CSUN –– SOC 468&468S -
KARAGEORGIS – EXAM 2 PREPARATION
SEVENTY (70) of the following quotes/passages will appear on Exam 2. They all come from assigned/required readings (ONLINE and from S.T.C.E.) by theorists themselves (no secondary material) covered or to be covered between Exam 1 and Exam 2 on your syllabus. You will be asked to identify the author (by last name) of each one. Each correct answer will earn you four (4) points towards your final grade. The order in which the quotes will appear on the actual exam will differ from the order in which they appear below. In addition, there may be multiple versions of the actual exam, each containing a different set of SEVENTY passages.
[SOC 468 Practice EXAM 2 (Version 1) ; SOC 468 Practice EXAM 2 (Version 2) ; SOC 468 Practice EXAM 2 (Version 3) ; CLICK HERE for Practice EXAM 2 (Version 4) ]
1. “[I]n principle [,] the concepts with which we try to analyze the dynamics of social systems ought to be equally applicable to the problems of stability and instability, continuance and change of social structures [.]”
2. “[T]he presence of a normative order, or common value-system, does not mean that conflict has disappeared, or been resolved in some way.”
3. “Any study of social change, defined even in terms of change in institutionalized value patterns, must be based on concepts that can interrelate the realistic and normative structure of the situation with the resultant actions of individuals and groups.”
4. “[W]hen we talk of the stability or instability of a social system, we mean [,] more that anything else [,] the success or failure of the normative order in regulating conflicts of interest.”
5. “Sociological theory is concerned, or should be, with the social and psychological processes whereby social structure in [the] dual sense [of a normative and a factual order] conditions human motives and actions. The existence of a normative order in no way entails that individuals will act in accordance with it; in the same way [,] the existence of a given factual order in no way means that certain kinds of behavior result.”
6. “Just as the problem of order is not just a function of the existence of a normative order and the social mechanisms which procure motivation to conform with it but also of the existence of a social substratum which structures interests differentially in the social system, so the problem of conflict is not reducible to the analysis of the division of labor and the group interests consequent on it. It is rather that both conflict and order are a function of the interaction of norm and substratum.”
7. “The generation of conflict, which may be taken as index of social instability, is never a simple matter of a conflict of material interest but also involves the normative definition of the situation.”
8. “It is not only the continual pressure of normative expectations exerted through the processes of socialization and social control, but also the range of differential opportunities created by the division of labor, that form the effective social environment of action.”
9. “Each social system contains elements of strain and of potential conflict; if in the analysis of the social structure of a system these elements are ignored, if the adjustment of patterned relations is the only focus of attention, then it is not possible to anticipate basic social change.”
10. “The sources and incidence of conflicting behaviour in each particular system vary according to the type of structure, the patterns of social mobility, of ascribing and achieving status and of allocating scarce power and wealth, as well as the degree to which a specific form of distribution of power, resources and status is accepted by the component actors within the different sub-systems.”
11. “Whether given forms of conflict will lead to changes in the social system or to breakdown and to formation of a new system will depend on the rigidity and resistance to change, or inversely on the elasticity of the control mechanisms of the system.”
12. “However, mere 'frustration' will not lead to a questioning of the legitimacy of the position of the vested interests, and hence to conflict. Levels of aspiration as well as feelings of deprivation are relative to institutionalized expectations and are established through comparison.”
13. “Thus it will be well to distinguish between those departures from the norms of a society which consist in mere 'deviation' and those which involve the formation of distinctive patterns and new value systems.”
14. “When changes in the equilibrium of a society lead to the formation of new groupings or to the strengthening of existing groupings that set themselves the goal of overcoming resistance of vested interests through conflict, changes in structural relations, as distinct from simple 'maladjustment', can be expected.
15. “A well-integrated society will tolerate and even welcome group conflict; only a weakly integrated one must fear it.”
16. “[T]he criticism of the unapplicability of the structural-functional theory for the analysis of conflict is directed only against a claim of generality of this theory which leaves untouched its competence with respect to the problem of integration.”
17. “[T]he structural origin of social conflict [is located] in the dominance relations which prevail within certain units of social organization [, i.e. ‘imperatively co-ordinated group[s]’].”
18. “[I] shall designate the roles in which the expectation of the exercise of authority is attached as ‘positive dominance roles’ and, conversely, the roles without authority privileges as ‘negative dominance roles.’”
19. “Thus the task of the theory of conflict turns out to be to identify the […] conditions [of organization, conflict and change] and to determine as sharply as possible their respective weight – ideally, by quantitative measure.”
20. “There is a good deal of evidence for micro-solidarity in everyday life; sometimes, under conditions of massive conflict group mobilization, this solidarity is temporarily expanded to large social movements. The macro structure of society, on the other hand, is well explained by the lineup of material and power resources, and the ideological domination which results from them.”
21. “Potential conflicting interests become effective to the extent that they are mobilized, relative to the mobilization of opposing interests.”
22. “Members of an interest group which is highly mobilized by social rituals thus acquire not only a sense of their own identity but also a polarized sense of membership and a symbolic worldview which similarly dichotomizes the world; as individuals they are charged up with emotional energy to carry on battles on behalf of their group.”
23. “Conflict turns the wheels of history, because the endpoint of one conflict is a new lineup of resources, which in turn become the basis for the formation of new interests and new conflicts.”
24. “[S]olidarity has not only a positive face but also a negative one; the group which is most morally committed, its members most dedicated to the altruistic, self-sacrificing tasks of defending the collective whole, is also the group which is most morally self-righteous.”
25. “Decreases in conflict come about by and large by the opposite of the processes which mobilize conflict.”
26. “Deescalation of relatively mild forms of group conflict tends to take place by bureaucratization.”
27. “Bureaucracy [i.e. formal rules, permanent organizational positions, and specialized personnel] is, to a large extent, a precipitate of past social conflicts. […] The result of conflict is never the utopia envisioned in the movements of intense ideological mobilization; there are hard-won gains, usually embedded in an expanded bureaucratic shell. Those who would like to debureaucratize today’s society are ahistorical romanticists; what they are asking is to clear away the result of victories by past conflict movements.”
28. “An interaction ritual can reach a high degree of emotional intensity only if there is a single focus of attention. Thus, although there are numerous lines of potential conflict around the various distributions of economic power and status resources, only one conflict can have a high degree of emotional and symbolic intensity at a time. Insofar as there are a plethora of non-coinciding lines of group conflict […] a long series of disparate conflicts tends to demobilize each in turn.”
29. “American society is settling into a Marxian-style structural crisis, but without a Marxian class mobilization. To the contrary, the fragmentation of conflict group[s] makes a unified class-based movement reacting to the economic crisis both ideologically and organizationally remote.”
30. “[T]he more people who compete for educational credentials, the higher become the conventional educational requirements for jobs. “
31. “[I]f one is pursuing the ideal of reducing social inequality, decredentialing jobs and eliminating the inflationary educational marketplace would be structurally necessary.”
32. “The prevailing cynicism among students about education is hardly surprising; they are aware that the sheer number of credits and a person’s relative standing in the queue of degree levels is what determines his/her career, and that the content taught in classrooms is a temporary commodity needed only for passing the course.”
33. “The mass inflationary credential-producing education of the future may not be very pleasant to live in, especially if one is an educator who values cultural ideals or an egalitarian ideology. Nevertheless, it is a solution to the structural crisis in employment, and it appeals to the material interests of educators, since it makes their jobs structurally indispensable.”
34. “[C]onflict can keep going longest when it is mild rather than severe, when it is institutionalized at moderate levels, with small amounts of violence and large amounts of organizational maneuvering.”
35. “The distinction between a society where [the commodity-exchange] form [of metabolic change] is dominant, permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. For depending on which is the case, all the subjective phenomena in the societies concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways.”
36. “Where
the commodity is universal, it manifests itself differently from the commodity
as a particular, isolated, non-dominant phenomenon.”
37. “Subjectively - where the market economy has been fully
developed - a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a
commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of
society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer
article.”
38. “[L]abour,
abstract, equal, comparable labour, measurable with increasing precision
according to the time socially necessary for its accomplishment, the labour of
the capitalist division of labour existing both as the presupposition and the
product of capitalist production, is born only in the course of the development
of the capitalist system. Only then does it become a category of society
influencing decisively the objective form of things and people in the society
thus emerging, their relation to nature and the possible relations of men to
each other.”
39. “With
the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work-process (in Taylorism) this
rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his
psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in
opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialized
rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.”
40. “The unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value: as society becomes more radically capitalistic, the increasing technical autonomy of the special operations involved in production is expressed also, as an economic autonomy, as the growing relativisation of the commodity character of a product at the various stages of production.”
41. “In
consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process, the human qualities and
idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when
contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational
predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man
appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a
mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.”
42. “In
this environment, where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable,
physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the
scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object
of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented.”
43. “Reification
requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of
commodity exchange. The separation of the producer from his means of
production, the dissolution and destruction of all ‘natural’ production units,
etc., and all the social and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of
modern capitalism tend to replace ‘natural’ relations which exhibit human
relations more plainly by rationally reified relations.”
44. “The atomisation of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover everything - for the first time in history, the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process - and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws. (By contrast, the organic unities of pre-capitalist societies organised their metabolism largely in independence of each other).”
45. “[The
fate of each individual worker in a capitalist society] is typical of society
as a whole in that this self-objectification, this transformation of a human
function into a commodity, reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising
function of the commodity relation.”
46. “Just
as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself
economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification
progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the
consciousness of man.”
47. “The
divorce of the phenomena of reification from their economic bases, and from the
vantage point from which alone they can be understood, is facilitated by the
fact that the [capitalist] process of transformation must embrace every
manifestation of the life of society if the preconditions for the complete
self-realisation of capitalist production are to be fulfilled. Thus, capitalism
has created a form for the state and a system of law corresponding to its needs
and harmonising with its own structure. The structural similarity is so great
that no truly perceptive historian of modern capitalism could fail to notice
it.”
48. “For
the essence of rational calculation is based ultimately upon the recognition
and the inclusion in one’s calculations of the inevitable chain of cause and
effect in certain events - independently of individual ‘caprice’. In
consequence, man’s activity does not go beyond the correct calculation of the possible
outcome of the sequence of events (the ‘laws’ of which he finds ‘ready-made’),
and beyond the adroit evasion of disruptive ‘accidents’ by means of protective
devices and preventive measures (which are based in their turn on the
recognition and application of similar laws).”
49. “The
distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur
faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with
the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is
purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference
in the structure of consciousness.”
50. “Bureaucracy implies the adjustment of one’s way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness to the general socioeconomic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case of the worker in particular business concerns. The formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civil service, etc., signifies objectively and factually, a comparable reduction of all social functions to their elements, a comparable search for the rational formal laws of these carefully segregated partial systems. Subjectively, the divorce between work and the individual capacities and needs of the worker produces comparable effects upon consciousness. This results in an inhuman, standardised division of labour analogous to that which we have found in industry on the technological and mechanical plane.”
51. “The
specific type of bureaucratic ‘conscientiousness’ and impartiality, the
individual bureaucrat’s inevitable total subjection to a system of relations
between the things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his
‘honour’ and his ‘sense of responsibility’ that exact this total submission,
all this points to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of
Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics.”
52. “The
transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’
cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the
gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the
whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an
organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose
of’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no
natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can
bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being
subjected increasingly to this reifying process.”
53. “This
rationalisation of the world appears to be complete; it seems to penetrate the
very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature. It is limited, however, by
its own formalism. That is to say, the rationalisation of isolated aspects of
life results in the creation of formal laws. All these things do join together
into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of
general ‘laws’. But the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter
of these laws, upon which disregard their authority as laws is based, makes
itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. This incoherence becomes
particularly egregious in periods of crisis.”
54. “It is evident that the whole structure of capitalist production rests on the interaction between a necessity subject to strict laws in all isolated phenomena, and the relative irrationality of the total process. […]The capitalist process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance.”
55. “As
the division of labour becomes more pronounced and more rational, [the tendency
of making artificially isolated partial functions autonomous and
their tendency, in turn, to develop through their own momentum and in
accordance with their own special laws independently of the other partial
functions of society (or that part of the society to which they belong)] naturally
increases in proportion. For the more highly developed [the division of labor]
is, the more powerful become the claims to status and the professional
interests of the ‘specialists’ who are the living embodiments of such
tendencies. And this centrifugal movement is not confined to aspects of a
particular sector. It is even more in evidence when we consider the great
spheres of activity created by the division of labour.”
56. “[I]t is the very success with which the
economy is totally rationalised and transformed into an abstract and
mathematically orientated system of formal ‘laws’ that creates the
methodological barrier to understanding the phenomenon of crisis. In moments of
crisis, the qualitative existence of the ‘things’ that lead their lives beyond
the purview of economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-themselves,
as use-values, suddenly becomes the decisive factor.”
57.
“The reified world appears henceforth quite
definitively - and in philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism’ it is
potentiated still further - as the only possible world, the only conceptually
accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. Whether this
gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair, whether we search for a path
leading to ‘life’ via irrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely
nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact.”
58. “Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [/’attributed’] to a particular typical position in the process of production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual-and these actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness.”
59. “Regarded abstractly and formally, then, class consciousness implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness of one's own socio-historical and economic condition. This condition is given as a definite structural relation, a definite formal nexus which appears to govern the whole of life. The ‘falseness.’ the illusion implicit in this situation is in no sense arbitrary; it is simply the intellectual reflex of the objective economic structure.”
60. “Bourgeoisie and proletariat are the only pure classes in bourgeois society. They are the only classes whose existence and development are entirely dependent on the course taken by the modern evolution of production and only from the vantage point of these classes can a plan for the total organization of society even be imagined.”
61. “[T]here is an insoluble contradiction running through the internal structure of capitalism between the social and the individual principle, i.e., between the function of capital as private property and its objective economic function.”
62. “Bourgeois thought observes economic life consistently and necessarily from the standpoint of the individual capitalist and this naturally produces a sharp confrontation between the individual and the overpowering suprapersonal "law of nature" which propels all social phenomena. This leads both to the antagonism between individual and class interests in the event of conflict (which, it is true, rarely becomes as acute among the [other] ruling classes as in the bourgeoisie), and also to the logical impossibility of discovering theoretical and practical solutions to the problems created by the capitalist system of production.”
63. “The older ‘natural’ and ‘conservative’ forms of domination had left unmolested the forms of production of whole sections of the people they ruled and therefore exerted by and large a traditional and unrevolutionary influence. Capitalism, by contrast, is a revolutionary form par excellence. The fact that [the bourgeoisie] must necessarily remain in ignorance of the objective economic limitations of its own system expresses itself as an internal, dialectical contradiction in its class consciousness.”
64. “Thus the situation in which the bourgeoisie finds itself determines the function of its class consciousness in its struggle to achieve control of society. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie really does embrace the whole of society; it really does attempt to organize the whole of society in its own interest (and in this it has had some success). To achieve this it was forced both to develop a coherent theory of economics, politics and society (which in itself presupposes and amounts to a ‘Weltanschauung’), and also to make conscious and sustain its faith in its own mission to control and organize society.
65. “[T]he rule of the bourgeoisie can only be the rule of a minority. Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority so that the need to deceive the other classes and to insure that their class consciousness remain amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime. (Consider here the theory of the state that stands ‘above’ class antagonisms, or the notion of an ‘impartial’ system of justice.)”
66. “[F]rom a very early stage the ideological history of the bourgeoisie was nothing but a desperate resistance to every insight into the true nature of the society it had created and thus to a real understanding of its class situation.”
67. “For the proletariat the truth is a weapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory. This makes more comprehensible the desperate fury with which bourgeois science assails historical materialism: for as soon as the bourgeoisie is forced to take up its stand on this terrain, it is lost. And, at the same time, this explains why the proletariat and only the proletariat can discern in the correct understanding of the nature of society a power-factor of the first, and perhaps decisive importance.”
68. “The unique function of consciousness in the class struggle of the proletarian has consistently been overlooked by the vulgar-marxists who have substituted a petty ‘Realpolitik’ for the great battle of principle which reaches back to the ultimate problems of the objective economic process.”
69. “When the vulgar-marxists detach themselves from this central point of view, i.e., from the point where a proletarian class consciousness arises, they thereby place themselves on the level of consciousness of the bourgeoisie. And that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superior to the proletariat both economically and ideologically can come as a surprise only to a vulgar-marxist.”
70. “As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organizational and every other advantage, the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the center as a coherent whole. This means that it is able to act in such a way as to change reality; in the class consciousness of the proletariat theory and practice coincide and so it can consciously throw the weight of its action onto the scales of history – and this is the deciding factor.”
71. “[The vulgar-marxists] reduce theory to the ‘scientific’ treatment of the symptoms of social change and as for practice they are themselves reduced to being buffeted about aimlessly and uncontrollably by the various elements of the process they had hoped to master.”
72. “The proletariat must act in a proletarian manner, but its own vulgar-marxist theory blocks its vision of the right course to adopt. The dialectical contradiction between the [course of action to which the economic situation necessarily commits the proletariat (regardless of its own thoughts on the subject)] and the vulgar-marxist (bourgeois) theory becomes more and more acute. As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the power of a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion.”
73. “[W]hen the final economic crisis of capitalism develops, the fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e., on its class consciousness.”
74. “Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.”
75. “[E]very ‘essential’ social group which emerges into history out of the preceding economic structure, and as an expression of a development of this structure, has found […] categories of intellectuals already in existence and which seemed indeed to represent an historical continuity uninterrupted even by the most complicated and radical changes in political and social forms.”
76. “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
77. “One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing toward dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.”
78. “Naturally this need to provide the widest base possible for the selection and elaboration of the top intellectual qualifications -- i.e., to give a democratic structure to high culture and top-level technology -- is not without its disadvantages: it creates the possibility of vast crises of unemployment for the middle intellectual strata, and in all modern societies this actually takes place.”
79. “Strata have grown up which traditionally "produce" intellectuals and these strata coincide with those which have specialized in "saving," i.e., the petty and middle landed bourgeoisie and certain strata of the petty and middle urban bourgeoisie.”
80. “The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, ‘mediated’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘functionaries’.”
81. “What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government.”
82. “The functions in question are precisely organizational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group's ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise:
1. “The "spontaneous" consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is "historically" caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.”
2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.”
83. “The function of organizing social hegemony and state domination certainly gives rise to a particular division of labor and therefore to a whole hierarchy of qualifications in some of which there is no apparent attribution of directive or organizational functions.”
84. “The process of historical development is a unity in time through which the present contains the whole of the past and in the present is realized that part of the past which is ‘essential’ -- with no residue of any ‘unknowable’ representing the true ‘essence’. The part which is lost, i.e., not transmitted dialectically in the historical process, was in itself of no import, casual and contingent ‘dross’, chronicle and not history, a superficial and negligible episode in the last analysis.”
85. “Politics in fact is at any given time the reflection of the tendencies of development in the structure, but it is not necessarily the case that these tendencies must be realized. A structural phase can be correctly studied and analyzed only after it has gone through its whole process of development, and not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicit proviso that one is dealing with hypotheses.”
86. “It is not sufficiently borne in mind that many political acts [, rather than being immediate expression of the structure,] are due [, instead,] to internal necessities of an organizational character, that is they are tied to the need to give coherence to a party, a group, a society.”
87. “If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realized which alone is a social force --with the creation of the ‘historical bloc’.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
88. “The reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.”
89. “[I]t is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labor power.”
90. “The whole of the political class struggle revolves around the State [, b]y which I mean around the possession, i.e. the seizure and conservation [,] of State power by a certain class or by an alliance between classes or class fractions. [Thus, I] distinguish between State power (conservation of State power or seizure of State power), the objective of the political class struggle on the one hand, and the State apparatus on the other.”
91. “[The State apparatus] may survive political events which affect the possession of State power.”
92. “[T]he objective of the class struggle concerns State power, and in consequence [,] the use of the State apparatuses by the classes (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes) holding State power as a function of their class objectives.”
93. “Even presupposing that it exists, the unity that constitutes th[e] plurality of ISAs as a body is not immediately visible.”
94. “The domain of the State escapes [the distinction between the public and the private that is internal to bourgeois law, valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’,] because […] the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private.”
95. “Of course, it is a quite different thing to act by laws and decrees in the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to ‘act’ through the intermediary of the ruling ideology in the Ideological States Apparatuses.”
96. “To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses.”
97. “[T]he class struggle extends beyond the ISAs because it is rooted elsewhere than in ideology, in the Infrastructure, in the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and constitute the base for class relations.”
98. “[F]or the most part, [the reproduction of the relations of production] is secured by the exercise of State power in the State Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive) State Apparatus, on the other the Ideological State Apparatuses.”
99. “[T]he unity of the different Ideological State Apparatuses is secured, usually in contradictory forms, by the ruling ideology, the ideology of the ruling class.”
100. “In fact, it is the [Ideological State Apparatuses] which largely secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production, behind a ‘shield’ provided by the repressive State apparatus. It is [in the Ideological State Apparatuses] that the role of the ruling ideology is heavily concentrated, the ideology of the ruling class, which holds State power. It is the intermediation of the ruling ideology that ensures a (sometimes teeth-gritting) ‘harmony’ between the repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and between the different State Ideological Apparatuses.”
101. “[I]t is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced.”
102. “[T]he peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we call history [, i.e.] the history of class societies.”
103. “[T]he ideal […] and spiritual existence of ‘ideas' arises exclusively in an ideology of the 'idea' and of ideology, and let me add, in an ideology of what seems to have ‘founded' this conception since the emergence of the sciences, i.e. what the practicians of the sciences represent to themselves in their spontaneous ideology as 'ideas', true or false.”
104. “[T]he ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing in the 'ideas' that his ‘consciousness' inspires in him and freely accepts, must 'act according to his ideas', must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice. If he does not do so, 'that is wicked'.”
105. “[A]ll ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.”
106. “[T]hose who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological'. […] As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself.”
107. “[T]here is no practice except by and in an ideology; [. . .] there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.”
108. “[A]ll ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects [; it is] nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence of that functioning.”
109. “[I]deology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing [.]”
110. “The more intense an individual’s concern with power over things, the more will things dominate him, the more will he lack any genuine individual traits, and the more will his mind be transformed into an automaton of formalized reason.”
111. “In our era of large economic combines and mass culture, the principle of conformity emancipates itself from its individualistic veil, is openly proclaimed and raised to the rank of an ideal per se.”
112. “Just as the slogans of rugged individualism are politically useful to large trusts in seeking exemption from social control, so in mass culture the rhetoric of individualism, by imposing patterns for collective imitation, disavows the very principle to which it gives lip service.”
113. “Modern mass culture, although drawing freely upon stale cultural values, glorifies the world as it is.”
114. “The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of any industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous.”
115. “Workers today, no less than the rest of the population, are intellectually better trained, better informed and much less naïve. The workers […] will join in any persecution of a capitalist or politician who has been singled out because he has violated the rules of the game; but they do not question the rules in themselves. They have learned to take social injustice – even inequity within their own group – as a powerful fact, and to take powerful facts as the only things to be respected. Their minds are closed to dreams of a basically different world and to concepts that, instead of being mere classification of facts, are oriented toward real fulfillment of their dreams.”
116. “It is not technology or the motive to self-preservation that in itself accounts for the decline of the individual; it is not production per se, but the forms in which it takes place – the interrelationships of human beings within the specific framework of industrialism. Human toil [,] and research and invention [are] a response to the challenge of necessity. The pattern becomes absurd only when people make toil, research, and inventions into idols.”
117. “The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both [,] it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. […] [A]lthough the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, they are an object of calculation, an appendage of the machinery. The consumer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not is subject but its object.”
118. “The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses.”
119. “The cultural commodities of the [culture] industry are governed [. . .] by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms.”
120. It may also be supposed that the consciousness of the consumers [of the products of the culture industry] themselves is split between the prescribed fun which is supplied them by the culture industry and a not particularly well-hidden doubt about its blessings. […] People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification, they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. […] […] Without admitting it [,] they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.”
121. “The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.”
122. “[E]nlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop. [T]he culture industry is not among the least responsible for making [people] into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit.”
123. “Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole.”
124. “By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian.”
125. “For any consciousness and conscience, for any experience which does not accept the prevailing societal interest as the supreme law of thought and behavior, the established universe of needs and satisfactions is a fact to be questioned – questioned in terms of truth and falsehood.”
126. “’Truth’ and ‘falsehood’ of needs designate objective conditions to the extent to which the universal satisfaction of vital needs and, beyond it, the progressive alleviation of toil and poverty, are universally valid standards.”
127. “The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation – liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable – while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society.”
128. “The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. […] Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.”
129. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs it has produced.”
130. “Today th[e] private sphere has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long ceased to be confined to the factory.”
131. “The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals’ recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole.”
132. “The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces ‘sell’ or impose the social system as a whole. The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative changes.”
133. “Validated by the accomplishment of science and technology, justified by the growing productivity, the status quo defies all transcendence. Faced with the possibility of pacification on the grounds of its technical and intellectual achievements, the mature industrial society closes itself against this alternative.”
134. “The highest productivity of labor can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs.”
135. “With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom – in the sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus – is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness.”
136. “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing.”
137. “The tolerance of positive thinking is enforced tolerance – enforced not by any terroristic agency but by the overwhelming, anonymous power and efficiency of the technological society. As such it permeates the general consciousness – and the consciousness of the critic. The absorption of the negative by the positive is validated in the daily experience which obfuscates the distinction between rational appearance and irrational reality.” ODM, Ch.9
138. “Within the established societies, the continued application of scientific rationality would have reached a terminal point with the mechanization of all socially necessary but individually repressive labor (‘socially necessary’ here includes all performances which can be exercised more effectively by machines, even if these performances produce luxuries and waste rather than necessities). But this stage would also be the end and limit of the scientific rationality in its established structure and direction. Further progress would mean the break, the turn of quantity into quality. It would open the possibility of an essentially new human reality – namely, existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled vital needs. Under such conditions, the scientific project itself would be free for trans-utilitarian ends, and free for the ‘art of living’ beyond the necessities and luxuries of domination. In other words, the completion of the technological reality would be not only the prerequisite, but also the rationale for transcending the technological reality.” ODM, Ch.9
139. “Civilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality of pacification, organon of the “art of life.” The function of Reason then converges with the function of Art.” ODM, Ch.9
140. “To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.” ODM, Ch.9
141. “Beyond the personal realm, self-determination presupposes free available energy which is not expended in superimposed material and intellectual labor. It must be free energy also in the sense that it is not channeled into the handling of goods and services which satisfy the individual, while rendering him incapable of achieving an existence of his own, unable to grasp the possibilities which are repelled by his satisfaction.” ODM, Ch.9
142. “The creation of repressive needs has long since become part of socially necessary labor – necessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.” ODM, Ch.9
143. “No matter how obvious the irrational character of the whole may manifest itself and, with it, the necessity of change, insight into necessity has never sufficed for seizing the possible alternatives. Confronted with the omnipresent efficiency of the given system of life, its alternatives have always appeared utopian. And insight into necessity, the consciousness of the evil state, will not suffice even at the stage where the accomplishments of science and the level of productivity have eliminated the utopian features of the alternatives – where the established reality rather than its opposite is utopian.” ODM, Ch.10
144. “Nothing indicates that it will be a good end. The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concessions to the underdog, and their armed forces sufficiently trained and equipped to take care of emergency situations. However, the spectre is there again, inside and outside the frontiers of the advanced societies. The facile historical parallel with the barbarians threatening the empire of civilization prejudges the issue; the second period of barbarism may well be the continued empire of civilization itself. But the chance is that, in this period, the historical extremes may meet again: the most advanced consciousness of humanity and its most exploited force. It is nothing but a chance. The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.” ODM, Ch.10