Critical Sociology

Earlier, this author investigated and found wanting popular claims that technical and social organizational changes associated with globalization have now greatly lessened alienation for factory workers in fully industrialized countries. Here he follows up his suggestion that any credible account of globalization must consider increased competition and employment insecurity and their effects upon alienation. Theoretically, decreased security could have made workers more concerned with having any employment at all and less with intrinsically interesting work over which they have control. Nevertheless, research on the 1930s and the current period of downsizing provides much more support for decreased security having further disempowered workers. Demands at work may well have increased more for managers and professionals, but they have also had greater resources for coping with such increased demands. While these new developments suggest that Marx's theory of alienation needs to be updated, they are consistent with its original thrusts.

With capitalism's introduction, Karuk people have experienced radical declines in the productivity of Klamath River salmon fisheries, dire impoverishment, and a new order of threats in the form of hunger and diet related diseases. We use interview, survey, medical and archival data to describe how capitalism has been an unsustainable system in the case of the Karuk because it is organized around market extraction and destroys cultural knowledge and behaviors that served to keep fish harvests sustainable. Using world-systems theory, we propose a fifth frontier exists, that of health. Despite the impacts of 150 years of direct genocide, Karuk people continue to survive and are revitalizing culture and community, which supports the idea that capitalist incorporation is not fully complete but partial. Karuk resistance and revitalization is epitomized in the campaign to remove four dams on the Klamath River and thereby 'Bring the Salmon Home' to the upper basin.

Utilizing the work of Thorstein Veblen, I argue that the interrogation of `symbolic exploitation' should be of pressing concern to sociologists who hope to end economic exploitation. Contesting economic exploitation must begin with the destruction of traditional sovereign action patterns of desire that ensnare agents. Such a work of destruction must simultaneously be a work of construction, the construction of counter-hegemonic cultures of solidarity that reject the normative systems of status distribution associated with pecuniary capitalism. With this self-recognition on the part of the laboring classes, the end of economic exploitation becomes both palpable and possible.

Classical critical institutionalism is compared to recent `neo-instititutionalism' in economics, sociology and organizational studies. Both approaches developed during a regime change within capitalism, crisis periods of economic change and destabilized relationships between capitalist sectors and social institutions. Unlike mainstream economics, institutional approaches map these changing connections between capitalist sectors (finance and industrial capital, for instance) and between economic and social institutions. The critical institutionalists were much more critical of society, mainstream economics and finance capital as a destructive force, a stance that has continuing utility for the analysis of global capitalism and neo-liberal finance capital. The new institutionalists, while uncritically positivist and administrative in their orientation to the capitalist system, have nevertheless devised useful concepts and theories of economic organization and structure. A new, condensed critical institutionalism is needed to better analyze neo-liberal finance capital in this era of globalization.

This essay develops and applies Resnick and Wolff's conception of `subsumed classes', groups that receive a portion of surplus value for helping capitalists reproduce their class position. We profile the rise and fall of one such subsumed class, the industrial relations (IR) experts whose theories and practices sought to depoliticize and curb the militancy of the US labor movement. We argue that these IR experts established themselves as a subsumed class in the 1930s and then lost that position in the 1970s and 1980s.