www.bolender.com Sociological Theorists Page Dr. Ron's Home Page
Karl Marx
1818-1883
Read each of the following items.
Karl Marx, the eldest son of Heinrich and Henrietta Marx, was born on May 5, 1818 in the Rhenish city of Trier, where his father practiced law and later rose to become head of the bar. Both his mother and father came from long lines of rabbis, Heinrich's in the Rhineland and Henrietta's in Holland.
Marx's father, the first in his line to receive a secular education, had broken with the world of the ghetto and had become a disciple of the Enlightenment--of Leibniz and Voltaire, of Kant and Lessing. His native Trier had once been the seat of a Prince-Archbishop, but early in the century it had been occupied by the French and incorporated by Napoleon in the Confederation of the Rhine. Under the French regime, the Jews, who had suffered from grievous civil disabilities earlier, achieved equal rights as citizens. The doors of trades and professions hitherto closed to them were now open. Since the Jews of the Rhineland owed their emancipation to the Napoleonic regime, they supported it with ardor. They faced a major crisis, however, when, after Napoleon's defeat, the Rhineland was assigned by the Congress of Vienna to Prussia, where Jews were still deprived of their civil rights. Threatened with the loss of his legal practice, Marx's father decided in 1817 to convert to the mildly liberal Lutheran Church of Prussia. Being a vague deist and having had no contacts with the synagogue, he regarded conversion as an act of expediency without great moral significance.
The young Marx grew up in a bourgeois household where tensions stemming from its minority status were at best subjacent. His mother, a fairly uneducated woman who never learned to write correct German or to speak it without an accent, does not seem to have had a major influence on him. In contrast, relations with his father, despite some strain, remained close almost throughout the latter's life. He introduced the young Marx to the world of human learning and letters--to the great figures of the Enlightenment and to the Greek and German classics. Although Marx was early repelled by his father's subservience to governmental authority and the high and mighty, the intellectual bonds that had been created between father and son began to be severed only in the last year of the father's life, when the son became a Young Hegelian rebel at Berlin University.
The young Marx was fortunate to have another role model besides his father, the Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen, a next-door neighbor. Westphalen, though socially his superior, enjoyed cordial relations with Marx's father: they were both at least nominal Protestants in a largely Catholic city, and they shared an admiration for the Enlightenment and for liberal ideas. An uncommonly cultivated man, Westphalen spoke several languages, knew Homer by heart, and was exceedingly well read in ancient and modern philosophy and literature. He soon found himself attracted to his neighbor's son; he encouraged him, lent him books, and took him on long walks during which he talked to him about Shakespeare and Cervantes and also about the new social doctrines, especially that of the Saint-Simonians, which had lately created such a stir in Paris. The bond between the two was close, and the distinguished upper-class Prussian government official became the spiritual mentor of the future leader of proletarian socialism.
From Coser, 1977:58-59.
(Special acknowledgement to Larry R. Ridener and The Dead Sociologists' Society) http://raven.jmu.edu/~ridenelr/personal/VITA.HTML
After uneventful years at the Trier Gymnasium, the young Marx, following his father's advice, registered at the age of seventeen at the faculty of law in the University of Bonn. In 1836 he left Bonn to transfer to the University of Berlin. Although this transfer seems to have been motivated by nothing more than the desire of a provincial to move to the more exciting and lively atmosphere of the capital, it was to prove the decisive turning point in the young man's career.
Hegel was already dead when Marx entered the University of Berlin, but his spirit still dominated it fully. And Marx, after but a short period of resistance, surrendered to that spirit.
His teachers at the faculty of law, Savigny in jurisprudence and Gans in criminal law, exerted some influence over the young Marx. Savigny, the founder of the Historical School of Jurisprudence, impressed him with his historical erudition and his power of argumentation. Gans taught him methods of theoretical criticism in the light of philosophy of history. But it was not these older Hegelians or near-Hegelians who converted the young man to his new vision; it was a group of near-contemporaries, the Young Hegelians. These young philosophers had formed a little band of heretics who, though in many respects beholden to the master, had moved away from his teachings. Through them Marx was initiated into the Hegelian world system at the same time as he became a member of a group of iconoclasts who irreverently began to raise awkward and critical questions about major parts of the great man's synthesis.
The informal Doktorklub, of which Marx now became a member, was comprised of young marginal academics--a radical, somewhat antireligious, and more than slightly bohemian lot. Outstanding among them were the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer, both radical and freethinking Hegelians of the Left, and Max Stirner, the later proponent of ultra-individualistic anarchism. Under the influence of these men Marx abandoned law and resolved to devote himself to philosophy. He also became a "man-about-town," frequenting the advanced salons of the capital, as well as the beer cellars, where the Young Hegelians debated for hours on end the fine points of Hegelian doctrine.
In these student years Marx saw himself as a future professor of philosophy. In fact, Bruno Bauer, who had recently been appointed to the University of Bonn, promised that he would find him a position there. But soon after this, Bauer himself was dismissed for his antireligious, liberal views, and Marx abandoned forever his hope for an academic position. His student days came to an end with the submission to the University of Jena in 1841 of his thesis, On the Differences between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. The dissertation was a fairly traditional exercise, except for a flaming antireligious preface which, upon the advice of his friends, was not submitted to the academic authorities. Marx faced an uncertain future: he was now twenty-three years of age, an amateur philosopher who had made a marked impression in advanced salons and bohemian gatherings, but had otherwise no prospects for a career.
It is no wonder that when an early admirer, the socialist firebrand Moses Hess, asked him to become a regular writer for the new liberal-radical and bourgeois paper Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, he grasped the opportunity. He became its editor-in-chief ten months later after writing a number of outstanding contributions. Back in his native Rhineland as an editor of a leading radical publication, Marx for the first time became involved in the immediate practical battles of the day. He wrote a series of articles on social conditions, among them, the misery of the Moselle vine-growing peasantry and the harsh treatment of the poor received for the theft of timber in forests to which they thought they had a communal right. These articles attracted considerable attention, and Marx began to be regarded as a leading radical publicist. But his editorship was short-lived. He had to battle with the censor continuously and to use all his ingenuity to get his thinly veiled democratic and republican propaganda past their scrutiny. When he acidly portrayed the Russian government as the chief bulwark of reaction in Europe, his own government's tolerance gave out. The Russian Emperor Nicholas I, who happened to have read one of Marx's attacks, complained to the Prussian ambassador, and consequently the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. The whole adventure had lasted only half a year and Marx was again without a position.
Soon afterward, in April 1843, he married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, to the dismay of most of her family who grumbled about the misalliance with a social inferior, indeed, one who had no standing whatever.
Following their marriage, the young couple stayed in Bad Kreuznach for several months. During those idyllic months of honeymoon and young love, Marx filled five large exercise books with extracts from nearly a hundred volumes of political and social history and theory, including Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau's Social Contract. In November 1843, despairing of any hope to attain a position in the increasingly reactionary atmosphere of Germany, Marx and his wife left for Paris.
From Coser, 1977:59-61.
The Paris years, from 1843 to 1845, were as decisive for Marx's intellectual development as the years of association with the Young Hegelians in Berlin. Under the relatively tolerant July monarchy, Paris had become the center of social, political, and artistic activity and the gathering place of radicals and revolutionaries from all over Europe.
During the Paris years, Marx plunged into the study of various reformist and socialist theories that had been inaccessible in Germany. He read Proudhon and Louis Blanc, Cabet and Fourier, Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians, as well as the revolutionary disciples of Babeuf such as Blanqui. In addition, he became familiar with the British political economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo and with their liberal and radical critics such as Sismondi.
In Paris Marx not only had an opportunity to study novel doctrines, but he also was able to meet a number of radicals in person. Among the emigres, he was especially attracted to the Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin, and among the Germans, he frequented the radical poets Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand Freiligrath, the revolutionary itinerant tailor Wilhelm Weitling, and the radical left-Hegelian writer Arnold Ruge. Among the Frenchmen Marx met in person, Proudhon may have made the strongest impression. Marx had already read his What Is Property? in Cologne and had praised it very highly. At first the two seemed to be made for each other, but after a fairly short period the friendship dissolved. A few years later Marx savagely attacked Proudhon's Philosophy of Misery in his The Misery of Philosophy, charging him with a misuse of Ricardo's economic concepts and with doing away with the movement of history by neglecting and neutralizing the thrust of dialectical contradictions.
Above all, it was in Paris that the remarkable lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels began. Here Marx became intimate with the textile manufacturer's son who had turned socialist from revulsion about the conditions of the working class, which he had observed both in his native Rhineland and in England, where he was now a manager of one of his father's enterprises. It was through Engels and his work that Marx was introduced to an understanding of the concrete conditions and the misery of working-class life.
Besides the leading intellectuals of the radical and liberal movement whom Marx had an occasion to meet in Paris, he also encountered for the first time those artisan and craftsman radicals, German and French, who, in alliance with intellectuals, were the mainstay of the socialist and revolutionary movement. In almost daily commerce with them, Marx, although often contemptuous of their simple-mindedness and lack of intellectual distinction, was impressed by this new type of man, so very different from the academically trained intellectual with whom he had associated before.
Marx, the radical liberal, completed his conversion to socialism in the heady atmosphere of Paris. It was here that, sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration with Engels, he wrote those early works that served to define his new philosophical and political position and helped to sever the ties that had bound him to his erstwhile Young Hegelian companions. Some of these writings appeared as articles in a short-lived review, Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher, which he edited with Arnold Ruge. Most, however, like the now famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology (which was completed in Brussels), were never published during his lifetime, having been written primarily as a means for intellectual self-clarification. The Holy Family, his final settling of accounts with the key figures of the Young Hegelian "family," appeared in Frankfort in 1845. It received little attention since it appeared to most readers, not without reason, as a tedious family quarrel within the ranks of the Hegelian Left. The Misery of Philosophy was published in French in 1847.
In the beginning of 1845 Marx was expelled from Paris by the Guizot government. Just as the Prussian government had once terminated Marx's editorial career as a result of protests from Russia, so the French government now acted to expel him upon representations of Prussia, which had been offended by the antiroyalist comments of the socialist paper Vorwaerts on which he collaborated. Marx moved to Brussels and established contacts with the German refugees who had taken shelter there. In particular, he sought out the remaining members of the dissolved League of the Just, an international revolutionary movement and eagerly cultivated relations not only with German but also with Belgian and other socialist individuals and organizations. He had become a professional revolutionary, writing, lecturing, and conspiring in the service of a revolution which he, like his newly found comrades, believed imminent. From then on, as Isaiah Berlin has said, "His personal history which up to this point can be regarded as a series of episodes in the life of an individual [became] inseparable from the general history of socialism in Europe."
From Coser, 1977:61-62.
Among the socialist organizations Marx made contact with in Brussels was the German Workers' Educational Association, headed by a type-setter (Schapper), a cobbler (Bauer), and a watchmaker (Moll); its headquarters were in London, and it was affiliated with a federation called the Communist League. In 1847 this group commissioned Marx to write a document expounding its aims and beliefs. Reworking a first draft provided by Engels, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in a burst of creative energy and dispatched it to London early in 1848. It was published, without having any major impact, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Paris revolution. The by now familiar first sentence, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle," adumbrates what is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of all of Marx's later work. His period of apprenticeship was over. He would elaborate and refine his message later on, and his specific political views and orientations would undergo many changes, but the main line of his intellectual development was determined.
When the 1848 revolution broke out in Germany, Marx returned to the Rhineland, after having spent some time in revolutionary Paris, and once again assumed the editorship of a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He and Engels now worked for an alliance of the liberal bourgeoisie with the incipient working-class movement. When the revolution failed, Marx, back again in exile, entertained for a while the will-o'-the-wisp of an impending new revolutionary outbreak. Castigating the liberals for their failure and their cowardice, Marx still expected that the revolutionary flame would be rekindled in the very near future.
In August 1849, Marx was presented by the French government with the alternatives of retiring into a distant provincial retreat or leaving the country. He made his decision and embarked for London. He was never to leave this city again for any length of time.
During the first phase of his stay in London, Marx considered the city a temporary port he would soon leave when the Continental revolution came again. In these early years he wrote his most brilliant historical pamphlets, The Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). These works are informed by a burning revolutionary ardor, but perhaps more importantly, they show Marx at his best in his new role as a social historian of distinction.
As the London years went on, Marx, although never despairing of the coming of a new revolutionary upsurge, realized that the fires of 1848 had burned out. Refusing to participate in a variety of insurrectionary conspiracies advocated by Continental revolutionaries, Marx and Engels withdrew from most of their fellow refugees. Since he had not managed to make many contacts in the British labor and socialist movement, Marx now retired almost completely into the narrow circle composed of his family, Engels and a few other devoted friends and disciples. He remained in this isolated condition throughout most of his life. When he wrote to Engels about "our party" he was referring to Engels and himself.
In June 1852 Marx obtained an admission card to the reading room of the British Museum. There he would sit from 10:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. every day, pouring over Blue Books of factory inspectors and perusing the immense documentation about the inequities of the operation of the capitalist system that was to become an important part of Das Kapital. Here also, filling notebook after notebook, he deepened his knowledge of the British political economists whom he had begun to study during the Paris days.
Throughout most of the London period Marx lived in dire and abject poverty. Only once had he attempted to find regular gainful employment (as a clerk in a railway office) but was turned down because of his illegible handwriting. Being entirely devoted to his work and absolutely convinced that the anatomy of the political economy of capitalism, which he now was describing, would provide an indispensable instrument for the "necessary" emancipation of the working class, Marx continued his scholarly tasks even when he and his family were pursued by angry creditors and found it hard to obtain lodging. Three of his children died from malnutrition or lack of proper care. When one of them died, he had no money to pay for a coffin until a fellow refugee came to his rescue. He and his family were exhausted by a variety of illnesses, some of which clearly stemmed from their miserable living conditions. But Marx persevered. Had it not been for the financial support that the devoted Engels gave to the full measure of his ability, the family might have gone down completely.
Meanwhile, work on what was to become Das Kapital proved even more time-consuming than had been anticipated. A first sketch entitled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy had been published in 1859 but attracted little attention. The first volume appeared in 1867. Marx never completed the subsequent volumes; they were finally published by Engels and Kautsky after his death.
Marx's grinding poverty was slightly relieved for a time when the foreign editor of the New York Daily Tribune, then probably the world's largest newspaper and one with a radical orientation to boot, asked him to become its regular correspondent for European affairs at one pound sterling for each article. He was to send them regular weekly dispatches for almost ten years. When ill health, lack of detailed knowledge, or the pressure of work on Das Kapital prevented him from writing, Engels, much more the facile journalist, took over. Recently, efforts to establish which of the unsigned articles were written by Marx and which by Engels have proved a profitable occupation for Marxicologists. In any case, these occasional writings provide privileged access to the operation of Marx's mind. The articles range over a variety of subjects--diplomatic events, social histories of England and the Continent, analyses of the secret sources of war and crisis, analytical accounts of the consequences of British domination in India--and reveal his reactions to the passing scene that are otherwise available only in his Correspondence, particularly with Engels.
Throughout the fifties, Marx and Engels watched expectantly for signs of the major economic crisis that would inaugurate a new period of revolutions. None came for many years. When a serious slump finally occurred in 1857, it had no revolutionary consequences. Marx then concentrated less on the expected economic breakdown and more on organizing the working class, but here too he was disappointed for a long time. To be sure, Ferdinand Lassalle, the romantic firebrand of German socialism, had created a German labor movement. But Marx disapproved of its political orientation even more than of Lassalle's histrionic manners. Jealousy of Lassalle, who had borrowed most of his theoretical weapons from Marx, may have been one of the motives for Marx's hostility, but there were more objective reasons. He was suspicious of Lassalle's tendency to build a socialist movement upon some sort of unspoken alliance with Bismarck and the Prussian government.
On the rest of the Continent, more particularly in France, the working-class movement was quiescent, not having fully recovered from the disasters of 1848. As for England, Marx never managed to have much sympathy for the stolid, unideological and pragmatic labor leaders who dominated the union movement there. He regarded most of them with withering contempt and they, in turn, to the extent that they knew him at all, returned the compliment.
From Coser, 1977:63-65.
The great change came in the year 1863. In that year, a delegation of French workers was given permission to visit England for the opening of the London Exhibition of Modern Industry in order to study industrial developments and to establish contact with their English counterparts. English and French labor leaders soon resolved to create a continuing economic and political cooperation, to invite representatives of other Continental nations to join them, and to constitute an international federation of working men pledged to end the prevailing economic system and to replace it with some form of collective ownership. The International, as it was to be called, was composed of various elements. Among the French, the Proudhonists and Blanquists were in the majority; among the Italians, there were nonsocialist radical democrats of Mazzini's persuasion; among the British, nonpolitical unionists and radical reformers, some of whom were followers of Comte, worked side by side.
Marx, contrary to his previous aloofness from organizations that were not fully committed to his own view, sensed the importance of this gathering and resolved not only to join it but to become its directing genius. German artisans residing in London made him their representative, and soon after the first meeting, Marx took full command. The Inaugural Address of the International, which Marx composed and which was adopted by the organization, is a historic document hardly less important in the Marxist canon than The Communist Manifesto penned fifteen years earlier.
During the next ten years of his life, Marx devoted a major part of his energies to the affairs of the International. He fought for his theoretical orientation against middle-class reformers and Bakuninist anarchists alike; he waged a continuous battle with the disciples of Blanqui and Proudhon in France and with the Lassalleans in Germany. Throughout these years he strove to make what had started as a loose alliance with divergent ideologies into a united movement informed by that one revolutionary ideology which he had forged in the many years of loneliness and isolation during his British exile.
The International soon became a powerful movement, inspiring fear in the defenders of the status quo. Branches of the International were formed in all the principal countries of Europe. From then on, Marx, as head of the General Council of the International, was in effective control of the movement and insisted on rigid adherence to the line he had set down. The specter of Communism that Marx had seen haunting Europe in 1847 seemed much more real to the men of power of the late sixties than it had been twenty years earlier. The obscure scholar from the British Museum suddenly became an object of choice attention for the various intelligence services that combed the world of London revolutionaries for information about subversive activities.
When the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867, Marx was already in the limelight as the leader of the International. Although the book did not attract as much immediate attention as he had no doubt expected, it soon gained an audience, particularly among Continental socialists. In England there was only one critical review, which amusingly remarked that "the presentation of the subject invests the driest economic questions with certain peculiar charm;" but on the Continent there was a more understanding reaction. A number of Marx's friends propagandized it strongly, and some of his old German associates sent him praise. In Russia, in particular, reviews were very favorable and more searching than anywhere else. Generally, quite apart from its scientific merits, the book was widely read by members of the International. Marx's previous books had been neglected even in German speaking countries. The first volume of Das Kapital was translated into Russian, French, English, and Italian within ten years of its publication.
In the late sixties, Marx, as head of the International and author of a book that sought to lay bare "the economic law of motion of modern society," must have felt that he had finally achieved the union of socialist theory and revolutionary practice that he had aimed for ever since 1847. He had provided the intellectual foundation for a socialist movement over which he exercised full organizational control. Yet that dream was soon shattered.
Ironically, the Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of the working class achieving power for itself and thus seemingly vindicating Marx's vision, also proved the undoing of the International. although the Paris Commune was dominated by Proudhonians and latter-day Jacobins rather than by Marxists, Marx had risen to its defense in an eloquent address published under the title, The Civil War in France. But soon after the Commune was drowned in blood, the latent dissensions in the ranks of the International came to a head. The English trade unionists grew frightened; they feared to be associated in the mind of peaceful British workers with the "red terrorists of Paris." The French movement was shattered, and its exiled leaders, as is the wont of emigre politicians, fell to quarreling among themselves. Followers of Bakunin now attempted to grasp the opportunity to wrest control from Marx. In order to insure his continued domination of the International, Marx managed to have its seat transferred to the United States where his followers were in full control. This proved to be the fatal blow. The International finally expired in Philadelphia in 1876.
In the few years that remained, Marx, wrecked by illness, produced no major work. When his followers and those of Lasselle united in 1875 to form a united socialist party at a congress in Gotha, he wrote a series of marginal and highly critical notes on its program in which he formulated for the last time his conception of the theory and practice that should guide the socialist movement. This Critique of the Gotha Program, published after his death, was his last major writing.
Toward the end of his life Marx finally achieved a measure of comfortable living. Engels, by now quite prosperous, settled an annuity on him, enabling him to spend his last few years in relative ease. He had become a famous man, and socialists from all over Europe consulted him by letter or in person. Russian radicals in particular--to the astonishment of Marx who for thirty years had attacked Russia as the charnel house of Europe--now flocked to him and asked for his advice. In addition, the young leaders of the now united German Social Democratic movement--Bebel, Bernstein and Kautsky--visited him and consulted him on all important issues. The German movement flourished, and one of the leaders of the revived French movement, Jules Guesde, consulted Marx on the program to be adopted. Slowly, the Bakuninist influence was pushed back by Marxist leaders in Italy and Switzerland, with whom Marx also carried on a long correspondence.
A revered figure in the growing socialist movement, Marx had finally found an audience and a satisfying role. But his creative powers were diminished. He still read voraciously; he even taught himself new languages such as Russian and Turkish, but, to Engels' despair, he wrote less and less, and more obscurely than ever.
In 1881, his wife died of cancer. A year later his eldest daughter, the wife of the French socialist leader Jean Longuet, also died. Marx never recovered from these blows. He died in an armchair in his study on March 14, 1883. Only a few friends and socialist representatives from abroad accompanied the casket to Highgate cemetery. His death was hardly noticed by the general public.
From Coser, 1977:65-68.
Karl Marx was a socialist theoretician and organizer, a major figure in the history of economic and philosophical thought, and a great social prophet. But it is as a sociological theorist that he commands our interest here.
Society, according to Marx, comprised a moving balance of antithetical forces that generate social change by their tension and struggle. Marx's vision was based on an evolutionary point of departure. For him, struggle rather than peaceful growth was the engine of progress; strife was the father of all things, and social conflict the core of historical process. This thinking was in contrast with most of the doctrines of his eighteenth century predecessors, but in tune with much nineteenth century thought.
To Marx the motivating force in history was the manner in which men relate to one another in their continuous struggle to wrest their livelihood from nature. "The first historical act is . . . the production of material life itself. This is indeed a historical act, a fundamental condition of all history." The quest for a sufficiency in eating and drinking, for habitation and for clothing were man's primary goals at the dawn of the race, and these needs are still central when attempts are made to analyze the complex anatomy of modern society. But man's struggle against nature does not cease when these needs are gratified. Man is a perpetually dissatisfied animal. When primary needs have been met, this "leads to new needs--and this production of new needs is the first historical act." New needs evolve when means are found to allow the satisfaction of older ones.
In the effort to satisfy primary and secondary needs, men engage in antagonistic cooperation as soon as they leave the primitive, communal stage of development. As soon as a division of labor emerges in human society, that division leads to the formation of antagonistic classes, the prime actors in the historical drama.
Marx was a relativizing historicist according to whom all social relations between men, as well as all systems of ideas, are specifically rooted in historical periods. "Ideas and categories are no more eternal than the relations which they express. They are historical and transitory products." For example, whereas the classical economists had seen the tripartite division among landowners, capitalists, and wage earners as eternally given in the natural order of things, Marx considered such categories as typical only for specific historical periods, as products of an historically transient state of affairs.
Historical specificity is the hallmark of Marx's approach. When he asserted, for example, that all previous historical periods were marked by class struggles, he immediately added that these struggles differed according to historical stages. In marked distinction to his radical predecessors who had tended to see history as a monotonous succession of struggles between rich and poor, or between the powerless and the powerful, Marx maintained that, although class struggles had marked all history, the contenders in the battle had changed over time. Although there might have been some similarity between the journeymen of the late Middle Ages who waged their battle against guildmasters and the modern industrial workers who confronted capitalists, the contenders were, nevertheless, in a functionally different situation. The character of the overall social matrix determined the forms of struggle which were contained within it. The fact that modern factory workers, as distinct from medieval journey- men, are forever expropriated from command over the means of production and hence forced to sell their labor power to those who control these means makes them a class qualitatively different form artisans or journeymen. The fact that modern workers are formally "free" to sell their labor while being existentially constrained to do so makes their condition historically specific and functionally distinct from that of earlier exploited classes.
Marx's thinking contrasted sharply with that of Comte, as well as of Hegel, for whom the evolution of mankind resulted primarily from the evolution of ideas or of the human spirit. Marx took as his point of departure the evolution in man's material conditions, the varying ways in which men combined together in order to gain a livelihood. "Legal relations as well as form of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel . . . combines under the name of 'civil society'. . . The anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy."
The change of social systems could not be explained, according to Marx, by extra-social factors such as geography or climate, since these remain relatively constant in the face of major historical transformations. Nor can such change be explained by reference to the emergence of novel ideas. The genesis and acceptance of ideas depend on something that is not an idea. Ideas are not prime movers but are the reflection, direct or sublimated, of the material interests that impel men in their dealings with others.
It was from Hegel, though perhaps also from Montesquieu, that Marx learned the holistic approach that regarded society as a structurally interrelated whole. Consequently, for Marx, any aspect of that whole--be it legal codes, systems of education, religion, or art--could not be understood by itself. Societies, moreover, are not only structured wholes but developing totalities. His own contribution lay in identifying an independent variable that played only a minor part in Hegel's system: the mode of economic production.
Although historical phenomena were the result of an interplay of many components, all but one of them, the economic factor, were in the last analysis dependent variables. "The political, legal, philosophical, literary, and artistic development rests on the economic. But they all react upon one another and upon the economic base. It is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and that everything else is merely a passive effect. There is, rather, a reciprocity within a field of economic necessity which in the last instance always asserts itself.
The sum total of the relations of production, that is, the relations men establish with each other when they utilize existing raw materials and technologies in the pursuit of their productive goals, constitute the real foundations upon which the whole cultural superstructure of society comes to be erected. By relations of production Marx does not only mean technology, though this is an important part, but the social relations people enter into by participating in economic life. "Machinery is no more an economic category than is the ox which draws the plough. The modern workshop, which is based on the use of machinery, is a social relation of production, an economic category."
The mode of economic production is expressed in relationships between men, which are independent of any particular individual and not subject to individual wills and purposes.
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of reality--the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.
Basic to these observations is that men are born into societies in which property relations have already been determined. These property relations in turn give rise to different social classes. Just as a man cannot choose who is to be his father, so he has no choice as to his class. (Social mobility, though recognized by Marx, plays practically no role in his analysis.) Once a man is ascribed to a specific class by virtue of his birth, once he has become feudal lord or a serf, an industrial worker or a capitalist, his mode of behavior is prescribed for him. "Determinate individuals, who are productively active in a definite way, enter into. . .determinate social and political relations." This class role largely defines the man. In his preface to Das Kapital Marx wrote, "Here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class- interests." In saying this, Marx does not deny the operation of other variables but concentrates on class roles as primary determinants.
Different locations in the class spectrum lead to different class interests. Such differing interests flow not from class consciousness or the lack of it among individuals, but from objective positions in relation to the process of production. Men may well be unaware of their class interests and yet be moved by them, as it were, behind their backs.
Despite his emphasis on the objective determinants of man's class-bound behavior, Marx was not reifying society and class at the expense of individual actors. "It is above all necessary to avoid postulating 'society' once more as an abstraction confronting the individual. The individual is a social being. The manifestation of his life--even when it does not appear directly in the form of social manifestation, accomplished in association with other men--is therefore a manifestation and affirmation of social life." Man is inevitably enmeshed in a network of social relations which constrain his actions; therefore attempts to abolish such constraints altogether are bound to fail. Man is human only in society, yet it is possible for him at specific historical junctures to change the nature of these constraints.
The division of society into classes gives rise to political, ethical, philosophical, and religious views of the world, views which express existing class relations and tend either to consolidate or to undermine the power and authority of the dominant class. "The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production." However, oppressed classes, although hampered by the ideological dominance of oppressors, generate counter-ideologies to combat them. In revolutionary or prerevolutionary periods it even happens that certain representatives of the dominant class shift allegiance. Thus, "some of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as whole" go over to the proletariat.
Every social order is marked by continuous change in the material forces of production, that is, the forces of nature that can be harnessed by the appropriate technologies and skills. As a consequence, "the social relations of production are altered, transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, of the forces of production." At a certain point the changed social relations of production come into conflict with existing property relations, that is, with existing divisions between owners and nonowners. When this is the case, representatives of ascending classes come to perceive existing property relations as a fetter upon further development. Those classes that expect to gain the ascendancy by a change in property relations become revolutionary.
New social relationships begin to develop within older social structures and result from contradictions and tensions within that structure at the same time as they exacerbate them. For example, new modes of production slowly emerged within late feudal society and allowed the bourgeoisie, which controlled these new modes of production, effectively to challenge the hold of the classes that had dominated the feudal order. As the bourgeois mode of production gained sufficient specific weight, it burst asunder the feudal relations in which it first made its appearance. "The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter sets free the elements of the former." Similarly, the capitalist mode of production brings into being a proletarian class of factory workers. As these men acquire class consciousness, they discover their fundamental antagonism to the bourgeois class and band together to overthrow a regime to which they owe their existence. "The proletariat carries out the sentence which private property, by creating the proletariat, passes upon itself." New social and economic forms are fashioned in the matrix of their predecessors.
From Coser, 1977:43-47
Marx's class theory rests on the premise that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." According to this view, ever since human society emerged from its primitive and relatively undifferentiated state it has remained fundamentally divided between classes who clash in the pursuit of class interests. In the world of capitalism, for example, the nuclear cell of the capitalist system, the factory, is the prime locus of antagonism between classes--between exploiters and exploited, between buyers and sellers of labor power--rather than of functional collaboration. Class interests and the confrontations of power that they bring in their wake are to Marx the central determinant of social and historical process.
Marx's analysis continually centers on how the relationships between men are shaped by their relative positions in regard to the means of production, that is, by their differential access to scarce resources and scarce power. He notes that unequal access need not at all times and under all conditions lead to active class struggle. But he considered it axiomatic that the potential for class conflict is inherent in every differentiated society, since such a society systematically generates conflicts of interest between persons and groups differentially located within the social structure, and, more particularly, in relation to the means of production. Marx was concerned with the ways in which specific positions in the social structure tended to shape the social experiences of their incumbents and to predispose them to actions oriented to improve their collective fate.
Yet class interests in Marxian sociology are not given ab initio. They develop through the exposure of people occupying particular social positions to particular social circumstances. Thus, in early industrial enterprises, competition divides the personal interests of "a crowd of people who are unknown to each other. . . But the maintenance of their wages, this common interest which they have against their employer, brings them together." "The separate individuals form a class only in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors."
Class interests are fundamentally different from, and cannot be derived from, the individual interests imputed by the utilitarian school and classical British political economy. Potential common interests of members of a particular stratum derive from the location of that stratum within particular social structures and productive relations. But potentiality is transformed into actuality, Klasse en sich (class in itself) into Klasse fuer sich (class for itself), only when individuals occupying similar positions become involved in common struggles; a network of communication develops, and they thereby become conscious of their common fate. It is then that individuals become part of a cohesive class that consciously articulates their common interests. As Carlyle once put it, "Great is the combined voice of men." Although an aggregate of people may occupy similar positions in the process of production and their lives may have objectively similar determinants, they become a class as a self-conscious and history- making body only if they become aware of the similarity of their interests through their conflicts with opposing classes.
To Marx, the basis upon which stratification systems rest is the relation of aggregates of men to the means of production. The major modern classes are "the owners merely of labor-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent." Classes are aggregates of persons who perform the same function in the organization of production. Yet self-conscious classes, as distinct from aggregates of people sharing a common fate, need for their emergence a number of conditions among which are a network of communication, the concentration of masses of people, a common enemy, and some form of organization. Self-conscious classes arise only if and when there exists a convergence of what Max Weber later called "ideal" and "material" interests, that is, the combination of economic and political demands with moral and ideological quests.
The same mode of reasoning that led Marx to assert that the working class was bound to develop class consciousness once the appropriate conditions were present also led him to contend that the bourgeoisie, because of the inherent competitive relations between capitalist producers, was incapable of developing an overall consciousness of its collective interests.
The classical economists picture the economic system of a market economy as one in which each man, working in his own interest and solely concerned with the maximization of his own gains, nevertheless contributes to the interests and the harmony of the whole. Differing sharply, Marx contended, as Raymond Aron has put it, that "each man, working in his own interest, contributes both to the necessary functioning and to the final destruction of the regime."
In contrast to the utilitarians who conceive of self-interest as a regulator of a harmonious society, Marx sees individual self-interest among capitalists as destructive of their class interest in general, and as leading to the ultimate self-destruction of capitalism. The very fact that each capitalist acts rationally in his own self-interest leads to ever deepening economic crises and hence to the destruction of the interests common to all.
The conditions of work and the roles of workers dispose them to solidarity and to overcoming their initial competitiveness in favor of combined action for their collective class interests. Capitalists, however, being constrained by competition on the market, are in a structural positions that does not allow them to arrive at a consistent assertion of common interests. The market and the competitive mode of production that is characteristic of capitalism tend to separate individual producers. Marx granted that capitalists also found it possible to transcend their immediate self-interests, but he thought this possible primarily in the political and ideological spheres rather than in the economic. Capitalists, divided by the economic competition among themselves, evolved a justifying ideology and a political system of domination that served their collective interests. "The State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests." "The ideas of the ruling class are. . .the ruling ideas." Political power and ideology thus seem to serve the same functions for capitalists that class consciousness serves for the working class. But the symmetry is only apparent. To Marx, the economic sphere was always the finally decisive realm within which the bourgeoisie was always the victim of the competitiveness inherent in its mode of economic existence. It can evolve a consciousness, but it is always a "false consciousness," that is, a consciousness that does not transcend its being rooted in an economically competitive mode of production. Hence neither the bourgeoisie as a class, nor the bourgeois state, nor the bourgeois ideology can serve truly to transcend the self-interest enjoined by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois reign is doomed when economic conditions are ripe and when a working class united by solidarity, aware of its common interests and energized by an appropriate system of ideas, confronts its disunited antagonists. Once workers became aware that they are alienated from the process of production, the dusk of the capitalist era has set in.
From Coser, 1977:48-50
For Marx, the history of mankind had a double aspect: It was a history of increasing control of man over nature at the same time as it was a history of the increasing alienation of man. Alienation may be described as a condition in which men are dominated by forces of their own creation, which confront them as alien powers. The notion is central to all of Marx's earlier philosophical writings and still informs his later work, although no longer as a philosophical issue but as a social phenomenon. The young Marx asks: In what circumstances do men project their own powers, their own values, upon objects that escape their control? What are the social causes of this phenomenon?
To Marx, all major institutional spheres in capitalist society, such as religion, the state, and political economy, were marked by a condition of alienation. Moreover, these various aspects of alienation were interdependent. "Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money." "Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; the essence dominates him and he worships it." "The state is the intermediary between men and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes al his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom." Alienation hence confronts man in the whole world of institutions in which he is enmeshed. But alienation in the workplace assumes for Marx an overriding importance, because to hi man was above all Homo Faber, Man the Maker. "The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phenomenology . . . is that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process. . . and that he, therefore, grasps the nature of labor and conceives objective man. . .as the result of his own labor."
Economic alienation under capitalism is involved in men's daily activities and not only in their minds, as other forms of alienation might be. "Religious alienation as such occurs only in the sphere of consciousness, in the inner life of man, but economic alienation is that of real life. . . . It therefore affects both aspects."
Alienation in the domain of work has a fourfold aspect: Man is alienated from the object he produces, from the process of production, from himself, and from the community of his fellows.
"The object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. . . .The more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself."
"However, alienation appears not merely in the result but also in the process of production, within productive activity itself. . . . If the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation. . . . The alienation of the object of labor merely summarizes the alienation in the work activity itself."
Being alienated from the objects of his labor and from the process of production, man is also alienated from himself--he cannot fully develop the many sides of his personality. "Work is external to the worker. . . . It is not part of his nature; consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. . . . The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless." "In work [the worker] does not belong to himself but to another person." "This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien, not belonging to him activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life. . . . as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him."
Finally, alienated man is also alienated from the human community, from his "species- being." "Man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men. . . . Each man is alienated from others . . . each of the others is likewise alienated from human life." Marx would have liked the lines of the poet, A.E. Housman, "I, a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made." Only Marx would have replaced the poet's I with We.
The term alienation cannot be found in the later writings of Marx, but modern commentators are in error when they contend that Marx abandoned the idea. It informs his later writings, more particularly Das Kapital. In the notion of the "fetishism of commodities," which is central to his economic analysis, Marx repeatedly applies the concept of alienation. Commodities are alienated products of the labor of man, crystallized manifestations, which in Frankenstein fashion now dominate their creators. "The commodity form," writes Marx in Das Kapital,
and the value relation between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. It is simply a definite relation between men, that assumes in their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things. To find an analogy, we must have recourse to the nebulous 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 with 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 labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities.
Explicitly stated or tacitly assumed, the notion of alienation remained central to Marx's social and economic analysis. In an alienated society, the whole mind-set of men, their consciousness, is to a large extent only the reflection of the conditions in which they find themselves and of the position in the process of production in which they are variously placed. This is the subject matter of Marx's sociology of knowledge, to which we now turn.
From Coser, 1977:50-53.
In an attempt to dissociate himself from the panlogical system of his former master, Hegel, as well as from the "critical philosophy" of his erstwhile Young Hegelian friends, Karl Marx undertook in some of his early writings to establish a connection between philosophies, ideas in general, and the concrete social structures in which they emerged. "It has not occurred to any of these philosophers," he wrote, "to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings." This programmatic orientation once established, Marx proceeded to analyze the ways in which systems of ideas appeared to depend on the social positions--particularly the class positions-- of their proponents.
In opposing the dominant ideas of his time, Marx was led to a resolute relativization of those ideas. The eternal verities of dominant thought appeared upon inspection to be only the direct or indirect expression of the class interests of their exponents. Marx attempted to explain ideas systematically in terms of their functions and to relate the thought of individuals to their social roles and class positions. We must go astray, he believed, "if . . . we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that in a particular age these or those ideas were dominant, without paying attention to the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, and if we thus ignore the individuals and the world conditions which are the source of these ideas."
Ideas, Marx maintained, must be traced to the life-conditions and the historical situations of those who uphold them. For example, it is not sufficient to state that the ideas of bourgeois writers are the ideas of the bourgeoisie. Distinctions must be made between those ideas that emerge at the beginning of the bourgeois era and those that come at it height. Utilitarian notions in the writings of Helvetius and d'Holback differed from those that made their appearance with James Mill and Bentham. "The former correspond with the struggling, still undeveloped bourgeoisie, the latter with the dominant, developed bourgeoisie."
It is with revolutionary ideas as it is with conservative ideas. "The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular age presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class." "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence."
The ideologists and the political representatives of a class need not share in all the material characteristics of that class, but they share and express the overall cast of mind.
One [must not] imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not go beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically.
Moreover, Marx granted that particular individuals might not always think in terms of class interests, that they "are not 'always' influenced in their attitude by the class to which they belong." But categories of people, as distinct from individuals, are so influenced.
In his more polemical writings Marx used his functional analysis of the relations between ideas and the social position of their proponents as a means of unmasking and debunking specific opponents and specific ideas. His aims were wider, however. Karl Mannheim perceived this when he wrote:
[Marx's] undertaking . . . could reach its final goal only when the interest-bound nature of ideas, the dependence of 'thought' on 'existence,' was brought to light, not merely as regards certain selected ideas of the ruling class, but in such a way that the entire 'ideological superstructure' . . . appeared as dependent upon sociological reality. What was to be done was to demonstrate the existentially determined nature of an entire system of Weltanschauung, rather than of this or that individual idea.
In Marx's later writings, and in particular in a remarkable series of Engels' letters that date from the 1890's, some of the sharp edges of earlier polemical writings were smoothed out. Marx and Engels were now led to repudiate the idea that the economic "infrastructure" alone determined the character of the "superstructure" of ideas and only held onto the assertion that it "ultimately" or "in the last analysis" was the determining factor.
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determinant element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. . . . Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure . . . also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggle and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.
In their later writings, both Marx and Engels were led to grant a certain degree of intrinsic autonomy to the development of legal, political, religious, literary, and artistic ideas. They now stressed that mathematics and the natural sciences were exempt from the direct influence of the social and economic infrastructure, and they now granted that superstructures were not only mere reflections of infrastructures, but could in turn react upon them. The Marxian thesis interpreted in this way gained considerable flexibility, although it also lost some of its distinctive qualities.
From Coser, 1977:53-55.
Marx's focus on the process of social change is so central to this thinking that it informs all his writings. The motor force of history for Marx is not to be found in any extra-human agency, be it "providence" or the "objective spirit." Marx insisted that men make their own history. Human history is the process through which men change themselves even as they pit themselves against nature to dominate it. In the course of their history men increasingly transform nature to make it better serve their own purposes. And, in the process of transforming nature, they transform themselves.
In contrast to all animals who can only passively adjust to nature's requirements by finding a niche in the ecological order that allows them to subsist and develop, man is active in relation to his surroundings. He fashions tools with which to transform his natural habitat. Men "begin to distinguish themselves fro animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. . . . In producing their means of subsistence men indirectly produce their actual material life."
Men "who every day remake their own life" in the process of production can do so only in association with others. This is what makes man a zoon politicon. The relations men establish with nature through their labor are reflected in their social relationships.
The production of life, both of one's own by labor and of fresh life by procreation, appears at once as a double relationship, on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social is meant the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner or to what end. It follows from this that a determinate mode of production, or industrial stage, is always bound up with a determinate mode of cooperation, or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a 'productive force.'
In their struggle against nature, and to gain their livelihood through associated labor, men create specific forms of social organization in tune with specific modes of production. All these modes of social organization, with the exception of those prevailing in the original stage of primitive communism, are characterized by social inequality. As societies emerge from originally undifferentiated hordes, the division of labor leads to the emergence of stratification, of classes of men distinguished by their differential access to the means of production and their differential power. Given relative scarcity, whatever economic surplus has been accumulated will be preempted by those who have attained dominance through their expropriation of the means of production. Yet this dominance never remains unchallenged. This is why "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Free men and slaves, patricians and plebeians, barons and serfs, guildmasters and journeymen, exploiters and exploited have confronted one another from the beginning of recorded time. Yet Marx, insisted on the principle of historical specificity, that is, he thought it essential to note that each particular class antagonism, rooted in particular productive conditions, must be analyzed in its own right. Each stage in history is conceived as a functional whole, with its own peculiar modes of production, which give rise to distinctive types of antagonisms between exploiting and exploited classes. Not all exploited classes have a chance to assert themselves in successful combat against their exploiters. The revolts of the slaves of antiquity or of the German peasantry at the time of the Reformation were doomed to failure because these classes did not represent a mode of production that would dominate in the future. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie in the last stages of feudalism and the proletariat in modern times were destined to be victorious since they represented a future mode of production and social organization.
While Marx can be considered a historical evolutionist, it would be a mistake to think of him as a believer in unilinear evolution. He was acutely aware of periods of relative stagnation in human history--for example, in Oriental societies--and he knew of historical situations characterized by a stalemate, a temporary equilibrium, between social classes. His writings on the regime of Napoleon III illustrate in masterful fashion a historical situation in which the forces of the old class order and of the new are so nearly balanced that neither is able to prevail, thus giving rise to a "Bonapartist" stalemate. Moreover, though throughout his life Marx held fast to the belief that the future belongs to the working class, which will lead the way to the emergence of a classless society, he was nevertheless willing to consider the possibility that the working class may not be equal to its "historical task" so that mankind would degenerate into a new kind of barbarism.
Marx conceived of four major successive modes of production in the history of mankind after the initial stage of primitive communism: the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois form. Each of these came into existence through contradictions and antagonisms that had developed in the previous order. "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society."
Class antagonisms specific to each particular mode of production led to the emergence of classes whose interests could no longer be asserted within the framework of the old order; at the same time, the growth of the productive forces reached the limits imposed by previous productive relations. When this happened, the new classes, which represented a novel productive principle, broke down the old order, and the new productive forces, which were developed in the matrix of the old order, created the material conditions for further advance. However, "the bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production." When they have been overthrown by a victorious proletariat, "the prehistory of human society will have come to an end," and the dialectical principle that ruled the previous development of mankind ceases to operate, as harmony replaces social conflict in the affairs of men.
Marx's emphasis on the existential roots of ideas, his stress on the need to view thinking as one among other social activities, has remained--no matter what qualifications have to be made--one of the enduring parts of his work. Together with his economic interpretation of the course of human history, his theory of class relations, and his focus on the alienating aspects of social life in modern society, it has become a permanent part of the sociological enterprise.
From Coser, 1977:55-57.
Slide Presentation of Karl Marx (PowerPoint format)
The following items are optional reading.
The Original Work: The Communist Manifesto
www.bolender.com Sociological Theorists Page Dr. Ron's Home Page
This page has been visited
times since July 26, 2004.
This page was last edited on Thursday January 26, 2006.