As a short introduction, I am Bob Robinson, a PhD student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, USA--just down the road from where Judith teaches at UNC.  I am currently teaching sociological research methods and am an academic advisor at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia.  My main interests concern helping working class people in the US to understand that the workings of the capitalist system do not benefit them as much as many of them seem to believe and that they share common interests with workers from every nation in the world.  That is why I like to focus on my teaching and advising duties.  I am trying to help working class students develop a critical consciousness to current economic and power relations, because I believe it is the working class, not intellectuals, who will need to implement aspects of their culture to overthrow current ways of relating in the economic realm.  Marx seemed to think that the workers already have the understandings to relate in a more egalitarian way than members of the bourgeoisie do.   I think that was why Marx was so sure about the revolution.  I agree with Marx on this matter, and I use my research (which is almost all participant observation) to find ways that workers relate with one another on the jobsite that are not alienating and exploitative.  I see so many aspects of a spirit of cooperation within work groups that I would like to see carry over into more aspects of their lives and to the working class as a whole. 

I am a 42 year old PhD student. I have taken a long and winding route throughout my academic career. While going to school (often part-time for financial reasons), I also have spent much of my time working on residential construction sites, mainly in painting and wood floor refinishing, though I have done a little work in just about every other trade within construction as well. My father is a painting contractor, and I started working on jobs with him when I was 12, so I have quite a few years of experience.

I think that this experience in the working class (with whom I still identify) has given me a unique perspective about academia. To me the academy seems to be dominated by middle class rather than working class values. Since I identify with, and probably most importantly respect, these workers, I have a unique insight into their lives that many academics would have trouble understanding. I recognize and embrace this bias that I have towards the working class culture. And I also recognize that I need to constantly critique this bias within myself.

---

I do not usually write in English. I hope I can write in a way you can understand.

I will present my self, shortly. António Pedro Dores, born 1956

(I am a southern European who have experienced fascism in my youth and a political and cultural revolution with a marxist defeat in my own country, Portugal 1974-76).

I teach sociology in Lisbon University. I used to work on Information Society issues: how computers change society? In 1999 I decided to use my short experience (since 1996) on denouncing secret crimes in jail by request of inmates. I become specialist on prisons. I use sociology as a tool to try to improving the rights of the prisoners. Better: to short the number of prisoners and other inmates by force.

I learn two contradictory facts: a) sociologists are against prisons, if we ask them; b) they feel repulse if one writes down what happens around prison institutions. I use to say that it was easier to publish when I wrote meaningless articles about computers than to publish non common sense thoughts about prisons.

Today I know sociologist feel repulsive about violence if violence is showed as every day life or as institutional organized force against people. As Michel Wiewiorka wrote recently, there is a lot of text of social science about violence since they look at quotidian violence produce by outlaws. Domestic violence, political violence, warfare violence, institutional violence (except police violence, in same cases) are not thematized by sociologists. They just feel sick.

There is a kind of labour division, and sociologists like to see themselves as being in the write side of life, helping other people and being blind to any violence. Violence is for other professionals to deal with.

I am developing the idea of opening social theory to a lost field of social research. I call my theme "social natures" and it can be exemplified by saying that mainstream sociology has "forgotten" to develop studies on "states of spirit": I mean Marxist revolutionary spirit, Weber´s spirit of capitalism, Durkheim´s collective counsciouness or morals. How people (individuals and popular masses) decide them selves to move on? That is my main question. 

My work is to built a critique of the social theory such as we (as a profession) have develop it in order to open a market in the west societies and to open social theory to new influences, such as concerning the sciences of law (I mean the discussions about social morals and the enforcement of law) and bio-medic sciences (I mean, to understand as a all mankind as part of the animal kingdom and as part of spiritual universe - a kind of discussion of the religious nature of human knowledge, as Durkheim propose it). Sociology, in my views, should be more therapeutic concerned and, for that propose, to discuss openly the morals, as positivists have done in the XIXth century.

 

My proposal of Social Natures is an ongoing result of a research and educational program I am developing since 2000 about prison issues and the radical ineffectiveness of social theory to understand prison institutions, as well as justice institutions.

It is developed in two Portuguese books I want to publish: prohibitionist spirit (an essay about the social nature that produce batter children and women in the quotidian and wars at global level) and submission spirit (a fieldwork with immigrants in Lisbon about what they know about justice institutions, and the way they build themselves to conquer citizenship in Portugal, knowing that they will be discriminated and eventually die on the process of being abused, at the same time they appreciate and want to join European rights, in order to be free of constraints of prior lives, where they come from).

I am writing, for the time being, a third book trying to compile pedagogical notes to teach my pupils what is and how they can use this sociological approach.  

 

In Lisbon I feel the same in a different ambience.

We are 10 million people coming since 1974 till today from a dictatorial agrarian society (50% of he people in 1960 lived of agriculture, mostly subsistence agriculture) Arabic like (if you may understand what I mean) to a modern society (today less than 10% live of agriculture, land being sell to corporations, desertification of the main land – only elders staid – strong urbanization and exclusion problems).

As a centre of the first Imperial State of the West (and the last to leave colonies, in 1974) we understand the world as political burocrats. The people think that working for the State is the best to have a earning for life and doing whatever people like to do (or not to do) since you avoid political persecution, since you avoid to understand how society and institutions works. That is why we have a lot of analphabetic people (8%), around 40% of people who do not know how to use simple information, such as to read a price of a product on the market, almost 50% of children who live school before entering the secondary school, less then 10% of people with a superior scholar degree. Worst than that, we do not care about our own very rich culture – we do not read or write, even till dominant classes. Politicians organized a contract with the people, ant it works till now (since 5 years till now it becomes more difficult to continue that path): the People do not say anything besides voting and they get money from EU as a social contribution. So economics come down and people learn how to use credit, till the pyramid broke. That is our national problem, today.

Well, sociology was forbidden till 1974. After that year every Portuguese, and sociologists too, came from leftwing marxist revolutionary like ideology (1974-1976) to political anomic rightwing tough against democracy. For instance, the People are against the Iraqi war since the beginning, but the Portuguese governments are in favour of saying YES to Bush, whatever is his wish.

Sociology in Portugal becomes a very strong academic discipline supporting democracy and the welfare state (we never had it, because we came to democracy when the neo-liberal politics wins the floor). Main Portuguese sociology is aggressive – that its force – think it self as non ideological and supports strongly Socialist Party. (our politics are centrist and against “radicalisms”, between a Social Democrat party and s Socialist party most of the time together, even they alternate in power).

I take seriously (I believed) main sociologists were non ideological. Till one of them explained to me that sociological institutions (he meant the flux of money sociological institutions receive from government) have to be defended from radicals, like me, who want to denounce human rights fault in Portuguese prisons. I understand that day I did not want to be a sociologist.

After that I define myself another way of dealing with the situation, because I WAS a sociologist. I need to make my living as a teacher of sociology. I am not a main line SOCIOLOGIST. I do not need to think as I am told to think.

That is why I turn myself to build a social theory appropriate for denouncing human rights faults and sociological like. I found Durkheim to be good inspiration for that propose. It is very funny, because I has been told since I was young (and I believed it) about contra revolutionaries concepts of Durkheim, his positivism (as if positivism was something diabolic). I discover what need to be forgotten on Durkheim heritage: the idea of elementary form of knowledge (religious knowledge) as a path to superior levels of reality available to human beings, and not to other animals.

Weber uncompassionate heritage reveals a world flat. Only burocratic (artificial) levels can be thought. That kind of social theory (dimensional social theory of the arbitrary ideal-type) supports the ongoing project of merging Marxist heritage and weberian heritage through structural statistical analyses of social classes as if it is the same concept as social stratification. Main sociological theory needed to forget the soul of each social classic theoricist in order to merge without pain their heritage. Main sociology is doing today the same as Parsons have done with Durkheim and Weber before.

In my view, we need to strongly support multiparadigmatic versions of social theory and denounce sociological conciliation strategies in the theorical level. We need institutional conciliation on the tolerance level for people who thinks differently. We need to stimulate different kinds of thoughts on our students and colleagues, as SSF does.

---

---