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Class Relations

Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• a 19th century social
philosopher and economist.
• famous for his work entitled
"Communist Manifesto."
• concerned on the growing
division between the
bourgeoisie and proletriat.
• criticizes the age of capitalism.
• Marx, together with Friedrich
Engels, were influenced by G.
W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) and
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-
1872).
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• Marx was by no means the first to use a class
analysis.
• in the 19th century, the bourgeoisie had
established a class despotism with few
disguises.
• Marx's central criticism of capitalism was neither
that it robbed working people nor that it denied
them elementary personal freedoms.
• Certainly he thought capitalism did both, but
more important, Marx condemned capitalism
because it murdered what is most beautiful in
human beings, the potential for creativity and
intelligence.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• Marx assumed that men and women are
first and foremost producers, not in the
narrow sense of producing goods and
services, but in the broder sense of
producing, laboring upon, and creating the
world: economic, political, and religious
that surrounds them.
• For Marx, inspired by Feuerbach, religion
was a form of alienation; "religion as the
opium of the people."
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• "an enforced increase of wages... would
therefore be nothing but better payment for the
slave, and would not win either for the worker or
for the labor their human status and dignity."
• Marx saw individuals are alienated in three
broad ways: first, men and women are alienated
from the defining characteristic of human beings,
that is, the act of producing.
• in every period of his life, Marx's chief concern
was liberating the creative potential smothered
inside each individual.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• the second kind of alienation that Marx outlined was the
alienation of human beings from one another.
• "competition separates individuals from one another."
and "the only one force that brings people together and
puts them in relation to each other, is the selfishness, the
gain and the private interests of each."
• rather than see others as obstacles to our own freedom
and to our own satisfaction, Marx suggested that in a
free community we would learn from others and look
upon others as resources helpful to our own
development.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• the third form of alienation that Marx identified was
alienation from the products of our labor.
• Marx was suggesting that human beings (subjects) have
always been the authors of the political, economic,
idelogical, and religious worlds (the objective world), but
human beings have never recognized the objective world
as their creation.
• to be alienated from the products of our labor is to be
tyrannized by our own creations. "Man's own deed
becomes an alien power opposed to him, which
enslaves him instead of being controlled by him."
• the products of our labor stand out as things that control
us, instead of vice versa, a process that Marx called
"reification." Although we should be "masters" of our
creations, we submit as "slaves."
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• Marx, capitalism as only assembling these productive
forces, whereas he believed that socialism could develop
these productive forces more efficiently both because
cooperative enterprises are more efficient than
authoritarian factories and because a "fully developed
individual" can bring a breadth of intelligence and
creativity to the work process that capitalism, relying on
workers rendered unimaginative and ignorant by the
division of labor, cannot.
• Marx thought that human freedom could only exist where
there was comparative abundance and after society had
reduced the average work week from perhaps sixty to
forty to ten hours.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• the initial stages of human liberation would have three
broad characteristics addressing the three different
forms of alienation that Marx outlined. First, human
freedom requires labor to be a spontaneous expression
of oneself.
• second, one attains such human emancipation only in a
community of equals.
• finally, freedom necessitates that people control the
products of their labor, that is, consciously construct the
political and economic world that best meets their needs.
• genuine freedom lies first in recognizing that we are the
authors of the social and political world and second in
consciously and cooperatively shaping the world to meet
human, and not class, needs.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• nothing seems quite so familiar in Marx as the claim that
the "history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles."
• "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into
two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly
facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat."
• the appearance of freedom was, for Marx, a crucial
ideological tool by which classes dominated. Classes
create ideologies, or systems of ideas, that justify their
claims and privileges, and individuals generally adopt the
system of ideas appropriate to their position in the class
structure.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• "the ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas (but not the only
ideas), i.e. the class which is the ruling
material force of the society, is at the
same time its ruling force."
• those who control the "material
production" of any society alos control the
"mental production" and use these ideas
to dominate other classes.
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
wrote that "the executive of the modern state is
but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeosie."
• far from gazing up at "reason," bureaucrats swim
about immersed in careerism."
• the socialist revolution, wrote Marx, "will no
longer attempt to transfer the bureaucratic-
military apparatus from one hand to another, nut
to smash it, and this is the precondition for every
real people's revolution on the continent."
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• Marx sought to form workers' organizations and workers'
parties, all of which were to be run by the workers
themselves.
• "the emancipation of the working class must be achieved
by the working classes themselves. We cannot therefore
cooperate with people who openly state that the workers
are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must
be freed from above."
• "what we have to deal with here is a communist society,
not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on
the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society;
which is thus in every respect, economically, morally,
and intellectually; still stamped with the birth marks of the
old society from whose womb it emerges."
Social Philosophy of Karl Marx
• Marx noted three general characteristics of this early
socialism:
– all people will be paid according to the amount of labor contributed.
– socialism will accelerate the development of science and technology in
order to reduce the amount of necessary labor and to diminish the demand
for a division of labor, smoothing the way for a time when society can end
alienation.
– workers will control the factories, something we might well call socialist
democracy or economic democracy.
• behind part of his writings, from his theory of alienation
to the notion that workers must emancipate themselves,
is the conviction that men women must be in control of
their own destinies. People can control their lives
democratically in smaller decentralized socialist
communities.

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