Marx Flashcards
• What kind of theorist is Marx?
• Conflict theoriest
• What does Marx say about facts and values?
• Does not distinguish between them. Social inquiry is simultaneously inquiry that is concerned with what is fact and what ought to be fact
• What is Marx beliefs of human nature?
• 1. Variable idea, and constant idea
• What is the variable idea?
- Human nature is a variable, we cannot be separated from social environment that influences us
- You are only smart in what you know, in what you have experience with
• What is constant in human nature?
- Objectification and manipulation of things (labour)
- Writing in lecture, using technology
- No other species does this
• What is species being
- We think, we objectify our thoughts through our actions on to things
- Feedback loop- how we manipulate things, lets us know who we are (we are students because we are sitting in class)
- We create our own needs through manipulation of objects (do we NEED laptops?)
• How is labour social?
- Labour is always the function of another relationship with another human being
- We labour with others
• What do we understand when we see others implicated in our labour?
• Morality is a relevant sociological area
• Morality doesn’t exist without human relationship
Self-awareness makes us understand we are apart of the same group
• What does Marx say about the moral
- He asks what we ought to be, and uses this standard to criticize what isn’t the standard
- Uses mutual respect as a dialogical principle
- The foundation for reaching human achievements is understanding eachother as thinkers and speakers
• What is an ideal human relationship
• Relationships among persons and nature are always non exploited (negative expression) could have said are always mutually respected (positive expression)
• What are the three ways hegel influences marx
- Idealism vs. materialism
- Dialectical logic
- The problem of ideas
• Explain idealism
- Marx says reality causes ideas
* Hegel says ideas cause reality
• What is dialectic
Exploitation ->alienation and alienation -> exploitation
• What are ideologies
- Exploitative systems cause them
* Systems of ideas
• What is exploitation
- The surplus value of your labour is appropriated for benefit of another
- Causes alination
• What is alienation
- A social cognitive behavioural condition, in which people produce things, fail to see themselves as the authors of those things and allow those things to oppose them in some sense
- Explolitation -> alienation
• Explain historical and structural totality
- History is 7 and a half circles
- Each represents a separate epoch of history
- Reasonably discrete period of time
- Demoniators of these circles represent reality and the reality of labour (material reality)
- What is the numerator
- The belief system in the way we do things
• Why do the circles intersect
- Represent the culmination of dialectical tension (revolution)
- Transition from one circle to another is vioelent
- Involves abrupt qualitative changes
• What happens as the circle matures
- Something in the demoninator begins to oppose itself
- Creating a dialectical leap
- Leaving last circle open
• Why is last circle open
• Open at the end of time for new ideas
• What people decide is based on mutual respect
• Represents communism
• What circle are we in
• 6th
• what is communism
- never existed in Marx’s view
* the democratic control of production (a social organization)
• What are the parts of society
Base and superstructure
• Explain the base
- denominator
- Mode of production
- 2 major forces: force of production and relations of production
• what are the forces of production
• tools and raw materials
• what is the relations of production
• how we organize our relationships with eachother in order to use the forces
• what is the superstructure
- the numerator – idealational realm has culture, religion education, art
- all generated with how we labour with one another and the tools we use to manipulate
• what type of theory is marx
- developmental not evolutionary
- developmental: moving towards an endpoint
- goal is something that ought to happen
- building into our capacity to make moral judgment
- all relationships non exploitive
• what happens in a relationship of not exploitation
- we see eachother as thinkers and speakers not jews and catholics
- we respect eachother
• what is the first circle
- ‘primitive communism’
- tribal/ primitive society
- women and men do everything the same
- product and labour are both shared
- because of difficulty of survival no knowledge of how they are living
• what is the second circle
- Asiatic
- Still hunting and gathering but its more focused on agriculture
- They farm too
- No social classes? Why? No private pripoty
- Labour divided to a noticble extent
- All productive surplus is redistributed
• What is the third circle?
- Ancient city
- Cities made through tribes
- There dominant and mode of existice is through agriculture
- They move to private property
- In the rural citicies it’s still common property
- Beginning of social classes and slavery
• Explain fourth circle
- Germanic
- Culturally dominated by ethnic distinction
- Dominant mode of existence was still hunting, stealing, planting
- Like robinhood movies
• Explain fifth circle
- Feudalism
- Centralism
- Occurs throughout all western Europe and the middle east
- Different forms of agriculture throughout
- Very sophisticated cultural and religious system and castes (king, lord, knight, peasant)
- Private property
- Feudal manners and small cabins
• Explain sixth circle
- Social classes
- Private property
- More extreme forms of alienation and exploitation
- Much more simplified social hierarchy
- In the context of labour extremely simplified: owners and workers
• Explain Seventh circle
•
Socialism
• Explain Open circle
• communism
• what is the dominant theme after the first loop
clear emergence of social class, and increasing exploitation and alienation
• what is the importance of history?
- History is necessary
- We can’t have socialism without the technological knowledge of capitalism
- We can’t achieve mutual respect without socialism
• Why does the circle change
- Remember hegels dialectic
- At the beginning of any historical epoch, the dominant forces of production and the relations of production will be in harmony
- The superstructure they create will function to legitimate this harmony
- At a certain point in their development the FOP in order to keep growing will have to destroy the existing ROP and replace them with new ones
• How do we determine or measure social class
• SES, education income and occupation
• What does marx consider class
- False consciousness
- Everything we have learned about stratification is false
- True conception of class would be the need to make a better world
- In the SES notion of class we all have same interests – money
- But working and owning class have different interests
- Thus class is about opposition
• what is class for itself
- if your interests are opposed to other groups and you are angry with class differences
- this opposition sets stage for social change and revolution
• what are the conditions necessary for class for itself to emerge
- A concentration of workers into urban areas
- A network of communications among workers has to be established
- The owning class can’t be doing same thing – can’t be developing self awareness
- not seing themselves as a coordinating group
- see the working class as a set of people they need to manipulate more efficiently
- if the owning class gets it together, working class won’t move forward
• define alienation
• social, cognitive, behavioural condition where we produce things and fail to know our ownership of those things
• what are the 3 types of alienation
Religion, political, and economic
• Define religious alienation
- Marx gets idea from Feuerbach
- We experience ourselves as evil, born into original sin
- To deal with this we conceptualize the good and right and project these ideas onto god
- See ourselves as good and evil and it’s my responsibility to decide which
• Define political alienation
- We forget our authorship of the political
- We relinquish all sorts of rights and responsibility
- We allow surveillance and control
• Define economic exploitation
Involves use value and exchange value
• What is use value
- What a thing is used for – the use value of something is based on the need it satisfies
- Historically, the farther back you go the more dominant becomes use value in human civilization
- Its realization is in the barter system, but things get complicated when barter goes on in different geographical locations
- So we convert our economies to exchange value
• Explain exchange value
- Doesn’t replace use value – use value is always the bottom line even if it is aesthetic everything has use value
- Money can be used for anything
- In exchange value circumstance we forget about the essence of objects and see them in relation to other objects
- Gives you the power to enter into an economic relationship
• What are commodities
- Things in an exchange value situation
- An object, don’t look at it’s intrinsic value, look at it in relationship for another thing
- Human labour now becomes a commodity
• In what ways is human labour a commodity
• The value of the human being as a worker or laborer isn’t determined by respect of abilities
• What is commodity fetishism
- Tend to see in things a value and lust after and crave, but we fail to see the true value of the car
- We have built this cultural system through our economic practices that prevents us from seeing the other
• What are the conditions of being alienated
- Workers alienated from
- What they produce
- How they produce
- Themselves
- Other workers (human community)
