom teacher to the school principal, from the district administrator to the education school professor, are, wittingly or not, agents of that reproduction of social classes and capitalist relations of production.
Now in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such a functionalist analysis could appear radical because it could be combined with calls for a millenial socialist revolution; the system is beyond reform and repair -- socialist revolution is the only answer. And, of course, this revolutionary vision was without any practical blueprint for actual social change. As this millenial revolutionary politics became increasingly untenable and indefensible, Gintis was left with a functionalist understanding of education as incapable of positive social change, as bereft of any agents of change. It is not such a long leap from that dilemma to the construction of some 'ideal' market [Gintis wants to allow parents to only use vouchers, provided in equal amounts to each student, to purchase education; he would, in effect, end all 'private' purchasing of education] the 'invisible hand' of which will make all well. It is a functionalist solution to a problem misdefined by functionalist theory. What could be more utopian than the notion that the way to make education more egalitarian is through the market.
I think that Enrenreich's work on class, especially the notion of the professional-managerial class, is pretty consistent with this Gintis problematic.
> i don't know what justin's position is, per se. i do know that marxist
> social scientists can be functionalists. i read justin as defending that
> sort of functionalism against the diatribes against durkheim, parsons, etc.
>
> ehrenreich's stuff on class is considered marxist functionalism.
>
> kelley
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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