FUNDAMENTALS OF

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Submitted to: Professor Melchor Salom Submitted by: Nathaniel Navarro

MARXISM

A body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx, it is related in philosophical anthropology as

a theory of history, and an economic and political program. It is understood and practiced that
Marxism is connected by various socialist movements. It is a social, political, and economic
philosophy which examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic
development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism.

The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars known for developing critical theory and
popularizing the dialectical method of learning by interrogating society's contradictions. It is
most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm,
and Herbert Marcuse. The Frankfurt School scholars are known for their brand of culturally
focused neo-Marxist theory; a rethinking of classical Marxism updated to their socio-historical
period. This proved seminal for the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and media studies. The
scholars’ concerns were the mass culture and this refers to technological developments. They
objected to how technology led to sameness in production and cultural experience. Frankfurt
scholars argue the work of Karl Marx’s theory on the domination of capitalism and explained
why revolution never came. Marcuse took this framework and applied it to consumer goods and
the new consumer lifestyle; he argued that consumerism functions in much the same way, for it
maintains itself through a creation of false needs that only the products of capitalism can satisfy.

The academic influence of the critical method is far reaching. Some of the key issues and
philosophical preoccupations of the School involve the critique of modernity and capitalist
society, the definition of social emancipation, as well as the detection of the pathologies of
society. Critical Theory provides a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy with regards to
some of its central economic and political notions like commodification, reification, fetishization
and critique of mass culture.

5 scholars of Frankfurt School and their Critical Theory on Marxism

Max Horkheimer

He developed an original interdisciplinary movement of Karl Marx, known as critical

theory that combined Marxist-oriented political philosophy with social and cultural analysis
informed by empirical research. Horkheimer describe the institute’s program as
“interdisciplinary materialism,” integrating the work of Marx philosophy of history especially
economics history, sociology, social psychology, and psychoanalysis. His work critical theory
focuses various forms of social control through which state-managed capitalism tended to defuse
class conflict and integrate the working classes into the reigning economic system.

According to Horkheimer, the traditional approaches are content to describe existing

social institutions more or less as they are, and their analyses thus have the indirect effect
of legitimating repressive and unjust social practices as natural or objective. By contrast, critical
theory, through its detailed understanding of the larger historical and social context in which
these institutions function, would expose the system’s false claims to legitimacy, justice, and
truth. They are interconnected with Marxism because of the communist act within the capitalism
as it is in the theory that focuses in their rights to work for revolution.

He addresses a wide variety of economic, social, political and aesthetic topics, ranging
from empirical analysis to philosophical theorization. Different interpretations of Marxism and
its historical applications explain some of the hardest confrontations on economic themes within
the Institute. He argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal
structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.

THEODOR ADORNO

Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx.

Adorno reads Marxism as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably
includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. The most important
that Adorno wrote in these is what Marx called “the fetishism of commodities.” Marx aimed his
critique of commodity fetishism against bourgeois social scientists that simply describe the
capitalist economy but doing so, simultaneously misdescribed it and prescribed a false social
vision. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to
capitalist production. They fail to understand that capitalist production, for all its surface
“freedom” and “fairness,” must extract surplus value from the labor of the working class. 

We can see here that the social classes is treated unequal because of their necessities in
the economy, so as for bourgeois having more necessities but for the working class contain less
necessities. It is in line with the class struggle in the work of Karl Marx that they experience
economic, social and political downfall regardless with their acts of carelessness in their motives
in the economy. According to Karl Marx, he argues that whatever makes a product a commodity
goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. The commodity would not have “use value” if
it did not satisfy human wants. It would not have “exchange value” if no one wished to exchange
it for something else. Adorno's social theory attempts to make Marx's central insights applicable
to “late capitalism,” the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the
relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the
nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social
theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.
HERBERT MARCUSE

Marcuse’s entire project can be seen as an attempt to rescue radical, socially

transformative subjectivity. He gravitates toward Marxism because Marxism is an attempt to
rescue subjectivity or humanity from the reifying, oppressive forces of capitalism. Radical action
was needed to overcome the oppressive, repressive, reified structure of advanced industrial
society. Karl Marx’s theory of alienation is implicit in various places in volume one
of Capital where he discusses the reduction of social relations between persons to the relations
between things while the relations between things are treated as social relations. As Marcuse
read the work of Karl Marx, it is based on his quest for radical or revolutionary subjectivity. He
saw western society as moving in the direction of a totally administered society. 

Marcuse believed that the real potentialities for the fulfillment of human life were at
hand. The relative success of capitalism in overcoming material scarcity had provided the level
of economic development which Marx claimed was necessary for socialist transformation.
Marcuse believed that human fulfillment would be determined by such factors as the control of
natural and social productive farces, the development of needs in relation to the possibility of
their satisfaction, and the availability and wealth of cultural values.

Marcuse believed that democratic social planning would enable the associated individuals
to freely decide what was to be produced and how the wealth of society would be distributed.
This emphasis on democracy and the autonomy of associated individuals characterized
Marcuse's vision of the rational society. The purpose of his critical theory, therefore, was to
explore the actual tendencies within capitalist society which could provide the basis for the
realization of such a society in which Karl Marx influence him.

Marx had argued that the alienation of the laborer from the product of his labor led to the
fetishism of commodities in which a "definite social relation between men assumes the fantastic
form of a relation between things. The fetishism of commodities conceals the true nature of
capitalism as a system of domination and servitude. In Marcuse's formulation the fetish of
technique, or technical efficiency, had replaced commodity fetishism as the predominant form of
mystification in the modem world.

JURGEN HABERMAS

The relation of Habermas to critical social theory has had a crucial effect on the declining
fortunes of this form of neo-Marxism. Marx famously rejects principle theories, which merely to
interpret, a necessity in his view to change the world. The appearance of the “critique” in the title
of a number of his writings suggests that critique can change the world. Marxian theory is
intended to respond to the problems specific to capitalism through an analysis of modern
industrial society, which disappears in Habermas’s basic distinction between work and
interaction.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological

or cultural means. Cultural hegemony functions in ruling class and the social and economic
structures that embody it, as just, legitimate, and designed for the benefit of all, even though
these structures may only benefit the ruling class. 

Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony out of Karl Marx’s

theory that the dominant ideology of society reflects the beliefs and interests of the ruling class.
Gramsci argued that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of
ideologies, beliefs, assumptions, and values through social institutions. Cultural hegemony is
most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that
the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created
by people with vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders.

Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony in an effort to explain why

the worker-led revolution that Marx predicted in the previous century had not come to pass.
Central to Marx’s theory of capitalism was the belief that the destruction of this economic
system was built into the system itself since capitalism is premised on the exploitation of the
working class by the ruling class. Marx reasoned that workers could only take so much economic
exploitation before they would rise up and overthrow the ruling class. However, this revolution
did not happen on a mass scale. Gramsci realized that there was more to the dominance of
capitalism than the class structure and its exploitation of workers. Marx had recognized the
important role that ideology played in reproducing the economic system and the social structure.

CLASS STRUGGLE

- also referred as class conflict and class warfare, it is the political tension and economic
antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio economic competition among the social
classes. The forms of class struggle include direct violence, such as wars for resources and cheap
labor and assassinations; indirect violence, such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness
and unsafe working conditions. In political forms of class warfare is: legal and illegal lobbying,
and bribery of legislators. The social class struggle can be direct, as in a dispute between labor
and management, such as an employer’s industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken
the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect. Class struggle is the central
tenet and practices, such as low wages and poor workplace conditions.
 Karl Marx presented two class models of the capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and
proletariat. It is evident that due to the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist, the
working class develops class-consciousness and hatred towards the former. Hence, this
antagonistic relationship between the main contending classes would be leading to the clash of
interests. In a class divided society, all other sections of the people take sides, based on their
economic interests. The workers having become proletariat and organized under the banner of
Communist Party would be successful in their onslaught against the capitalist class. Marx
observed that the class conflicts in the capitalist system did not occur on their own. It is only
through the conscious involvement of the working class struggle that would eventually shape a
revolution.

VIRGINIA HELD
 She is a leading moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics
of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and
critiques of the traditional roles of women in society. She wrote the book “Ethics of Care” and it
features a potential as a novel normative theory. It is defined and devoted to the ethics of care
where there are distinct theoretical approaches that represent an alternative to moral theories
such as Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. In contrast of her moral principles, Held argues that the
ethics of care centers on personal relations and communal ties. They acknowledge the root of
care ethics and defend it as an independent moral framework whose broader agenda is
distinguished from the feminist propaganda and also from virtue-ethics. She also values the view
of social and political aspect and it is surprisingly greater than the work of Kantian Ethics
because of its central values, and the ways in which it constrains markets. Held raises some
concerns about the limits of rights-based political discourse, and proposes that we focus on care
in order to overcome such limits. Ethics of care has a larger significance for global issues insofar
as it offers an alternative characterization of global civility.

There are five features that supposed to define the ethics of care according to Held:

 First, the focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to
and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility.
 Second, the idea of epistemological perspective, the ethics of care values emotions, and
appreciates emotions and relational capabilities that enable morally concerned persons in
actual interpersonal contexts to understand what would be best.
 Third, the ethics of care reject the view of the dominant moral theories that the more
abstract the reasoning about a moral problem, the better because it is all the more likely
to avoid bias and arbitrariness, more nearly to achieve impartiality. The ethics of care
respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we
share actual relationships.
 Fourth, the ethics of care proposes a novel conceptualization of the distinction between
private and public and of their respective importance.
 Fifth, the ethics of care adopts a relational conception of persons, which is in stark
contrast to Liberal individualism.

“These five features are supposed to define the ethics of care and qualify it as a better
alternative to other 'dominant' theoretical approaches”.

Held further viewed that traditional ethicist is contractual-duties/commitment and obligation

towards relationship of human interaction. Held maintained that morality is not unitary; it is
closely related to justice. Held emphasized that women’s struggles and striving in the private
reals count as much as men’s struggles in the public realm, she faulted traditional ethics not only
for discounting women’s morality but also for presenting men’s morality as a human person’s
morality. Held conceded, however that the kinds of relationships that exist between a mothering
person and children can be just as oppressive-even more oppressive than the relationships that
exist between two rational contractors.