5. Karl Marx Flashcards
To acquire an understanding of Marx’s theoretical approach to the study of the workings of society, it is first of all necessary to grasp the basic tenets of his ____ ____ of ____.
materialist conception of history
Karl Marx was born in Trier in the German Rhineland in ____.
1818
The fundamental assumption underpinning the materialist conception of history is that it is ____ ____ ____ rather than ideas which plays the crucial role in historical development.
practical human activity
The production of the means of ____ (food, shelter, clothing) and the conditions under which they are produced, are of primary importance.
subsistence
The capacity of human beings to ____ on and transform nature to meet their needs is at the very core of human life. Work/labour is what makes us human.
work
Marx was in particular reacting against the thought of the German philosopher, ____ (1770-1831).
Hegel
Hegel had argued that ____ were the principal dynamic force in historical development. Ideas determine material life.
ideas
Marx’s counterargument against this idealism was that ideas originated in the fundamental problems of material life. Marx’s ____ is the reverse of Hegel’s idealism.
materialism
Bearing in mind the key point that the economic organisation of society is the point of departure for the study of society, Marx goes on to make a crucial distinction between the economic base or ____ of socety and the ____.
infrastructure, superstructure
The ____ includes the political legal and cultural institutions and the corresponding forms of social consciousness (ideas).
superstructure
The economic infrastructure of a society is the foundation stone which upon particular political, legal and cultural (eg. the media, churches) ____ are built.
institutions
The superstructure is usually described as a reflection of the economic infrastructure in the ____, legal and cultural institutions.
political
The infrastructure/base/foundation of any society can also be called the ____ of ____.
mode of production
Any mode of production is made up of ____ of production and ____ of production
forces, relations
A mode of production is ____ both by the level of development reached by its productive forces and by the nature of the relations of production.
defined
The ____ of ____ include the whole range of means available to human beings for controlling nature and producing material goods to satisfy their needs.
forces of production
The ____ of production: natural resources (eg, oil, wood, minerals, water) tools, machinery, technology.
means
The ____ ____ of human beings (their capacity to work) - without which natural resources could not be extracted from the earth, nor machines transform these same resources into objects for human use.
labour power
The ____ of production, according to Marx, have to do with the ways in which the production process is organised.
relations
____ occurs, according to Marx when the objects created by human beings confront them as external, alien, hostile and oppressive things. Alienation means that human beings are estranged from ther own creative activity and from other people.
Alienation
Alienation is the process through which workers lose control over their ____ and the products of that ____.
labour
Marx identifies three principal forms of alienation in modern, capitalist society the human being is alienated from ____, from ____ and from their ______ (their species being).
nature, themselves, fellow human beings
In the human being’s alienation from ____, Marx sees, in particular, the worker’s alienation from their capacity to shape their world
nature
In respect of the human being’s alienation from ____, Marx argues that capitalism alienates the worker from their own activity and from the product of their activity (ie, ‘alienation of things’).
themselves
Regarding alienation from ________, Marx stipulates that competition between workers for scarce jobs, between capitalists to maximise profits, and class conflict between capitalists and workers have all rendered most forms of co-operation impossible.
fellow human beings
All in all, then, human beings in modern, capitalist society have, in Marx’s view, lost their ____. They have been reduced to an animal existence.
humanity
The fact that the worker, in particular, is separated from nature, themself, their activity, the product of their activity and others, all confirm the total ____ conditions of modern capitalism.
dehumanising
Workers are mainly measured in terms of their ____ ____, that is, how much profit can be made out of them in the shortest period of time.
labour value
Alienation is ____ ____. It is the outcome of a particular set of historical circumstances namely, the capitalist mode of production. Because alienation is not intrinsic to the human condition it can be overcome.
historically contingent
Marx analyses alienation in modern capitalism the against backdrop of a state of ____, a future communist society.
unaleination
____ ____ would involve the full return of human beings to themselves as social beings.
Communist society
Many of the characteristics ascribed to ____ by Marx such as by the end of a highly specialised division of labour (each worker would be involved in a variety of tasks rather than simply performing one boring task), and the overthrow of the class system - attest to this envisaged full flowering of an intrinsically social humanity under communism.
communism
The splintered human being of modern, ____ society would be healed.
capitalist
According to Marx a ____ is a group of individuals who stand in a common relationship to the means of production. Man develops a two-class model peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.
class
The capitalist owners of the means of production are called the ____ The bourgeoisie also accumulate capital through trade.
bourgeoisie
The propertyless workers who have nothing to sell but their labour power are called the ____. The proletariat are the producers of wealth.
proletariat
Marx reasons that the class division between the numerically small bourgeoisie and the numerically enormous proletariat, is based on a relationship of _____.
exploitation
Essentially, this means that the capitalist owners extract more value from the workers in the form of ____ than is returned to them in the form of ____. Workers labour longer hours than is necessary to produce the value of their wages.
profit, wages
____ between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is an objective, unavoidable necessity growing out of the very nature of the capitalist mode of production.
Conflict
Marx predicted that once the workers became _____ aware of their objective position, that is, fully conscious of the fact that they were being exploited by their capitalist employers - they would organise themselves and rebel against their capitalist oppressors.
subjectively
This, in very rough outline, is what Marx refers to as ____ ____.
class consciousness
What Marx calls ____ is part of the superstructure of a society. The ideas, values and beliefs found in a particular society are never simply neutral.
ideology
The ____ ideas, values and beliefs are always ideological in the sense that they serve to legitimise the interests of ____ social groups within a society.
dominant, powerful
The dominant social groups in a society, of course, always masquerade their ideas values and beliefs as general and ____.
universal
It is Marx’s contention that ideology acts to give a ____ picture of reality since it conceals the way in which the dominant groups in a society take advantage of and exploit subordinate social groups
distorted
In the case of modern, capitalist society, the dominant ideas, values and beliefs are, in Marx’s view, those of the ____. Although the working class is subordinate to and exploited by the bourgeoisie, it nonetheless shares the bourgeoisie’s conception of reality.
bourgeoisie
