[Yorgos] What Can Class Abolition Teach Metaphysics?

The radical collective Endnotes advance a theory of class abolition. They hold that capitalism will end when workers – or more technically the proletariat – confront their own position as an oppressed class and destroy it. Therefore, capitalism is abolished through negating the preconditions of its existence i.e., the working class.

Now, Endnotes do not preach a normative guideline that will direct social movements’ action “from the above” as if they, as a group, had an external relation to it. On the contrary, they seek to produce class abolition, both as theory and practice, from within the real movement of social struggle. For that, they argue that capitalism’s logic immanently generates the contradictory subject known as the proletariat. Therefore, social struggle and capitalism reflect each other as an explosive moving contradiction waiting to dissolve itself.

From a metaphysical standpoint, the relationship between social struggle and capitalism (as a general social relation) is that of grounding. Briefly, grounding is a non-causal determination relation between entities. For Endnotes, social struggle is grounded by the logic of the capitalist social relation. Grounding implies that the social relation (capital) determines the social struggle and not the other way around (because of asymmetry). However, Endnotes do not subscribe to such determinism because for them the capital relation is, in last resort, set up by people i.e., by another social struggle. Does this imply that grounding relations go the other way around violating asymmetry? If that is sound, then class abolition goes against the mainstream conceptualization of metaphysical grounding. We attempt a reformulation of grounding so it can solve the following puzzle: Could we have a double grounding from the social relation to the social struggle and the other way around that makes sense and is informative?

Yorgos Karagiannopoulos is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He does research on social ontology and social movements. His research interests include political theory, critical theory, and Marxism.

[Aleksandra] Uncovering the Metaphysics of Social Change

I start this talk with the following assumption: if we understand the ontology of social change, we are enabled to deliberately initiate it in a socially desired direction. Therefore, the main aim of this talk is to examine this ontology.

To that aim, I first assume that social change happens when there is a change in social norms. For this reason, I argue that to uncover the ontology of social change, we need to understand the ontology of social norms. Further, by understanding the ontology of social norms, I hold that we are able to understand what social actions are necessary for initiating social change.

Second, I use Sperber’s (1985) framework of Cultural Cognitive Causal Chains (CCCC) to explain the metaphysics of social norms. Sperber uses CCCC to elucidate how cultural phenomena (e.g., social norms) exist. He defines cultural phenomena as long-lasting and widely distributed cultural representations. For Sperber, cultural representations are a causal complex of two different kinds of representations: mental representations and public productions. Simply speaking, mental representations include things “in head” such as beliefs, intentions, desires, etc., and public productions include public social objects such as works of art, utterances, written symbols, etc.

In the last part of my talk, my ultimate goal is to show that CCCC can be used for clarifying how causal and constitutive social construction cooperate in construing social kinds such as social beliefs and social objects. To do so, I first compare Sperber’s framework of CCCC and Haslanger’s (2007) ontology of social structures to demonstrate their similarities. Then, contra Haslanger (2003) and Díaz-León (2013, 2018), I state my reasons for holding that causal social construction is relevant for those who aim to design strategies for achieving social change. Lastly, I claim that social change as a change in social norms can be deliberately initiated in a socially desired direction by manipulating the social objects constituted by causally constructed public meanings.

Aleksandra Knežević is a doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. In her doctoral research, Aleksandra investigates the methodology of evolutionary social sciences. Her research interests also include social metaphysics, social construction, and the philosophy of gender.

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