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marxism_presentation1.pptxAlison Tressider-Spivey
Karl Marx. He died in 1883 but his ideas have helped shape the world we live in. So much so that 130 years after his death his ideas are still being debated and rediscovered by every new generation. In October 2012 for example, the BBC2 Money Programme had a special hour long programme examining whether Marx’s ideas explained the current crisis. Even city financiers, traders and capitalists agreed that they did. The problem is that nobody agrees with what is meant by a Marxist analysis of society. Why is this?
Alison Tressider-Spivey
His works had such an impact on the world that there have been thousands of books and articles interpreting Marx, saying what they think he meant, arguing about his emphases, re-interpreting his works to take account of developments in the modern world, that it would be impossible in a one-hour lecture to encompass all of this
Alison Tressider-Spivey
Unlike functionalists, Marx argues that conflict is not pathological but is normal.
He starts from the premise that conflict is at the core and is the very essence of all societies to date.
Societies are all based on conflicts of interests between groups over the distribution of resources.
As a consequence, societies are characterised by gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth & power.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
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One group uses their power & wealth to dominate the others not just economically but also politically & crucially ideologically by:
coercion
legitimation – making the gross inequality seem legitimate, fair or just.
As a consequence, the oppressed defend their own exploitation as ‘legitimate’.
Marx’s analysis starts by looking at what is called ‘the base’ – the basic element that produces society – the economic system (not the value system as it is for functionalists). Producing is, for Marx, man’s basic essence – everything flows from that.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
The first activity of humankind must be economic. We have to produce to survive. Under totally free conditions, humans therefore express their humanity in and through work. The way that production is socially organized in capitalist societies that separates work and its products alienates man from his ‘species being’ (his basic essence). In other words, in capitalist societies work corrupts man’s basic essence. This reaches its nadir in the mass production of goods in 20th century production lines.
When Marx was writing Das Kapital he was focussing upon the effects of the newly industrialised world. Mass production within factories. His ideas are still relevant now in post-industrialist society.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
The products or fruits of their (the workers) labour are expropriated (taken away) from workers and this alienates them. ‘Class relations’ are the real foundations of society not culture as suggested by functionalists.
For Marx, labour power is the source of all wealth. All the natural resources of the planet are useless until labour power is applied to them. Unlike his mentor, Hegel, Marx had a ‘materialist’ rather than an ‘idealist’ conception of history. The way that production is socially organised is the key to all social life. Social change comes through:
a) conflict and class struggle over the distribution of material resources: dialectical materialism
b) internal contradictions between productive forces and social relations
Alison Tressider-Spivey
Capitalism is a specific phase in human history. There’s nothing ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ about it. Economic inequality and exploitation are characteristic of all modes of production. But only in capitalism are all social relations destined to be transformed into economic relations
i.e. the cash nexus is increasingly dominant. This is called the ‘commodification process’. In ancient slave civilisations personal relations are the norm as well as the cash nexus. In feudal societies personal relations are the norm as well as the cash nexus. In capitalism only naked self-interest remains.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
Capitalism is a specific phase in human history. There’s nothing ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ about it. Economic inequality and exploitation are characteristic of all modes of production. But only in capitalism are all social relations destined to be transformed into economic relations.
i.e. the cash nexus is increasingly dominant. This is called the ‘commodification process’. In ancient slave civilisations personal relations are the norm as well as the cash nexus. In feudal societies personal relations are the norm as well as the cash nexus. In capitalism only naked self-interest remains.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
The gradual development of ‘capitalism’ – first ‘mercantile capitalism’ (where people traded with each other) and then ‘industrial capitalism’ which involved large-scale production & consumption of commodities produced for markets – a ‘market economy’. More extensive private ownership of property.
There was gradually the birth of the consumer where everything becomes a commodity to be bought and sold including land and ‘labour power’ i.e. people’s ability to work gets turned into a commodity. Over the last few centuries more and more things become commodities.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
This is where dialectics comes in. From ‘feudalism’ to ‘capitalism’. In feudal Europe the aristocracy was the dominant class. This ‘ruling class’ dominated a peasant class. Capitalism developed out of feudalism over a period of 400-500 years. This was due to the gradual emergence of a bourgeois (middle) class. Because of their economic power, this industrial middle class gradually became the new ‘ruling class’. They don’t ‘govern’ society directly but they have become the ‘dominant force’ i.e. their interests, their ideas become the interests and ideas of society as a whole. As commodity production has grown so has a new class of wage labourers (the proletariat)
Alison Tressider-Spivey
The dominant relations in capitalism: class interest and surplus value. Marx does not suggest that in capitalist societies there are only bourgeoisie and proletariat. Modern capitalist societies are very complex and in his huge 3 volumes of Das Capital he recognises this. However, although the laws of development may be modified by these complexities, these complexities obscure the dominant relations between capital and labour. For Marx, then, ‘class’ is not a ‘thing’ but a set of relations. So, whether someone does a manual or a non-manual job doesn’t define their class. It is the social relations of production that they are subject to that define their class. Only when we enter into relations does ‘class’ exist. These relations produce surplus value which gives the power to capital in general to dominate ‘society’ culturally.
Alison Tressider-Spivey
“The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life in general.”
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Karl Marx
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