Final Flashcards
The study of/the process by which material inequalities bring about the forces that will overturn them
Dialectical Materialism
To every thesis there is an antithesis, and through the clash of thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis emerges
Hegelian Philosophy- The Dialectic
Every existing idea or fact belongs to an all embracing spirit… Working itself out as history
Hegelian Philosophy- Idealism
Reality grounded not in ideas but in actual relations among people and things
Materialist Method
- “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time it’s ruling intellectual force”
- “The ruling ideas are nothing more than that ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance”
- “every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously”
Ruling class = Ruling ideas
Process of a feeling of separation from, distance to:
-Act of production. The product made through labor. Oneself as a producer. Other humans.
Alienation
- Idea that man isn’t a mindless laborer. We are social and have a stake in production and reproduction in human life
- when we become alienated we become alienated from this
- we take a stand on mans life in the world to produce stuff which forwards that project
- man is fundamentally a social and producing thing. And that stuff that is produced makes our life meaningful and worthwhile as a species. Something that makes life worth while- we are producers of stuff- not just input but cultural stuff that make life worth while
- man is essential social/desire life with our species
- man also makes the species a goal of life
- “shiny thing make it all better”
Species being
- the necessary consequence/product of alienated labor
- “___is this the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.”
- NOT same as personal belongings. It IS the stuff that is produced through alienation
- productive property (e.g. Factories)
Private property
FUNDAMENTALLY NEW
- Wage= some of money paid by the capitalist for a particular labor or for a particular output of labor
- selling ability to work to someone else
- not the workers share in his or her output but part of already existing commodities with which capitalist buys his labor
- Time and labor effort put in is what is sold
- workers do not have a share in stuff that they produce; they sell their labor time and labor effort
- wages paid for a certain amount of time or output from the laborer which means the work time becomes a thing that is paid for by $ in the same ways you might pay for something with $
- labor has become a commodity
- doesn’t just effect those in factories but also everyone who producing anything
Wage-labor
- A general process characteristic of capital that makes EVERYTHING into a buy able and sellable thing
- “Labor is therefore a commodity which it’s possessor, the wage worker, sells to capital. why does he sell it? in order to live”
- -labor is a commodity to capital (system of productive relations)
- -for the ability to live needed to work which is also fundamentally new
- “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto, honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers”
- -these were social positions that didn’t function in this way of labor and exchange for wage$
- *when labor is a commodity, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand and prices like other things such as iPhones
Commodification
A group of people sharing common relations to labor and the means of production
- 3 great ___:
- -Capitalists; owns stud
- -Landowners; owns land
- -Laborers; doesn’t anything at all
Class
-History is actually the process of this
Class struggle
- Capitalism is in permanent crisis, capitalism is constantly transforming the labor process and revolutionizing the relations of production, driven by the unresolvable contradiction between capital and labor
- “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”
- -will lead to communism
Crisis of capitalism
Social relations of production (classes): NONE
Dominant class: NONE
Mode of production (Economic Organization): PLANNED PRODUCTION
Communism
?
The state
- The price of a definite commodity: labor
- -Makes people more productive
- Marx: what happens when you have this system? Do wages actually go up over time or do wages stagnate or do wages actually go down
Wages
- Attempt to explain social outcomes from the outside, as an object
- to be contrasted with subjective explanations based on personal viewpoints/opinions
Objectivity
- concepts designed to capture the essential characteristics of a phenomenon (r.g. Democracy, capitalism, class, status group)
- “An ___-____ is formed by the one-sides accentuating of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unifies analytical construct. In it’s conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found anywhere empirically in reality. It is utopia. Historical research faces the task of determining each individual case the extent to which this ideal-construct approximate to or diverges from reality”
- not meant to be real
- construction of these makes us see the world different
- A mental construct
- helps when things get blurry
- they are inevitable: no way not to use them in describing and evaluating social life
Ideal types
- we need to differentiate between these
- try to place objective of good and bad to know the nature of things
- “The elementary duty of self-control and the only way to avoid serious and foolish blunders requires a sharp precise distinction between the logically comparative analysis of reality by ideal types in the logical sense and the value-judgment of reality on the basis of idea. And “ideal type” in our sense, to repeat once now, has no connection at all with value-judgments, and it has nothing to do with any type of perfectionist other then a purely logical one
Fact – value distinction
- Two types: specific meaning actor gives to act; General meaning of given type of action
- not purely subjective
- can be understood as a rational or deviation from rational action
Meaning
- Action meaningfully oriented to the actions of others
- part of “Being”
- sociology is the explanation of social action
Social action
-sociology is an interpretive science in search of meaning…not in search of timeless regularities, or laws, like gravity
Interpretation and causal laws
- Instrumentally rational
- Value-rational
- Affectual (especially emotional)
- Traditional (habit)
Types of social action
- Behavior that is instrumental- we think we will get something out of this
- an ideal type
Instrumentally Rational
- Things done because you value them as an end in itself
- an ideal type
Value – Rational
No social action is STRICTLY ______ or ________
-hard to differentiate these two; they are not really different
Instrumentally Rational or Value-Rational
Webers re-analysis of the cultural bases of capitalism
- -not about the material relationship between individuals and the “ideal superstructure”
- -______comes BEFORE capitalism is fully developed
Protestant Ethic
Two puzzles about capitalism for Weber?
- Making money for the sake of it is irrational. Why spend life working so hard?
- Why are Protestant countries wealthier than catholic ones?
Severe self disciple and avoidance of all forms of indulgence
Protestant Asceticism / Asceticism
