(a) Describe the impact of capitalist mode of production on society. (20 marks) (b) Differentiate between social hierarchy and…

(a) Impact of the capitalist mode of production

What the capitalist mode of production (CMP) is: Marx (Capital, Vol. I, 1867) defined it by four features:

• private ownership of the means of production;
• labour power sold as a commodity for wages;
• production for exchange and profit (the circuit M–C–M′);
• the extraction of surplus value from wage labour.

Impact on stratification:

• the Communist Manifesto (1848) predicted a simplification of class antagonisms into bourgeoisie and proletariat, with the petty bourgeoisie sinking into the working class;
• later theorists qualified this. Dahrendorf (1959) described the decomposition of capital and labour, C. Wright Mills (White Collar, 1951) the salaried new middle class, and Erik Olin Wright the contradictory class locations of managers;
• Weber added that market capitalism ranks people by life chances, and status and party do not reduce to ownership.

Impact on work:

• alienation (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844): the worker is estranged from the product, the labour process, their species-being and fellow workers;
• Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) showed deskilling under Taylorist management;
• Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) saw specialisation producing organic solidarity, but warned of the anomic and forced division of labour.

Impact on social relations:

• the "cash nexus" replaces personal and feudal bonds, and commodity fetishism makes relations between people appear as relations between things;
• Tönnies described the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (1887); Simmel (The Philosophy of Money, 1900) the calculating, blasé outlook of the money economy;
• Weber traced the spread of formal rationality and bureaucracy, the "iron cage" (The Protestant Ethic, 1904–05).

Impact on family and gender:

• the separation of home and workplace created the male breadwinner and the housewife;
• Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) linked monogamy to the inheritance of private property;
• Marxist feminists showed that unpaid domestic labour reproduces labour power for capital.

Impact on culture, ideology and the state:

• the "ruling ideas" are those of the ruling class (The German Ideology); Gramsci explained consent through hegemony;
• Adorno and Horkheimer's culture industry and Veblen's conspicuous consumption (1899) describe a consumer culture in which identity is bought;
• the state manages capitalism's contradictions: the Manifesto called it "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". Polanyi's double movement (The Great Transformation, 1944) explains the rise of welfare protections.

Global impact: Wallerstein's world-system (1974) and A.G. Frank's dependency theory show capitalism producing a core–periphery hierarchy between nations.

Positive effects: an unprecedented growth of productive forces; the dissolution of feudal and ascriptive bonds; legal freedom of contract and mobility. Barrington Moore argued "no bourgeois, no democracy" (1966).

Indian context:

• colonial commercialisation of agriculture, then the mode of production debate in Indian agriculture (1970s, EPW: Utsa Patnaik, Ashok Rudra, Hamza Alavi's "colonial mode of production");
• capitalist farming after the Green Revolution; liberalisation after 1991; about nine-tenths of workers in the informal economy;
• capitalism has not dissolved caste and gender. Barbara Harriss-White (India Working, 2003) shows them regulating accumulation as social structures of accumulation, and Jan Breman documents "footloose" migrant labour.

Conclusion: the CMP restructures stratification, work, intimacy, culture and the state together. Its effects are mediated by pre-existing structures, as the Indian case shows.

(b) Social hierarchy and social exclusion in caste

Social hierarchy:

• a vertical ranking of groups by unequal status, honour or power, in which every group has a place;
• it is gradational: groups are higher or lower relative to one another;
• Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) saw hierarchy, based on the opposition of purity and impurity, as the organising value of caste.

Social exclusion:

• the term was popularised by René Lenoir (Les Exclus, 1974) in France;
• it is a relational process that denies groups participation in economic, social, political and cultural life;
• Amartya Sen (2000) distinguished constitutive from instrumental exclusion and active from passive exclusion;
• Weber's social closure, extended by Frank Parkin (1979), describes how groups monopolise resources by shutting others out.

Key differences:

Hierarchy in the caste system:

• the varna scheme and local jati rankings; Célestin Bouglé (1908) named its three principles as hierarchy, repulsion and hereditary specialisation;
• rules of commensality and marriage mark rank; the jajmani system tied ranked castes together through exchange of services;
• Sanskritisation (M.N. Srinivas) shows mobility within the hierarchy, which leaves the hierarchy itself intact.

Exclusion in the caste system:

• untouchability placed Dalits outside the varna order (avarna), excluded from temples, wells and schools, as in the Mahad Satyagraha (1927) over access to a public tank;
• residential segregation (separate hamlets), denial of land, and forced occupations such as manual scavenging;
• exclusion in modern markets: Thorat and Attewell's correspondence study (EPW, 2007) found equally qualified applicants with Dalit names less likely to be called for interview; Thorat and Newman's Blocked by Caste (2010) documents discrimination in markets;
• the IHDS-II survey (2011–12) found about 27% of households admitting to practising untouchability in some form.

How the two interlock:

• B.R. Ambedkar's graded inequality shows each caste placed above some and below others, which divides the oppressed; exclusion is harshest at the bottom of this hierarchy;
• Gerald Berreman argued that hierarchy looks like consensus from the top but is experienced as oppression from below;
• the two can separate: ritual hierarchy has weakened (commensality rules have relaxed in cities) while exclusion persists in housing, jobs and marriage; Dipankar Gupta (Interrogating Caste, 2000) sees castes asserting difference rather than accepting a single ranking;
• exclusion can also operate without ritual rank, as with Adivasis, who stood outside the caste order but faced land alienation and marginalisation.

Constitutional response: Article 17 abolishes untouchability; the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 target exclusion; reservation seeks inclusion.

Conclusion: hierarchy ranks and exclusion shuts out. Caste combines both, so policy must address status (dignity) and access (inclusion) together.

(c) Data and theory

Origin: the statement adapts Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781): thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. In sociology it expresses the interdependence of theory and empirical research.

"Data without theory is blind":

• facts do not speak for themselves: observation is selective and theory-laden (Karl Popper; N.R. Hanson), and concepts decide what counts as data;
• C. Wright Mills (The Sociological Imagination, 1959) attacked "abstracted empiricism", meaning survey research that piles up findings without explaining them;
• big-data correlations likewise show patterns but cannot explain them.

"Theory without data is empty":

• Mills attacked Parsons's "grand theory" as abstract and untestable;
• Popper's falsifiability requires theory to face evidence;
• Robert K. Merton proposed theories of the middle range (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949) to connect abstract theory with testable propositions.

The interplay:

• Merton showed that theory guides research, and research in turn initiates, reformulates, deflects and clarifies theory, as in the serendipity pattern;
• Walter Wallace's wheel of science (1971) runs from theory to hypotheses, observation, empirical generalisation and back to theory;
• Durkheim's Suicide (1897) tested integration and regulation against official statistics; Glaser and Strauss's grounded theory (1967) builds theory from data;
• in India, M.N. Srinivas's fieldwork in Rampura produced the concept of the dominant caste, and his "field view" corrected the "book view" of caste.

A qualification: interpretivists add that data are themselves socially constructed. Cicourel and J. Maxwell Atkinson showed that suicide statistics reflect officials' decisions, so the relationship is dialectical, not a simple test.

Theory gives data meaning, and data give theory content. Sound sociology moves continuously between the two.