Review: Towards a New Radical Agenda: A Critique of Mainstreamed Sociological Radicalism Author(s): Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Reviewed work(s): Enriching

the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline by Rhonda F. Levine Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Mar., 2006), pp. 111-114 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30045724 Accessed: 13/08/2009 16:26
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Symposium However, once we acknowledge that we are living in a world that is changing in intrinsically uncertain ways, what kinds of moral choices are before us? This is the question that Weber raised, but never answered in a satisfactory manner, when he spoke of substantive rationality. (Incidentally, we should remember that "substantive" is a very bad translationof the German original which was materiell, and that we should really be speaking of material rationality in its contrast with merely formal rationality.) Radical sociologists seem to think they have their moral choices clearly indicated. I would think ratherthat the subject is never really debated even by them, and certainly not within the confines of sociology. Weber raised the issues in his Munich lectures, but we-the Weberians, the Marxists,and all the others--

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have collectively buried these issues ever since. It will only be when we have faced up to the major intellectual questions before us (which seem to me to start with the epistemological questions), and then to the questions of what material rationality implies for us all, that we can get to the question that inspired radical sociology originally-the political implications of our intellectual and moral analyses. The radical sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s had less of a lasting effect than they had hoped, primarily because they took for the most part the shortcut of working back from their political objectives to the intellectual and moral tasks. Perhaps if we tried to work our way forward, from the intellectual analyses to the moral debates to the political conclusions, we might have a more long-lasting impact.

Towards a New RadicalAgenda:

A Critique of Mainstreamed Sociological Radicalism
EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA Duke University Tobe radical is to grasp the rootof the matter.But,for man, the root is man himself. -Karl Marx,Introductionto the Critique of Right" of Hegel's "Philosophy In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon stated that "Eachgeneration must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it." The work of the authors compiled in this edited collection represented an important moment in American history and, for those of us in the field of sociology, an epistemic break with Parsonian-inspiredsociology. Their work provided the theoretical weapons for my generation to reframe our agenda and enhance our sociological imagination. In short, their work provided the "mission" for many sociologists of my age. But we are now far removed from the sixties and seventies and, thus, it is time to assess how well their radicalism has aged. Have their views, as with good wine, improved with time? Or have they become rancid and stale? Therefore, with this evaluative goal in mind, I proceed in this essay as follows. First, I make some general comments about this

Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline, edited by Rhonda F. Levine. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2005. 357 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 1-59451-168-3. book as a book project. Second, I highlight succinctly a few of the articles in this collection that, for one reason or another, best withstood the test of time. Third,I discuss the radical project advanced by these authors and examine if it provides the "mission"for the new generation of radicals. Lastly, I outline a few elements that I believe a radical sociological project for the 21st century ought to include. This is a dandy of a book. Rhonda Levine has done a fabulous job of producing a very well-organized and edited book. The book begins with a 1972 essay by Richard Flacks conceptualizing what radical sociology should look like and ends with an essay by Michael Burawoy addressing the future of radical sociology. In between, we are treated to a "who is who" in the radical tradition 35, 2 Sociology Contemporary

112 Symposium (e.g., Therborn, Wright, Bonacich, etc.) based on articles originally writtenin the seventies in The Insurgent dealing with the issues of "Power and Class," "Class and Inequality,""Raceand Gender,"and "Capitalism and the World Economy." Levine did a masterfuljob of removing unnecessary material from the original articles while still maintaining the essence of the authors' arguments. This editing makes many of these articles much more readable. She also did something else which will be extremely useful for posterity: she asked each author to reflect on their piece and write a short comment on it. Hence, this book will be of immensurable value for those interested in the history of ideas and in the historyof sociology. I also believe this book can be used as a supplementary text in basic courses on political sociology and stratification at the graduate and even undergraduatelevel. The article by Richard Flacks is of historical interest and, if only for that, is a mustread. Reading this piece gives us the coordinates of thought among those who developed the notion of a "socialistsociology" in the 1960s and 1970s. Therborn'sarticle is still relevant as political scientists and political sociologists, despite years of radicalcritique, still operate with "subjectivists"and "functionalists"understanding of power. G. William Domhoff, the most clear and direct writer of this group, produced an analysis of power dynamics that allowed people to understand "who rules America"as well as how hate his they do so. Albeit many structuralists Domohoff has done a career "subjectivism," of producing data and analyses that have forced people to think and maybe act. Bowles and Gintis's piece is as relevanttoday as the day when it was written. Who has not used their work in "Introductionto Sociology" courses or in graduate seminars on education to show how class is reproduced in schools? And, lastly, the piece that I find the most useful in this collection-and the most advanced for its time-is that of Zillah Eisenstein on "capitalist patriarchy."Eisenstein wrote about intersectionality, the classgender nexus, and articulation in 1977. And her thinking did not stagnate as she followed this piece with work dealing with race and sexuality. Now let me proceed with the hard task of criticizing the radical sociological and politiContemporarySociology 35, 2

cal project offered by many of these authors. And I do so with some trepidation as some of the authors in this volume are my mentors, some are my friends, and some are both. However, and as consolation for those whose ideas I will criticize, I am already of the age when people have begun criticizing my work. As radicals, we should expect to be spanked by a younger generation searching to develop their critical voice. One caveat before I proceed with my critique-I am making general comments about the radicalism of this generation, but my comments, obviously, do not apply to every member of this generation. The first limitation of the radical project of this cohort was its whiteness. Flack acknowledges this as much when he describes his reference group as "all-white male" (p. 14). These radicals hardly ever included any minorities in their intellectual midst (check the acknowledgements of their books), hardly ever cited minority scholars (check the references in their books), and ended up, with a few notable exceptions, denying the structural import of race in America. This is astounding considering that so many claimed the civil rights movement had a profound influence on them. Their organizational and intellectual whiteness explains in part why these radicals were not able to connect in a meaningful way with the radical efforts of black and Latinosociologists in the 1970s and 1980s. Second, this movement was not only mostly white, but also mostly male. Not surprisingly then, issues of gender were not dealt with in a forthrightmanner. I, for example, trained by members of this generation in Puerto Rico and the United States, could not understand in the early eighties how patriarchy could be viewed as a category of equal magnitude to the capitalist mode of production. And, like most Marxists of my generation, I believed "sexism" and "racism"were ideologies used by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class. The third limitation was the class reductionism of this generation. Their marriage to a narrow-Marxist perspective limited them severely-and I say narrow because there were already some openings to think of the class-race nexus (e.g., the work of W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson among others) and class-gender nexus (e.g.,

Symposium Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldtia, etc.). Hence, many of them were unable to appreciate the radical possibilities of the race- and genderbased mobilizations of the eighties and nineties. Worse, lacking the tools to fully appreciate how race and class are central cleavages of modernity, too many members of this radical generation opposed the praxis of minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and other subaltern folks as divisive "identitypolitics."Todd Gitlin is a prime example of this, but unfortunately, some of the authors in this volume seem to hold this view, too! Fourth, with a few notable exceptions, these authors were-and still are-first-world centered. The problem with this fixation is that their theories of class, state, and politics were accordingly driven by the ideas and experiences of ten percent of humanity. Hence, theorizations they advanced, I suggest, were ultimately of limited use and applicability for most of the societies and peoples in the world-system (on this, see the recent work of Amin, Wallerstein, and most notably, of Anibal Quijano and his colleagues on the subject of the "colonialityof power"). To this day, the Eurocentric imagination still weighs like a nightmare on the brain of many of these authors and therefore, they do not bother to read the radical scholarship produced by Indian, African, Caribbean, and LatinAmerican scholars. Fifth, too many members of this generation became enamored with theory and forgot one of the central radical elements of the Marxisttradition: its unrepentant call for revolutionary praxis to "change the world."They traded the streets for the comfort of the sweets and claimed this trade was "revolutionary." And in their quest for theoretical purity, some became "analytical Marxists" and, much like Althusser, they decided to excise "unscientific"concepts and ideas from Marxism such as "consciousness," "alienation," "dialectics," and, more recently, the "labor theory of value" (see Wright's comment on page 253). Lacking direct connections to social movements, the radicalism of many of these radicals became inorganic. Sixth, albeit many of these authors believe they won the battle against mainstream conservative sociology (see, for example, Burawoy's contribution in this volume), one wonders about the perils of incorporation. What happens when radicals get jobs at

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Wisconsin, Berkeley, and other major universities? What happens when their articles are published by the American Sociological Review and their books are published by the University of CaliforniaPress?What happens when their income rises significantly and they no longer have to deal with the threat of insecurity, instability, and unemployment? What happens, in short, when they join the sociological elite? I will tell you what can happen (it definitely did not happen to all the members of this generation) and what I have seen happen to members of this radical generation. And my remarks apply to this generation as well as to mine. (As I write this article, I am now a member of Duke's sociology department and have privileges similar to those that have accrued to my friends and mentors. Thus, my comments here are also a sort of self-criticism.) First, being professors in major universities means that we have to tone down our politics. We have to become careful in our public statements and interventions. We have to think before we sign a petition or support a cause (e.g., how many of these radicals supported the efforts of minority scholars to challenge the ASA Council's decision on ASR a few years ago or signed the petition to take to the ASA membership a ballot to decide on an anti-war resolution two years ago?). Second, when we publish in ASR or AJS, we abdicate formal and maybe even substantive radicalism. We write for a certain audience and in a certain way and that audience, whether it loves or hates us, does its best to co-opt us. We become reviewers for these journals, members of their editorial boards, and guest editors and even editors of these journals. And when we do so, do we break with the canonical rules of normative sociology or do we reproduce their rules and become gate-keepers? Third,when we make some real money in this business and have stability,we are affected by the process that Marx described so well in The German Ideology ("Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life"). That is, we may believe our radicalism is beyond reproach, but when people perceive us as Gucci Marxists, we must pay attention to that perception and to the possibility that it has a material foundation.
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114 Symposium criticalof them. Hence, sociology, as a Lastly,when we are heralded as academic stars and join the center of the discipline as discipline, is part of the problem and members of ASA Council, as Presidents of we must remain critical of its social ASA, as distinguished scholars, as name project (greasing the wheels of capichairs in universities, we must watch out! Our talism through reformso that the promove from the periphery to the core may cess of accumulation runs smoothly) have changed the discipline somewhat, but it and skeptical of its various lullabies has also transformedus and our radicalism. of what segmentof the socioregardless Hence, I remain deeply skeptical about logical community they come from. the depth of the break we created in sociology. The inclusion of class as a variable, the 4) Democraticsocialism is still our goal, discussion of Marx as a central theorist, and but not based on dated notions of "the the like does not mean we gave birth to radindustrial working class" or on the ical or socialist sociology. Unlike my friend notion that class-based politics is the and comrade Michael Burawoy, I do not only way of uniting the people here or believe for a second that "The world lags elsewhere. behind sociology" and that "Now the point is not to transform sociology but to transform 5) We must seriously question the the world" (p. 314). Sociology, I contend, is Eurocentric assumptionsand the white still in deep need of transformationand socinationalism(Americanism, if you will) ologists need to learn from the real experithat have plagued sociology. This is ments of anti-systemic social movements in importantas it is an obstacle for all of the world and not the other way around. our radicalinterventions. Now, I outline some elements I believe will be central for the reconstruction of the 6) We must struggle against the demons radical sociology project in the 21st century: of complacency, objectivism,depoliticization, and incorporation. If we 1) If race, class, and gender are articulatremainin the core of sociology (and I ed in a matrixof dominationin moddoubt that if we regain our radical em societies,we mustdeveloppractices spirit,we will remain in the core), we and theories that fit this realityrather must contend with the positive as well than continue our quasi-religious as the negative effects of that location. belief in prefabricatedmodels of collective action (e.g., "Workersof the But these are just pointers and, since I am world. . ."). getting old and have just moved to the core of yesteryears, we 2) Fromthe radicalism of the discipline myself, I suspect the new must retainthe insistence on the cengeneration of sociologists coming up will not tral role of praxis. But we must look trust my instincts (and I do not blame you). with disdain on their infatuationwith That new generation will carve its own raditheoretical correctness and their chic cal script "out of relative obscurity" and I radicalelitism. trust they will do a much better job at deep3) The disciplines are implicated with ening the radical imagination than my generation-and those before us--did. power and, therefore,we must remain

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