5. Karl Marx

Question 0

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 ____.

Answer 0

materialist conception of history

Question 1

Karl Marx was born in Trier in the German Rhineland in ____.

Answer 1

1818

Question 2

The fundamental assumption underpinning the materialist conception of history is that it is ____ ____ ____ rather than ideas which plays the crucial role in historical development.

Answer 2

practical human activity

Question 3

The production of the means of ____ (food, shelter, clothing) and the conditions under which they are produced, are of primary importance.

Answer 3

subsistence

Question 4

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.

Answer 4

work

Question 5

Marx was in particular reacting against the thought of the German philosopher, ____ (1770-1831).

Answer 5

Hegel

Question 6

Hegel had argued that ____ were the principal dynamic force in historical development. Ideas determine material life.

Answer 6

ideas

Question 7

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.

Answer 7

materialism

Question 8

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 ____.

Answer 8

infrastructure, superstructure

Question 9

The ____ includes the political legal and cultural institutions and the corresponding forms of social consciousness (ideas).

Answer 9

superstructure

Question 10

The economic infrastructure of a society is the foundation stone which upon particular political, legal and cultural (eg. the media, churches) ____ are built.

Answer 10

institutions

Question 11

The superstructure is usually described as a reflection of the economic infrastructure in the ____, legal and cultural institutions.

Answer 11

political

Question 12

The infrastructure/base/foundation of any society can also be called the ____ of ____.

Answer 12

mode of production

Question 13

Any mode of production is made up of ____ of production and ____ of production

Answer 13

forces, relations

Question 14

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.

Answer 14

defined

Question 15

The ____ of ____ include the whole range of means available to human beings for controlling nature and producing material goods to satisfy their needs.

Answer 15

forces of production

Question 16

The ____ of production: natural resources (eg, oil, wood, minerals, water) tools, machinery, technology.

Answer 16

means

Question 17

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.

Answer 17

labour power

Question 18

The ____ of production, according to Marx, have to do with the ways in which the production process is organised.

Answer 18

relations

Question 19

____ 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.

Answer 19

Alienation

Question 20

Alienation is the process through which workers lose control over their ____ and the products of that ____.

Answer 20

labour

Question 21

Marx identifies three principal forms of alienation in modern, capitalist society the human being is alienated from ____, from ____ and from their ______ (their species being).

Answer 21

nature, themselves, fellow human beings

Question 22

In the human being’s alienation from ____, Marx sees, in particular, the worker’s alienation from their capacity to shape their world

Answer 22

nature

Question 23

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’).

Answer 23

themselves

Question 24

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.

Answer 24

fellow human beings

Question 25

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.

Answer 25

humanity

Question 26

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.

Answer 26

dehumanising

Question 27

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.

Answer 27

labour value

Question 28

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.

Answer 28

historically contingent

Question 29

Marx analyses alienation in modern capitalism the against backdrop of a state of ____, a future communist society.

Answer 29

unaleination

Question 30

____ ____ would involve the full return of human beings to themselves as social beings.

Answer 30

Communist society

Question 31

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.

Answer 31

communism

Question 32

The splintered human being of modern, ____ society would be healed.

Answer 32

capitalist

Question 33

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.

Answer 33

class

Question 34

The capitalist owners of the means of production are called the ____ The bourgeoisie also accumulate capital through trade.

Answer 34

bourgeoisie

Question 35

The propertyless workers who have nothing to sell but their labour power are called the ____. The proletariat are the producers of wealth.

Answer 35

proletariat

Question 36

Marx reasons that the class division between the numerically small bourgeoisie and the numerically enormous proletariat, is based on a relationship of _____.

Answer 36

exploitation

Question 37

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.

Answer 37

profit, wages

Question 38

____ between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is an objective, unavoidable necessity growing out of the very nature of the capitalist mode of production.

Answer 38

Conflict

Question 39

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.

Answer 39

subjectively

Question 40

This, in very rough outline, is what Marx refers to as ____ ____.

Answer 40

class consciousness

Question 41

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.

Answer 41

ideology

Question 42

The ____ ideas, values and beliefs are always ideological in the sense that they serve to legitimise the interests of ____ social groups within a society.

Answer 42

dominant, powerful

Question 43

The dominant social groups in a society, of course, always masquerade their ideas values and beliefs as general and ____.

Answer 43

universal

Question 44

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

Answer 44

distorted

Question 45

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.

Answer 45

bourgeoisie