sociology midterm

I According to Marx, history can be divided into stages defined by the mode of production.

I Marx describes five stages: tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist.

I In each stage, there is a struggle between classes (“freeman and slave”, “lord and serf,” “bourgeoisie and proletariat,” etc.)

I Classes are relational. They are defined by their opposition to other classes.

I Each new stage of history creates the conditions for its own downfall.

I Serfs who worked on the lord’s land during feudalism were kicked off the land and forced to move to cities to sell their labor for a wage. This is sometimes called proletarianization. I But, Marx claims, working alongside each other in factories put them into greater contact and allowed them to see that they have a common interest in overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

I Marx acknowledges the existence of other classes like the petty bourgeoisie (small merchants who seek to emulate the bourgeoisie) and the lumpenproletariat (those who are excluded even from the proletariat), but he predicts that over time members of these classes will be pushed either into the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

I Marx also predicts that over time other social divisions like national divisions or religious divisions will become less important to people than class divisions. Members of the proletariat will put aside their national or religious differences and realize that they have common class interests.

I Marx does not believe that the bourgeoisie are simply bad people.

I Instead, he believes that they have been born into one class in one historical stage governed by one particular mode of production. The bourgeoisie are compelled to act in accordance with their class interests. They enter relations that are “independent of their will” (4). I In order simply to survive, the bourgeoisie must compete. Marx writes: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production” (476) I Still, Marx does not believe that people are simply products of their circumstances. Instead, he writes, “it is men who change circumstances” (144).

I The bourgeoisie constantly revolutionize the instruments of production in two ways.

I First, through technological change: They introduce machinery to speed up production.

I Second, through globalization: They spread across the globe in search of new goods to sell, new markets, and cheaper workers.

I Capitalism does not just create new ways of producing things.

I It also creates new wants.

I Commodities that no one owned in the recent past are now considered indispensable.

Review

Review

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Biography

I 1850-1852 London, begins economic studies in the Reading Room of the British Museum

I 1857-1858 Writes Grundrisse, first draft of Capital, some of Marx’s liveliest writing

I 1859-1866 Economic publications

I 1867 Publishes Capital, Volume 1

Scientific Method

I “The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England” (295)

Scientific Method

I “here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” (297)

Materialism

I “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” ( 301)

The Commodity

I “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (319)

Use-value

I “The utility of a thing makes it a use-value...This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities” (303)

I “nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value” (308)

I “Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but no commodities”

(307)

Exchange Value

I “Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place” (304)

Abstract labour

I “in two different things—in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third” (319)

I “If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour” (305)

I “all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract” (305)

Abstract labour

I “It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract” (316)

Socially-necessary labour time

I “The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogenous mass of human laobur-power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour-power of society, and takes effect as such” (306)

I “Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value” (306)

Labour theory of value

I “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time” (307)

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I “There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (321)

I We treat people as instrumental objects and enter into personal and emotional relations with things.

I “Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange” (321)

I “It is, however, just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between individual producers” (324)

I “How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?” (328)

I “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond” (328)

I Things do not have intrinsic value. They have value because of the social conditions of their production. But because we do not come into direct contact with the producers of the commodities we consume, we forget this.

Commodity Fetishism

Commodity Fetishism

Commodity Fetishism

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Problems with the labour theory of value

I Why are diamonds so expensive?

I The autographs of celebrities? I In discussing value, Marx considers the supply of labor but not the demand for commodities.

Types of circulation

I C-M-C: exchange of objects; exchange of use-values; undertaken by the worker

I M-C-M: exchange of money; exchange of exchange-values; undertaken by the capitalist

I “it is evident that the circuit M-C-M would be absurd and without meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money, pound 100 for pound 100” (329)

I What kind of commodity would allow money to be turned into more money (M0)?

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