Marx Flashcards
How does Marx view production in relation to society?
Marx saw society’s way of producing as central to the way society is constructed.
Marx does not focus on individual labour but sees the labour force as a social reality.
Human labour is related to the social interaction between others.
What elements is the mode of production made up of?
Forces of production
Social and technical relations of production
What is meant by the forces of production?
These include human labour power and means of production (e.g. tools, productive machinery, commercial and industrial buildings, technical knowledge, materials, plants, animals and exploitable land).
What is meant by the social and technical relations of production?
Includes the property, power and control relations governing society’s productive assets.
Includes the relations between people and the objects of their work and the relations between social classes.
Relates to the social distribution of control over means of production.
What is the relationship between the forces and relations of production?
Marx believed within capitalist society there is a tension/contradiction between the forces and relations of production.
What is feudalism?
The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which peasants or workers were tenants of the nobles land, and were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, in exchange for military protection.
How did the feudal system change into capitalism?
The discovery and colonization of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries required new methods of production and exchange.
The increased debt incurred by the aristocracy, eventually led to the English Revolution (1640) and the French Revolution (1789), both of which opened the way for the establishment of a society structured around commodities and profit.
Because of the demand for more efficient, larger scale production, the medieval feudal system gave way to new methods of manufacturing, with the widespread use of division of labor and the advent of industrialization, by steam and machinery.
How did class systems change according to Marx?
While human societies have traditionally been organised according to complex, multi-membered class hierarchies, the demise of feudalism effected by the French Revolution has brought about a simplification of class antagonism. Rather than many classes fighting amongst themselves, society is increasingly splitting into only two classes: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
How did the bourgeoisie gain power?
While the bourgeoisie had originally served the nobility or the monarchy, they had come in the middle of the 19th century to control the representative states of Europe.
With this political empowerment the bourgeoisie introduced an ethic based on the absolute right to free trade and the rational, egoistic pursuit of profit.
These economic and social forces unsettled the boundaries of nations and created pressure toward globalisation, producing economic imperialism which demands other nations assimilate to bourgeois practice.
Finish the Marx quote:
The ____ “create the ____ after their ____ _____”
Marx (1848)
The bourgeoisie “create the world after their own image.”
Who are the bourgeoisie?
In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production and societal wealth during modern industrialization. Their societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society
How do the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat’s labour?
Within capitalist society, the bourgeoisie exploit the labour of the working classes for their own benefit and they can control society’s surplus product. This is the difference between what the labourers actually produce and what is needed simply to keep them alive and working. This produces class polarisation which means society divides into a minority capitalist class of the bourgeoisie and a majority working class
How do the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat’s ideology?
For Marx, the bourgeoisie also own and control the production of ideas and so the dominant ideas in society are the ideas of the economically dominant class. The capitalist institutions that produce and spread ideas, such as religion, education and the media, all serve the dominant class by producing ideologies and this set of ideas and beliefs justify and legitimise the existing social order as desirable or inevitable.
What is a Marx quote about the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?
They “face each other as two warring camps.” (1848)
How should we understand society according to Marx?
Marx believed that it was possible to understand society scientifically and this knowledge would lead us to a better society, he described his theory as ‘scientific socialism.’
How does a commercial crisis come about according to Marx?
Overproduction is when capitalists produce too much compared to the demand for things or services.
Suddenly capitalists build up stocks of things they cannot sell, they have factories with too much capacity compared to demand and they have too many workers than they need.
So, they close down plants, slash the workforce and even just liquidate the whole business.
That is a capitalist crisis.
What is class consciousness?
It is the awareness of one's place in a system of social class and the awareness of class conflict with an antagonistic relationship between other classes. It is the set of beliefs and values that a person holds regarding their social class or economic rank in society.
What happens to the proletariat class without class consciousness?
Class without class consciousness is class in itself. They share their position towards the means of production. They are unaware of their being a class and class conflict, so they are unlikely to organise politically in their own class interest.
What happens to the proletariat class with class consciousness?
Class with class consciousness is class for itself. They are aware of their being class and class conflict within society and so they are likely to organise a political revolution in their own class interest.
What is historical materialism?
It is a methodology used by Marx that focuses on human societies and their development through history.
Marx argued that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideas.
Marx believed that history was defined by the society’s mode of production, the mode of production changed when the productive forces came into conflict with social relations.
What is the proletariat?
The proletariat is the social class that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary. They are capable of revolutionary action to topple capitalism in order to create a classless society.
What are the four stages of economic development?
Marx (1845): Tribal society Primitive communism Feudal system Capitalism
How does Marx describe tribal society?
Tribal society has no social classes but is structured around kinship relations, with hunting the province of men and domestic work the province of women.
The tribal form is elementary at this stage, a further extension of the natural division of labour exists within the family.
During this stage, it is possible to see a slave culture established, as population increases, leading to the growth of wants and the growth of relations with outside civilisations (through war or barter).
With slave culture, we see the beginning of class society.
How does Marx describe primitive communism?
Primitive communism is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest.
During this stage, the concept of private property begins to develop.
With the development of private property, it leads to a concentration and demand for private property and begins the transformation of the small peasantry into a proletariat.
How does Marx describe capitalism?
The transformation of labour into an abstract quantity that can be bought and sold on the market leads to the exploitation of the proletariat, benefiting a small percentage of the population in control of capital. The working class experiences alienation since the members of this class feel they are not in control of the forces driving them into a given job.
What are the two fundamental drivers of social change according to Marx?
1) Contradictions between the forces and relations of production.
2) Class antagonisms
What happens at the initial stage of the modes of production and how does it change over time?
At the initial stage of each mode of production, productive forces rapidly develop in society.
The relations of production help this process of development as they correspond to the productive force.
Over time the two dependent forces and relations of production come into conflict and become ‘fetters’ on human progress.
What is fettering?
Fettering occurs when existing relations of production are sub-optimal for the further development of productive forces.
What is the core idea of historical materialism?
The notion that the system of production of a given society will eventually exhausts its creative and productive potential.
How did the economists respond to Marx’s theory at the time according to F.Lee?
F.Lee (2008): The leading economists of the day feared that if workers understood Marxist theory, the working class would realise how badly they were being exploited. So economists sought to recast their neoclassical theory to neutralise the Marxist critique. They limited their economic theory to looking at innocuous issues such as how prices change.
What is Marx’s economic theory?
Marx’s economics, in contrast to orthodox mainstream economics, cannot be separated from his philosophy, history or sociology.
His economic theory is concerned with social relations, social structure and agency rather than with the technical relations between commodities and prices.
What is the function of Marx’s economic theory?
For Marx, the function of economic theory is to penetrate beneath the markets of society (appearance) to the social foundation on which the markets are based (essence).
What is the methodology behind Marx’s study of capitalism?
Marx asserts the study of capitalism shouldn’t start with the directly observable e.g. populations, markets, but with abstractions and empirical observations from economic structures.
We need to investigate the multiple, historically changing interconnections between productive forces and all other non-economic facets of society.
What is meant by commodity?
Marx defined this as any object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human needs.
What is commoditization?
Refers to a fundamental feature of capitalist modernity.
A highly complex interdependent system of commodity production for the purpose of exchange through the market.
What are the two aspects of every commodity?
Use value
Exchange value
What is meant by use value as an aspect of every commodity?
Use value is determined by its capacity to satisfy a human need.
Use values are specific; concrete and historical they exist in all societies
What is meant by exchange value as an aspect of every commodity?
Exchange value refers to the way a quantity of one commodity, can be expressed in terms of another commodity.
Do all commodities have a use and exchange value?
Every commodity has a use value but not every commodity has an exchange value.
Either because it is freely available e.g. air, sunshine, or it is not exchanged e.g. something produced for personal consumption.
What property do all commodities have in common?
The property that all commodities have in common is they are the product of labour.
This creates the relationship of exchange.
What is commodity fetishism?
In Marx’s critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships.
People ascribe powers to commodities they don’t have, they see value as an inherent, natural property of commodity.
But the concept of the intrinsic value of commodities determines and dominates the economic relationships among people.
How do people mistake the market value of commodities according to Marx?
Buyers and sellers continually adjust their beliefs about the value of things (consciously or unconsciously) to the proportionate market value of commodities over which buyers and sellers believe they have no control.
So people mistake the social characteristics of commodities for natural properties of commodities, when in reality value is determined by social characteristics of human labour.
What is the theory of alienation?
Under capitalism, workers are alienated because they do not own what they produce and have no control over the production process.
What are the 4 types of alienation?
Marx (1927):
1) Alienation from the product
2) Alienation from the act of production
3) Alienation from the species-essence
4) Alienation from other workers
What is meant by alienation from the product?
The design and development of a production doesn’t rest in the hands of a worker but within the decisions of the capitalists.
A worker does not have control over what they produce or the specifications of the product.
What is meant by alienation from the act of production?
The production of goods and services within a capitalist society is repetitive and mechanical that offers little to no psychological satisfaction to the worker.
What is meant by alienation from the species-essence?
The species-essence of an individual comprises of all their innate potential.
Under a capitalist mode of production, an individual loses identity and loses the opportunity for self-development as they’re forced to sell their labour power.
What is meant by alienation from other workers?
The reduction of labour to a mere market commodity creates the so-called labour market in which workers compete against each other.
In what book did Marx write about commodity and production?
Das Kapital (1867)
What is socialism?
Political and economic theory of social organisation which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
What is industrialisation?
The development of industries in a country or region on a wide scale.
Focus was more on working for wages instead of working from the land.
