Sociological Marxism: Four countries, four decades, four great transformations and a critical tradition

Abstract

The quality of much of what is produced under the title of scientific research in Social Sciences is quite questionable. And this seems to me to be a democratic assertion, as it affects the most varied theoretical currents and political orientations of researchers. Among Marxists, it is no different: descriptive and boring case studies abound, many of which give up, in principle, on presenting a new thesis. If we consider this to be too ambitious for certain types of texts, we still very frequently come across works resulting from field research with dubious data collection procedures, which do not even discuss the theses present in the bibliography or attempt to arbitrate between them. This is on the side of those who propose to carry out field research. On the other hand, there is a set of studies in which essayism predominates, without concern for empirical data and tied to concepts that are not always well explained, among which, frequently, are those of “emancipation” and “alienation”. In common, many of these studies still focus on normativism: “what workers, parties, unions, social movements should do”.