Re-reading the Elementary Forms of Religious Life alongside Capital for the theory portion of my comprehensive exams reminded of the many analogies, Rosetta Stones, and subtle comportments between so-called "functionalism" and "conflict theory" in sociology.
Of course, Marx and Engels themselves recognized that capitalism, while doomed to destroy itself, is also constantly reproduced through ongoing primitive accumulation, proletarianization, and technological advancement. Moreover, the bourgeoisie seizes our very organic embodiment with coercion and ideological persuasion alike, stimulating reproduction and outsourcing the cost of sustaining labor-power to the home. This is why Gramsci called the Russian Revolution a "revolution against Capital", as Capital is the story of the bourgeoisie's planned economy, constantly reproduced although marked by periodic crises of overproduction.
Marx is rife with functionalism at even a slightly critical appraisal; unemployment functions as a reserve army of labor, religion functions to pacify and refract hopes for a better world. While superficially the destruction of commodities and means of production in a crisis seems bad for the bourgeoisie, this too just pushes the system forward in the short term.
However, even the "conflict" narrative in Marx can be interpreted functionally on a wide scope. The revolution is just another event in the ongoing life of the social-organism as it develops and metamorphoses. Capitalism is itself functional to communism as a caterpillar is to the moth, dispossessing and concentrating the proletariat, equipping it with all the technology it needs, and educating the movement through the process of "confrontation" until the people have accumulated the organizational, bureaucratic and military experience required to sweep capitalism aside.
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| Just kiss already. |
Far from muting the revolutionary mindset, perceiving the structural-functions of both capitalism and our movements allows for savvy adoption of a range of interesting vocabulary and discoveries from both Durkheim and the rest of the functionalist school. For a protest is both a site of confrontation and of solidarity, and being aware of this dialectic permits one to consciously guide the kind of counter-society and counter-culture which forms through the ritual aspect of protests, meetings, and party conventions.
Issues of social solidarity and ritual are too often papered over in organizing by shabby, unscientific language concerning "community building," that it would be "fun" to grab food together after a protest, or the need to have periodic "fun events." The consequences of dysfunctional solidarity are often individualized/psychologized in terms of "burnout" or being a "good fit" for a group. Worst of all is the misuse of existing scientific language: the tasks of building movement solidarity and a communist counter-society are mislabeled as Lenin's dual power, which actually denotes a military-political state of affairs where the deteriorating capitalist state is beset on all fronts by the militarized people.
It is Durkheim who can remind us that any organization, movement, or society must reproduce itself through mass rituals of collective effervescence, where our sense of collective belonging is created, renewed, and returned to the individual consciousness. The next time you attend a protest, think not only of its external, confrontational dimension, but its internal function as a ritual where social bonds are created and renewed in the movement. A party convention or local organizational meeting is indeed a talking-shop for conflict, but is also a ritual gathering which should reproduce the group's solidarity. Wheresoever people gather, a culture is produced, and a basic awareness of this Durkheimian insight can guide the formation of culturally rich, socially relevant, coherent movements.
Consider Durkheim's anomie, or the "normlessness" which occurs when someone is loosely connected to the rest of a group or wider society, not sharing its values, adrift and purposeless. Anomie is a perfectly recognizable condition of imperialism, and it drives people either to despair and suicide or to find new centers of collective consciousness to give their lives meaning. Capitalists know this well, encouraging the feel-good depoliticizing mass effervescence of Evangelical idiocy and the ritual gatherings and mass rallies of the right wing. It is communism which should serve as this new moral center, and it should renew its own symbolic universe in its confrontations with the state and consciously through festivals, sports teams, music, and art. This is something that communism knew well in the 30's, where union halls became both forts of revolutionary confrontations and sites of cultural production, sustaining collective belonging and inhibiting anomic drift into the disorganized capitalist alternative. Lessons abound of the need to create a communist counter-institutionalism concentric with expanding conflict--in fact, we will create an organizational-movement culture whether we like it or not, and suffer or benefit according to how attractive it seems relative to the alternatives.
