Organised discution topics

Let’s think about our paper about social natures and prisoners, Habermas and working class people. What should we do about it? How should we do it?

I propose we should agree, first, on the index of the subjects to refer on the paper:

My proposal is:

a) sociological classic problems to be addressed: a) working class is in or out new capitalism way of domination? b) lumpen proletarian – as prisoners and low class criminals – are they out or in the new way of capitalism? c) what social mechanisms of decision making in order to organize social action (resistance or political participation or revolution) can be identified?

b) Habermas contribution to address these problems; and his critics;

c) Sociological and normative approaches: reality and desires, divergences and convergences;

d) Social natures approach as a sociological transdisciplinary look to human kind

e) Sociology and soft and hard human rights (I mean ethnocentric and opportunistic human rights and helpful, healing and socially engaged human rights agenda)

I suggest we develop a critical approach to Habermas theory analysing social communication in three levels and one synthesis.

1. public spaces – where people can join and gather for public proposes. Participation is important, even there is very different conditions and opportunities of influence social decision making

2. publication agendas – influential institutionalized social machines in order to control social decision making

3. public temporalities – social abilities to interpret social decisions in a reflexive way (as traditions, as progress, as conjunctures)

4. public sphere – the social dynamics produced by the three social levels mentioned and by quotidian inputs and by social intentionality (class struggle or pacification by enforcement of the law or running wars or developing social democracy and social integration, for instance)

What do you think about it?

Esfera pública (ee)

Temporalidades públicas

Agendas de publicação

Espaços públicos

APD

Paul Hawken says no more ideology and no more consensuses. Instead, he believes that it exist an organic movement of different thousands of parts which do not know about the existence of other parts. All of them, some how, organize them selves to overcome actual risks.

Ok.

The other concept is one need a concept to join every little alternative power together to overcome big power in office, as Aneta propose.

My guess is that sociology can face the scientific project to build a research program (theoretical and empirical) to go deeper and brooder to find what is society (that is the amazement of Hawken) and how people, at different level, decide to change the way one lives (that is the problem Aneta put on the table, as much as Bob Robison did before, asking for working class position at the moment facing the global problems).

APD

1. What is dominant or main frame sociology in the States, in Europe, in Africa, in South America, in Asia?

2. What are dominated sociologies in the States, in Europe, in Africa, in South America, in Asia?

3. Why should it be like this? Structural mechanisms are very strong? The sociologists who are able to better organize their own influence are social winners?

What is the main massage we want to write down in the first article to present our working group?

a) Capitalism excludes and explores nature (ecosystems and human kind social systems). Capitalism lives upstairs, let us say this, and natures stays under the carpet: that is why capitalism need to stress social inequality as a natural thing, the reverse what Marx said about communism.

b) Habermas calls for political openness through public space for emancipator movements to confront with commercial interests. This means he believes it is possible public speech and public political standing to help people´s emancipation movement. He believes in democracy.

c) Social constructivism opposes the idea of social stability and opens the window for social intervention both for disadvantage and powerful people.

Even these interventions can not do much about natural changes; even when these changes are induced by human activities, such as global warming.

These three questions can be use to confront Pierre Bourdieu/Freudian social theory and social nature concept of society (privilege to normative, bio-ethics and anthropological knowledge perspectives) facing the empirical fact of growing global use of penitentiary systems for immobilisation of dangerous people and the global neo-liberal process of political depreciation of working classes.

APD

a) Habermas argues that capitalist relations colonize the lifeworld of normal citizens, and capitalist rationales have come to dominate the public sphere almost to the point of hegemony. I think that the environmental movement is one of the few current challenges to some of the capitalist rationales, because it is driven by the idea that the environment is a public resource rather than a private resource.

b) Habermas does believe in the emancipatory promise of democracy. Though, he is also very critical of current forms of representative democracy because they allow the current power structure to remain in place. It is not until we can move much closer to the ideal of undistorted communication (open communication that occurs without coercion or threat of violence) that a true democratic political discourse can occur. This form of communication will be realized more as capitalist rationales lose their strength in the public sphere.

c) We do need the promise of a system that allows both the powerful and disadvantaged people to have a say in how the social world is structured. I agree that even with interventions, we still cannot completely control nature. The control over nature is one of the mythical promises of capitalism and results from an egotistical belief that humans are "above" or "better than" the natural world. But, like you say, what we have in common with other humans (and plants and animals) is our mortality, a natural fact that we cannot change.

And tying in to your idea from a) that capitalist rationales try to make social inequality look natural, we sociologists need to uncover the lie that social inequality is natural in order to convince people that less oppressive ways of relating economically and politically is possible.