This is a fork off of another thread in which the question at issue involves whether or not radical sociology has been or can be effective in empowering workers. Short version - does the Marxian tradition have any gas left in the tank?
On the topic of radical sociology and agency, let me offer the case study of Paulo Freire. A couple years ago I did a deep dive into multiple works by and about Freire, having previously read his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed quite a few years ago.
One thing the stood our for me about Freire is how anti-ideological he was. He did not have much use for doctrinaire “revolutionaries” from the urban centers who wanted to use campesinos as class struggle cannon fodder. The pedagogy of the oppressed was largely a pedagogy of personal empowerment. Freire’s team got the campesions to develop their own reading primers based on an iconographic syllabary the adult students themselves devised. This was a political act in 1970s Brazil, because there was at that time a literacy test on voting. Freire had complete scorn for what he called the “banking model” of education in which experts lecture and students take notes.
Did Freire succeed? Well … he got exiled from Brazil after a coup and Brazil did not exactly become a workers paradise. Neither did anywhere else, for that matter. But is that a fair standard? Our problem here in this situated historical moment is to find the most plausible way forward to a human-friendly future. Declaring victory in advance or offering iron-clad guarantees, that really no mortal person is in a position to truly offer, strikes me as asking entirely too much! The most interesting questions about Freire’s methods are not, did they transform Brazil in the 1970s? It’s more like, do these methods have potential for us here and now? And how do these methods compare to the available alternatives?
Yes, I postulate that a deliberateley developmental socity (DDS), where the highest value of the whole is the flourishing of all, will be a "human-friendly future. "
For a social history of DDS’ antecedents, we could reach back in time deeper than the never-realized Marxist dream. I am talking about the ancient Greece, where the ancient Greek the concept of Paideia serves as a primary historical model for a culture entirely dedicated to human flourishing.
Paideia is a worthy goal. I’m curious, however how Paideia connects to radical sociology. The classic Greek tradition had a very different political context than anything recent. Can we just go for Paideia straight away? Or are there barriers to overcome?
Theoretically (almost) everything is possible, but i have an action research stance.
Emancipation is not feasible without large swaths of the population having the capability to go for it, i.e to shift up from blind evolution to deliberate development.
Me too. Having graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1979, my ideals at that time involved liberal arts (which imagines a sort of Paideia holism). Once the need to for steady income began to emerge as a primary concern, however, my educational vision ran bang into all sorts of institutional and social factors that had their own ideas about what is important in the world, and Paideia was not all that high on that list! Hence followed several decades of highly transactional social navigation. My more liberal arts thinking resurfaced a couple years ago when I realized retirement was looming, and previous professional games no longer needed to be played.
I’m in a US context, and that matters for what I’m about to say next. My action research, in general, has convinced me that any Paideia-like approach has to be anchored squarely to the bedrock levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. US society is utterly unforgiving to those without material means. Intriguingly, though, the recent rise of AI has allowed me to frame something like Paideia as a rational career strategy for workforce development in information technology. That Phi Beta Kappa background is turning out to be really difference making for the ability to separate truly valuable information from the sea of slop that clogs all current channels! How to get young people - who need a paycheck ASAP - up to Phi Beta Kappa speed, while also pursuing technical skills, is a serious challenge. I’m thinking teamwork and collective study/research efforts may hold the key to it.
No one can accuse me of excess idealism when it comes to macro history (see this list, for example: Macrohistorical Reading List) That said, I do see the long term evolutionary trend as being in the direction of deeper and broader human agency.
Kemp and Turchin are two authors who put the finest point on it. Maximum power concentration occurred roughly in the Assyria of Ashurbanipal. Everything since then has been generally democratizing, in net effect, with many obvious exceptions to the long-term trend. When it comes to political analysis I lean very Hobbesian. If a political system can’t manage fear and greed, it can’t manage at all. The reason Ashurbanipal was not followed by hundreds of other versions of Ashurbanipal is because dictatorial terrorism as a governance strategy does not scale effectively across space and time. Cyrus the Great was Great precisely because he saw how “soft power” builds better imperial muscles that just putting heads on stakes all the time. Through the long haul of history, every authoritarian system was ultimately undone by something with a wider social base. This tells me there is power in numbers, even if the deadliest weapons are concentrated in relatively few hands.
Geopolitics for the next couple decades promises to be a very unholy mess. Different geopolitical actors are making authoritarian gestures of one type or another. But I do believe the net effect of these authoritarian gestures will be to mobilize anti-authoritarian coalitions both internally and externally to create more network-centric and distributed effective power structures. Such distributed structures should be the most resilient, come what may.