Materialism, and..

As a sociologist bound by the ethics of my discipline, I have a faithfulness to my subject matter. Karl Marx, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, is one of the big three “classical” theorists that form the bedrock of the discipline. I engage his work, though it may be politically inconvenient in these the waning days of Babylon. For me, this is not abstract. As a contingent professor, I am at the mercy of student evaluations, and students today mainly have an allergy even to the mention of the name.

I explain to students that Marx had at minimum, a sociology, a political philosophy, and a theory of history. I point out that but for some small pockets, his political philosophy has been in decline around the world, and that decades of European social theorists in particular, have tried to explore why his theory of history hasn’t panned out—yet—give the current crop of global oligarchs a chance.

But even in introductory classes I proceed to talk about one of Marx’s key contributions to sociology, the definition of class by relationship to the means of production: you owned it, or worked in/with it.

I also point out that Max Weber extended Marx’s view of class by adding prestige (status) and political power (party) to this view of economic class.

In social theory, we explore Marx’s view that material conditions, or structural arrangements determine culture, and provide examples. But then we engage Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to show how features of Calvinism led to the rise of capitalism. In other words, ideas affect material conditions.

All this is a long–winded way of saying that ideas about vaccine safety are affecting, and will continue to affect the material conditions of public health. In turn, these ideas have emerged because managed care in a for–profit system is unsatisfactory and unsustainable. I need to develop these ideas more fully and demonstrably. But a key takeaway here is that sociology is a threat precisely because it interrogates both structure and culture.