The Social Theorising of Karl Marx (1818-1883)

-Perhaps no social theorist has generated more intense feelings among more widely dispersed audiences
than Karl Marx. His name is identified with some of the twentieth century’s major emancipatory struggles
and worst forms of repression (Goodman, 2003)
-As capitalism spread throughout the world from its original centers in Europe and North America, his
ideas were appropriated in nearly every corner of the globe, revised, blended with other traditions and
applied in heterodox ways. Different Marxisms bear the imprints of highly divergent cultures, times, and
sociopolitical aims.
-The importance of Marx’s thought for labor movements and other forms of resistance and insurgency, as
well as for various socialist and communist parties and regimes, has made it a topic of intense debate on
the left and right. However, his mature work is as analytical and sociological as it is political.
-Although he is usually regarded as one of the "founding fathers" of modern sociology, Karl Marx was not a
conventional academic. Nor was he directly a part of the nascent field of sociology in his day. Instead,
Marx was trained as a philosopher and became a political economist, journalist, social critic, and political
agitator.
-His importance to sociology lies in the way that his work brought a theoretical focus to empirical social
analysis and because of its political and social implications. Marx provides a way to understand the
connection between the economic relationships among people and the broad patterns of social order that
emerge from them in specific eras, an argument known as "historical materialism."
-In developing historical materialism, Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820- 95) laid the
foundation of what was to become a broad school of sociology. Today, Marx continues to fascinate not
only because of his brilliance as a philosopher and pioneering social scientist, but because he represents
the epitome of the scholar-activist who, to paraphrase Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, is not content with
criticizing the world but wants to change it.
 Intro to Karl Marx…….Continued
• -According to Marx, the human being is a product of society, so that religion is a product of
society as well. Marx put the practice of man, i.e. what one does to earn a living, into the center
of attention more so than Feuerbach. Economy is the main focus for Marx and against Idealism
he set Materialism, claiming the task to be finding "natural laws" which work with necessity.
Famous is the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: "Philosophers in the past have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the important point, however, is to change it.“ Marx was also directly and
positively influenced by Enlightenment thinking.
• Because the matters of class, property, exploitation, ideology, alienation, and capitalism are as
important as ever, Marx retains his place as one of the main founders of the sociological
tradition.
•  Most Marxist-inspired or -organized attempts to change the world have been discredited, and
there are few activists who will now mount a political program in his name. Moreover, many
scholars contend that a central reason for the failure of Marxist inspired attempts to change the
world lies in Marxist interpretations of it. That is, as an attempt to understand the making of the
modern world, Marxism was embedded within, and shared basic assumptions of, other modes
of thought that interpreted the rise of capitalism. It was, in short, modernist, and it approached
history and politics with a positivistic commitment which subsumed different societies and
histories within a common grand/master narrative.
• N.B To reconstruct what Marx would say about capitalist classes now that the proletariat
revolution looks less than inevitable is to call not just Marx mistaken but also a number of our
colleagues who are still waiting for the proletariat to cast off their chains (Goodman, 2003). Marx
insisted that there are real material structures or regularities in nature, structures which are
neither imposed by the human mind nor its epiphenomenal expression:
Marx’s theory of capitalism: labor, value, and extraction
• Marx’s main contribution to social theory derives from his effort
to explain capitalism and overall social modernity through the lens
of his materialism. He held that the dynamic of all previous class
societies was ongoing; capitalism’s developmental tendencies are
still shaped by the appropriation of unremunerated labor and
product and patterns of resistance to this extractive process.
• He considered the relationship between the historically specific
ruling class and subaltern class of direct producers as the most
fundamental social site and center of his inquiry. Rather than
entrepreneurship, supply and demand, and consumer choices,
Marx saw capitalism’s most basic facet to be its complex fusion of
advanced technical means of production with highly rationalized
means of extraction, which, he held, generate the radical
disturbance and transformation of social life - “modernity.”
 The German Ideology (1845)
• In The German Ideology (with Engels), Marx noted, "The production of ideas, of
conceptions, of consciousness, is directly interwoven with material activity and
material intercourse of men and appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their
material behavior."
• In other words, it is not ideas that determine the shape of human institutions, but
rather the prevailing material relations that give rise to institutions.
• Marx called this "turning Hegel over on his head." This text articulated much more
explicitly the bases for their later views of materialism, capitalism, and revolution.
Marx considered the work the start of their mature program (Marx and Engels,
1845-6).
• Marx and Engels described how “largescale industry” was overturning the
premodern world and creating a new global order. They saw hypermodern
factories, markets, and capitalist class relations supplanting traditional forms of
production, social ties, and hierarchies and replacing local autonomy and
particularity with centralized interdependence and homogeneity. In their view, the
Second Industrial Revolution was creating “world history for the first time, insofar
as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent
for their satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former
natural exclusiveness of separate nations”
 The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• In February 1848, Marx and Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a
call to arms for a great working-class social revolution and one of the most important
political and social tracts ever written. Alongside stirring polemics, the Manifesto
sketched out a philosophy of world history as the struggle between contending social
classes.
• This class struggle could only be resolved through putting an end to the alienation
between people created by the institution of private property. The manifesto was well-
timed. Revolutionary insurrections growing out of economic crisis and social unrest
took place in France in February 1848 and in Germany and other central European
countries in the following months. Marx’s and Engels’s publicly important political
pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) probed similar themes more dramatically
and eloquently. Originally the party platform of the German “Communist League,” the
essay became a political catechism for later communist movements.
• Writing in the revolutionary climate sweeping across Europe, Marx and Engels hoped
that the capitalist class would soon smash the remains of the old order and elites,
attain complete political power, and create global capitalism and liberal democracy,
which they saw as the stage for proletarian revolution. They expressed their
materialism lucidly and succinctly, applied it to capitalism, and located it vis-avis other
socialist and anticapitalist approaches. In their immanent critique, they detected
nascent crises, revolutionary tendencies, and seeds of postcapitalism.
 The Communist Manifesto (1848)…….Continued
• Holding that they were amplifying historical tendencies that favor the
determinate negation of capitalism, they argued that competition
drives the bourgeoisie to constantly revolutionize the productive
forces and radically and untiringly transform society and culture.
• Marx and Engels asserted that the entirety of premodernity’s “fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices” were being “swept away” and “all new-formed ones”
were becoming “antiquated before they can ossify.”
• Regardless of unparalleled material progress, they saw capitalism to
be “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world. . . called up by his spells.” They were optimistic,
however, that after “all that is solid melts into air,” people will come
to their “sober senses,” see things clearly, take self-conscious
collective agency, and shape history rationally in an emancipatory
direction
 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
• Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) was much more pessimistic. At the
start of this scalding report on the rise of the second Napoleonic dictatorship,
Marx recalled Hegel’s point that major historical “facts and personages”
happen twice, asserting that he “forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce.” The work’s opening paragraphs, among the most
beautifully written and circumspect in all of Marx’s corpus, state
disappointedly that we do not make our history just as we please.
• Rather, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brain of the living. And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something that never yet existed, precisely
in these times of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
the past to their service and borrow from them names, battles-cries and
costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-
honored disguise and this borrowed language.
• After the “revolution,” Marx held, the French state returned “to its oldest
form,” based on “the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the
cowl” (Marx, 1852a, pp. 103-4, 106).
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte…..Continued
• In the Brumaire, Marx reported how Louis Bonaparte became dictator, aided by
the Parisian lumpenproletariat, or underclass mob of easily bribed riffraff. In his
view, the new regime echoed previous absolutism, but concentrated power
much more totally, sweeping both bourgeoisie and proletariat from center
stage.
• Anticipating Weber, Marx held that the earlier parliamentary democracy’s
modernized, centralized, rationalized bureaucracy was an ideal means for
carrying out a coup d’e‘tat and asserting total power. He blamed the
bourgeoisie for creating the conditions of their own demise; their manifestly
selfish, one-sided pursuit of short-term, material interest created a
Frankenstein’s monster, or total state, that appeared to be “completely
independent” of the material base and leading classes.
• Arguing that “state power” could not really be “suspended in mid air,” Marx
stated that the dictatorship represented the class interests of “small-holding
peasantry.” He considered this stratum to be the most backward in French
society, living in what he considered to be “stupefied seclusion,” isolated by
their proto-feudal productive forces, lack of cooperative and communicative
links to modern classes, and backward lifestyle, culture, and interests.
 The Eighteenth Brumaire…..Continued
• Although still claiming that proletarianization and commodification of
rural life would eventually undermine the new regime, the Brumaire
illustrated dramatically that capitalism’s rationalizing locomotive could
lead to nightmare fusions of modernity and tradition (portending
fascism and Nazism) as well as to socialism’s promised land (Marx,
1852a, pp. 147-51, 181-97).
• Although Marx stuck to his materialist agenda, he was no longer
optimistic about capitalist modernization bringing us to our senses and
making capitalism transparent at the surface level of simple empirical
observation. In the Brumaire, he spoke about the Napoleonic regime’s
“superficial appearance” (i.e. state autonomy) as a veil covering the
underlying logic of capitalism.
• This idea of the blinding, fettering effects of ideological illusion can be
found in his earlier work, but he now held that immanent critique must
dig much more deeply and theoretically to grasp the factors that shape
capitalism’s highly distorted sociopolitical surface.
 Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867)
• Capital (1867) was Marx's monumental effort to lay out a systematic theory of the
capitalist economy, its genesis and its tendency toward terminal crisis. In it, Marx
further elaborated the argument he had made in "Wage-Labour and Capital“
(1849), excerpted in this volume, to demonstrate that the root of all profit in
capitalism can be traced to the extraction of surplus value from human labor.
• As competition increases, the owners of capital are compelled by falling profit
margins to attempt to increase the exploitation o f workers and concentrate
capital in ever-fewer hands. Capitalists oversupply the market with commodities
for which there are insufficient buyers. A cycle of boom and bust results and
industrial depressions become ever more frequent and destructive occurrences.
• The scale of production increases and workers are herded together into factories
and industrial cities where they begin to see themselves as members of the same
social class with the same objective interests. In time, they reject their increasing
misery, band together as a political force and overturn the capitalist system. In the
place of private ownership, social ownership of capital is introduced. Gradually,
the need for a coercive administration of economy and society vanishes as
solidarity and cooperation replace estrangement and competition
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
• Stressing relations of surface and depth, Marx held that everyday
appearances and understandings of capital circulation are characterized by
fundamental “mystification”; money and commodities are treated as an
independent realm of “things” rather than “a social relation.”
• Although “monetary crises” draw out “immanent” contradictions of
capitalism, Marx argued, the money form’s illusory independence
“shrouds” the tensions at the same time that it manifests them. He said
that “in the process of exchange, as it emerges on the surface of bourgeois
society, each gives only while taking, and takes only while giving,’’ yet both
roles depend on “having” or ownership.
• In his view, basic property and class inequalities are seen as external to
circulation’s “free” and “equal” exchange. Marx saw the unequal exchange
between workers and capitalists (i.e. wages for labor power) to be
capitalism’s most profoundly mystified and pivotal social relation. His
counterfactual theory of value explained capitalism’s surface by
transposing the apparent relation between things into an unequal relation
between persons. Overall, however, Marx held that the “semblance of
simplicity disappears in more advanced relations of production”