Publication Details

Abstract

The study starts from the report delivered by the author at the scientific conference on “Marxism and Structuralism“ at Smolenice on October 8th, 1976. It is critically directed against the penetration of structural-functional influences into Czechoslovak sociology, namely into the sphere of empirical research of the social structure in the sixties. The author holds the opinion that it is not important to eliminate from the Marxist terminological stock certain means of expression (system, structure, function, social position, status, role, stratification, etc.), but to hinder any of these elements in playing the role of Trojan Horse of bourgeois theoretical consciousness in using them in the field of Marxist sociology. As the structural functionalism’s deal is to absolutize always and everywhere the moments of stability in the general evolutional route, the author denies the claims of this trend to the leading theoretical and methodological position in sociology and reserves this place solely to materialist dialectics and historical materialism. Finally, he points out how the ideological clash with the principles of functionalism evokes a need to investigate more deeply and Marxistically the mutual relation of the most important dimensions of social structure expressed by the terms “the class—the stratum—the profession“.