It is not enough to defend values in the abstract. A sociological approach to values is to discover them as embedded in institutions – institutions that incubate values as utopian imaginations that prefigure an alternative world. They might be the workplace free of alienation, the family free of domination, education free of inequality. The external forces we explore are the anti-utopian limits on the realization of those utopias. But these limits are not immoveable. As Max Weber writes in the epigraph to this book – the realization of the possible is through the pursuit of the impossible. Or to put it slightly differently, the pursuit of the impossible shifts the limits of the possible. To expand them we have to identify them and understand them. If we are not careful, however, the pursuit of the impossible can restrict as well expand those limits. Here lies the tragic moment of sociology – the way it maps the unintended consequences of utopian strivings. Without attention to the anti-utopian science, utopian strivings can, indeed, turn into dystopian nightmares.
It took me a few decades to come to these conclusions: to recognize the meaning of sociology as a value-based science, rooted in lived experience and focused on the tension between utopian and anti-utopian thinking. This book relates that process of discovery. It is not a novel, however. So it begins with my point of arrival. Part One begins by describing the utopian and anti-utopian tensions that lie at the heart of sociology as read through the conventional classics of sociology – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – but captured most clearly in the life and writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Feminists have made their own distinctive contributions.
The classics are also the founders of sociology because they had to carve out the distinctiveness of sociology as against other disciplines – psychology, economics, philosophy, history, and even theology – while at the same time drawing on them. Over the last century (and this is the subject of the second chapter), sociology has advanced as an academic discipline with its own division of labor, often trying to shed those founders either because they are obstacles to the progress of “value-free” science or because they are mired in the prejudices of their time. The classics are classics, however, because they transcend their time: they speak to the crises we face and are rooted in values we embrace. Their time is still our time.
Part Two turns to the point of departure, starting where so many of us begin – with policy sociology’s naïve view that social problems have technical solutions. I went to India in the earnest belief that the question as to which language should be the medium of instruction in Indian universities could be solved by what today would be called a field experiment. I came away understanding that wider political and economic context interests were the major contributors to any solution. I thought that integrating Black and white pay scales in the copper industry of postcolonial Zambia was a mathematical problem, but I quickly learned that the supposedly neutral job evaluation scheme I constructed already contained within it a solution defined by the preexisting racial order. I had entered the realm of policy sociology driven by utopian desire but without anti-utopian science.
Part Three, therefore, recognizes the limits to social change, leading me to public sociology and the hope that stimulating public debate and the exercise of collective rationality could shift those limits. Thus, television and print media disseminated the results of our study of the persistence of the color bar in the Zambian copper mines. Yet dissemination was not enough. Even though the study engendered public debate, the multinational corporation was able to deploy the results in its own interests. Casting one’s findings into the public sphere that is populated by powerful actors can have unexpected and unintended consequences – often unfavorable consequences. Thus, I turned from this traditional, mediated public sociology, to what I call an organic public sociology – an intimate, organic connection between sociologists and their constituency. I worked with students at the University of Zambia to collectively contest government policies. But this, too, was diverted into a losing political battle. In another continent – Latin America – these interventions might be called participant action research, which had its own fateful consequences, including the disappearance of sociology.
Despairing, I realized I simply understood too little of the forces shaping the outcomes of these public interventions – the unintended consequences of intentional action. Part Four follows my path as a graduate student to the University of Chicago, one of the historic heartlands of sociology. I was very disappointed by what was on offer – a parochial and self-referential vision of sociology. I took up arms against this professional sociology in critiques of extant theories of race, of development, and then of work – theories that served racial domination, neocolonialism, and capitalist profit. I turned against those reigning theories and their comforting illusions: that racism would simply evaporate through assimilation; that Third World countries released from colonialism would take off into modernity; that pretending to treat workers as human beings would get them to work harder. When the illusions proved to be just that, illusions, the temptation was to blame the victims – pathologized people of color, tradition-oriented colonized, lazy workers. Instead I drew on an anti-utopian Marxist research program to interrogate the class character of racial orders, the reproduction of cheap labor power through migration, and what I called “the politics of production.” I remain committed to participant observation, studying the factory I worked in, challenging the objectivity of the removed scholar, and gaining insight into the subjectivity of industrial labor. At the end of this part I bring together the ideas of the preceding chapters to assess one important sociological framework for studying race as it applied to South Africa. Together these four chapters in Part Four comprise critical sociology – a critique of the world but also of professional sociology as it was then.
Part Five describes my own trajectory into professional sociology. It opens with a series of flukes that landed me a position at Berkeley. This was as radical a department of sociology as you could find in the US, but it was still driven by the imperatives of the discipline. To survive I had to develop a research program – both a methodology and a theory – that could advance Marxism within professional sociology. What was at stake was not only the advance of a Marxist science, not only my own survival, but also securing jobs for my students. To establish some sort of legitimacy for Marxism I had to respond to mainstream critics of my research. Among other things, they were skeptical of the generality of my claims based on the study of a single factory. They doubted that my experiences in my Chicago factory were a function of capitalism rather than modern industrialism. I responded by developing the “extended case method” but also turning, once again, to working in factories, this time in socialist Hungary. There I identified their specifically socialist organization of labor, their specifically socialist production politics, and how they harbored a real utopia of democratic socialism. There were similarities between socialist and capitalist production, but there were also fundamental differences.
History took an unexpected turn. In 1989, while I was working away in the Lenin Steel Works (LKM), then the biggest and oldest steel mill in Hungary, state socialism crumbled. The democratic socialism I had envisioned from within the furnaces of LKM was never a serious contender; instead state socialism gave way to a destructive capitalism. That transition was not what I had come to Hungary to study. So I migrated to the still-standing high command of state socialism, to become a worker in the Soviet Union. But not for long. It was 1991 and the Soviet Union was itself in flux, about to sink into an extortionate merchant capitalism. From their lofty perch the Western