1. Karl Marx
Part 1. An introduction
Dr. Graham Sharp
SS122 Foundations of Sociology

2. Marx the person
• Born 5 May 1818 at Trier
in the Rhineland,
Germany
• Died 14 March and buried
17 March 1883 in
Highgate Cemetery
• Student of law, but was
more interested in the
philosophy of law
• Completed a PhD on
Greek philosophers –
• Influenced by Epicurus –
the first materialist

3. Marx’s starting points
• Influenced by the
teachings of Hegel
(1770-1831)
• He saw the history of
society as a series of
conflicts or dialectics
• Change comes about
as the result of
conflict between two
opposing movements

4. The Dialectic
• This is the idea that change comes about
as a result of conflict of ideas. There are
three stages to this:
• Thesis: the original idea
• Antithesis: the second, contradictory
viewpoint
• Synthesis: the amalgamation of the two
opposing views

5. Hegel turned upside down
• Hegel assumed that the idea of
the State was the subject, with
society as its object, whereas
history showed the opposite.
Turn Hegel upside down and the
problem was solved: religion
does not make man, man makes
religion; the constitution does
not create the people, but the
people create the constitution.
• Thought arises from being, not
being from thought.
(Wheen 2006: 13)

6. Marx the Materialist
• Distinction between idealist and materialist
philosophy
• Therefore for Marx materialist explanations in
which concrete social relations are determinant
are contrasted with idealist explanations in which
ideas are seen as the ultimate cause of social
relations
• We can see such divisions in contemporary
sociology between say social constructivism and
critical realist approaches to analysis.

7. Marx and gainful employment
• Marx the journalist
• Began to write more
radical and critical
articles for the
Rheinische Zeitung
including the famous
story of the ban on
peasants collecting
free firewood in the
newly privatised
forests of Germany

8. Marx the unemployed
• In January 1843 the paper was prosecuted and
closed down by the German Government
• Marx and his new wife Jenny moved to Paris to
have more freedom to write . Paris, at the time
was a hotbed of radical dissent.
• In this atmosphere Marx wrote his Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 not published
(in German) until 1932 and not published in
English until 1959.

9. Marx meets Engels
Marx met Engels in Paris in August 1844 and they
became close friends for over 40 years. Engels had just
finished writing his famous book The Condition of the
Working Classes in England. They later went on to write
many more publications including in 1848 The
Communist Manifesto.

10. Marx and Economics
• Marx saw the capitalist economy as a ‘mode of
production’ and a ‘social formation’. He argued that there
have been four main social formations to date in human
history:
• Primitive communism
• Slave society
• Feudalism
• Capitalism

11. The Labour Theory of Value
All products in capitalism are commodities, i.e.
they have a value. They can be valued in two
different ways:
- Use-value – a commodity has a value of
usefulness to the consumer
- Exchange-value – the relationship
between the different values of different
commodities, e.g. pint of beer = one day bus
ticket

12. Surplus Value
• Capitalists (employers) gain surplus value
(profit) from their workers by paying them a fixed
amount for their labour power regardless of the
profit they gain
• Surplus value can be increased by lengthening
the working day or increasing productivity
• Not all surplus value is profit

13. The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists

15. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Tramps, Exploiters of All those All those The
beggars, labour, engaged in engaged in unemploy
society thieves, unnecessary necessary ed
people, swindlers, work work – the
the pickpockets, production
aristocra burglars, of the
cy, great bishops, benefits of
landown financiers, civilisation
ers, all capitalists,
those shareholder
possesse s, ministers
d of of religion
hereditar
y wealth

16. Two types of Labour
• Necessary labour =
the time the worker
spends actually
earning the amount
paid in wages.
• Surplus labour = the
time spent producing
surplus value for the
capitalist.

17. Two main elements to capitalist
production
• Forces of production = both the materials
worked on and the tools and techniques
employed in production, distribution and
exchange.
• Relations of production (the labour process) =
relations that exist between capitalist and worker
such that the former both controls the means of
production and can sell the commodities (goods
and services) that are produced by the worker.

18. Base and Superstructure

19. Base and Superstructure
• A lot of debate over this issue. Some read
the base superstructure metaphor in a
mechanical way, others have a more
sophisticated reading whereby there is a
two way flow of influence and
determination. Think about the discussion
around structure and agency.

20. What determines what?
“Men [sic] make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen
by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and
transmitted from the past.”
(Marx: 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

21. Next…
Alienation

22. Marx Part 2
Alienation
Dr. Graham Sharp
SS122 Foundations of Sociology

23. Historical Materialism
• Marx used the phrase ‘the materialist conception
of history’. (The German Ideology)
• Saw society built around antagonistic social
classes, division of labour and forms of private
property
• Ideas are rooted in specific material contexts
and have no independent existence apart from
the social formation.
• Social change occurs through conflict and
struggle and contradictions existing between the
productive forces and its social relations

24. Alienation of Labour
• In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 Marx defined labour as ‘man’s self-
confirming essence’. In other words, capitalism
had transformed human labour into an object, an
external thing
• Marx argues that labour (specific and general) is
the basis of human culture
• Alienation is a process in which humanity is
turned into a stranger in a world created by
labour

25. Alienation of Labour
• Unlike Hegel Marx saw alienation as being
located within economic and material
elements; he defined it as an historical
and not a universal state.
• Human relationships that are alienated are
experienced not as relations between
persons but rather as relations between
things, i.e. as reification.

26. Communist Man [sic]
Marx developed a
concept of ‘the whole
man’ whose human
essence is degraded
by the external power
of capital. Man needs
to be returned to a
non-alienated state,
reconnected with
nature, other men and
society.

27. Communist Man…
“He [humans within capitalism]
is a hunter, a fisherman, a
shepherd, or a critical critic,
and must remain so if he does
not want to lose his means of
livelihood; while in communist
society, where nobody has one
exclusive sphere of activity but
each can become accomplished
in any branch he wishes,
society regulates the general
production and thus makes it
possible for me to do one thing
today and another tomorrow, to
hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticise after dinner.”
(Marx 1846 The German
Ideology:45)

28. Pre-modern to Modern
• Reification = social relations appear to be
beyond human control; they appear to be a fixed
and immutable quality, as if they were the
natural rather than social world.
• Modern capitalism is built around impersonal
relations based on the domination of exchange
value. This masks, or creates the illusion of, a
free exchange of equivalents (labour for wages)
e.g. ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages’.
Capitalist inequality is thus defined as natural.

29. Species being
• Marx believed that labour is
the essence of man (the
labour process)
• Marx saw humans as part of
nature
• For Marx labour is an
important part of human
development for through
labour we change nature
and society and in the
process we change
ourselves.
• What is the difference
between an architect and a
bee?

30. Back to the Paris Manuscripts
• “The worker can create nothing without
“nature”, without the “sensuous external
world”. It is the material on which his
labour is realised, in which it is active,
from which and by means of which it
produces” (p. 64)

31. Manuscripts…
• “Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature
that is, insofar as it is not itself human
body. Man lives on nature – means that
nature is his body, with which he must
remain in continuous interchange if he is
not to die. That man’s physical and
spiritual life is linked to nature means
simply that nature is linked to itself, for
man is a part of nature.” (p. 67)

32. Manuscripts…
• “It is just in his work upon the objective
world, therefore, that man really proves
himself to be a species being. This
production is his active species life.” (p.
69)
• In other words we live out our lives
through labour (broadly defined) – the
labour process.

33. Division of Labour: Assembly Line

34. Division of labour and alienation
• De-skilling of traditional craft skills
• Fragmentation of tasks
• Work becomes hyper routine
• Scope for personal or collective creativity
is stifled
• Wages are often lower
• Work becomes boring and meaningless.

35. Division of labour and automation

36. Automation and the division of
labour
• Some sociologists such as Robert Blauner
argued that changes in technology would
alter the level of alienation experienced.
He argued that technology developed
through 4 stages:
• Craft production
• Machine based factory production
• Assembly plants
• Automation

37. A question of control
• The Marxist theorist Harry Braverman
argued in his book, Labour and Monopoly
Capital (1974) that it is not always
necessarily the routine nature of the
labour process, but rather the level of
control over it. This is seen as antagonism
between management and worker (labour
and capital) being played out, in other
words class struggle.

38. Back to Marx
• Marx developed further
his theory of alienation in
later works, particularly in
volume 1 of Capital
published in 1867. He
integrated alienation into
his political economy and
theorised it in terms of the
metabolic rift with
nature, an issue we will
examine later.

39. The End
• Next time we will look at how Marxism
developed in the changed circumstances
of the 20th Century.
• We will look in particular at the work of
Antonio Gramsci and his concept of
‘hegemony’.
• Also we will look at how feminism has had
an impact on modern Marxism
• Bye for now

40. You tube clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2
Source:
David Harvey lecture at the RSA(2010)