Chapter 1 - Karl Marx

Germany 1818-1883

Expansion of Capitalism

• Marx accurately predicted the expansion of global capitalism

• capitalism needs ever-larger consumer markets

• coerces other nations into capitalism

• it “creates a world in its own image”

Capitalism: Structured Inequality

• capitalism is a mode of production based on inequality

• the bourgeoise (capitalist class) owns the means of production (factories, land, oil wells, railroads)

• the proletariat (wage-workers) work to meet capitalist production demands

• capitalism thrives off: maximizing profits & acquisition of private property

Fall of Capitalism?

• Marx predicted a fall of capitalism due to:

  • relentless pursuit of capital/profit

  • proletariat revolt

• Marx’s failed predictions based on two false assumptions

  • continued expansion of the proletariat

  • continued poverty of the proletariat

• contrary to Marx, the proletariat have a large stake in the “success” of capitalism

Giving more for less - gap between productivity and pay

Historical Materialism

• interpret history based on material forces and conditions

• historical evolution and expansion of economic (material) production

• contradictions found in economic/social conditions/relations

• lead to the class consciousness (wage-workers’ aware of the exploitation under capitalism)

Dialectical Materialism

• dialectic of change:

  • existing economic/social conditions lead to →

  • tensions and contradictions which lead to →

  • opposition; class revolt which leads to →

  • emergence of new material/social relations

• this process captures the human-social activity involved in historical transformation (including ongoing political activity & social change)

Human Nature

• Marx saw work as integral to what it means to be human

• The ability to transform nature, to work and to produce a material and social existence is what sets us apart from animals

• this creative-productive ability is core to our species being (our humanity)

• species-being implies altruism and man’s nature as social, collective

Material and Social Existence

• for Marx, the relations of production (economic-material relations) constitute social relations; they are the core of society at any historical moment

• what we do is who we are; our material existence determines our social existence

• Marx focuses on practical activity: the life-processes and activities of individuals

Capitalism: A Distinctive Social Form

• inequality & private property are found in other social systems but the ceaseless accumulation of increasing capital and profit via commodity production and exchange is unique to capitalism

• under capitalism, the ties among individuals are based solely on economic exchange and interests

• lack of non-economic ties between capitalists and workers is what sets capitalism apart from other social systems

Commodification of Labor

• commodities have a use value and an exchange value (a price)

• under capitalism, wage-workers too are commodities

• workers have both a use value and an exchange value

• workers produce commodities, capital, and profit for the capitalist (use value)

• workers are bought on the market; their exchange value is their hourly/monthly/yearly wage

Commodification… Forced Labor

• workers sell their labor power to the capitalist class

• capitalism requires that “free'“ workers be wage-workers

• workers’ existence depends on the sale of their labor power

• the worker “cannot leave the whole class of purchasers… without renouncing existence”

• thus, for Marx, capitalism is a system of coerced labor - wage labor is indirect forced labor

Workers’ Illusions

• work, under capitalism, becomes a means to an end; it loses its intrinsic and creative value

• wage-workers work in order to live

• the value of work becomes its use value to the capitalist in the creation of profit

• rather than recognize their exploitation, workers instead embrace what Marx saw as the illusionary promises of capitalism

False Consciousness

• wage-workers believe they will profit through their labor, but the capitalist will always profit more

• the proletariat (and the bourgeosie) believe that capitalism a natural system - they embrace its illusions/its false promises - but it is a historically-specific and human-made creation

• false consciousness keeps the proletariat from seeing the contradictions of capitalism

Marx’s Focus on Class

• physical, social, economic

• role of ideology

• concern about the separation between manual and mental labor

• role of religion

• “class in itself” vs. “class for itself”

Marx on Ideology

• any system of ideas that blinds us to the truth of economic relations

• cultural practices (norms, values, and beliefs) that underscore and legitimate relations of power and prevent workers from seeing their oppression

• this in turn, inhibits possibility of social change

Marx on Religion

• “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Wage Labor and Surplus Value

• wage labor creates surplus value for the capitalist

• surplus value: the value created by the worker over and beyond his/her costs to the capitalist (i.e., wages paid to the worker)

Use vs. Exchange Value

• use value - a qualitative natural expression that something is or is not useful

• exchange value - a quantitative expression of the amount of labor needed to appropriate useful qualities, sets in motion process of distortion

• both commodities and labor have use and exchange value

Wages & Value

• wages - the costs (price) the capitalist must pay in order to produce and reproduce workers

• capitalists pay workers minimum wages that:

  • allow them to subsist as workers and to maintain a material-social existence in order to reproduce a new generation of workers

• the workers’ wages become an ever-smaller proportion of the value the worker creates for the capitalist in exchange for wages

Surplus Value

• “The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist” (Marx, 1867/1967:218)

• “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Marx 1987/1967:233)

Capitalist Production Process

• division of labor

• highly specialized with minute occupational tasks

• reduces work to the most efficient activities in order to maximize use value in producing profit

• assembly line production

• the division of labor produces alienation

Cycles of Overproduction

• capital accumulation increases

  • employment level increases

  • level of industrialization increases

  • level of market expansion increases

• level of commodity production increases

• overproduction

• economic recession

• collapse of smaller businesses

• increase in size of the working class

Alienated Labor

• workers alienated from the products they produce; products exist outside the individual

• the production process controls the worker

• the worker is measured against what he/she produces

• the worker is simply another object in the process

Alienation

• alienation of the workers from their species being; coerced labor diminishes the worker’s freedom/creativity/humanity

• alienation of workers from other workers/people; the controlling and competitive demands of work reduce workers’ participation in a shared human-social existence with others

Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

• increase value of things leads to increase in devaluation of men (labor)

• labor (man) becomes objectified, estranged, alienated

• worker becomes a slave of the object of labor

• private property as cause and consequence of estranged labor

Oppression of Capitalists

• capitalists, too, are in servitude to production; driven by the external power exerted by the ceaseless force of capital accumulation

  • ex. subcontractor, middle manager, CEOs working on behalf of stock owners

• both the capitalists and the workers are servants of (inhuman) capital

• nonetheless, Marx saw the revolution coming from the proletariat; their standpoint in the unequal relations of capitalism give them a more immediate experience of capitalist exploitation

Economic Inequality

• as industry prospers, the domination of capitalism extends over a greater number of people

• increased productivity accompanied by a widening economic and social gap

• increased wages; better working conditions; but these changes do not change the structural inequality that inheres in capitalism

Why do workers accept inequality?

• an expanded middle class

• more workers hold stocks; have a direct vested interest in the success of capitalism

• state intervention to prop up capitalist institutions, and to compensate workers for capitalism’s most severe negative effects (e.g., unemployment, occupational injury)

• unionization of labor; workers protected from excessive exploitation

Power of Ideology

• upholds capitalism & suppresses awareness of and concerns about capitalist inequality

• ideology: the everyday ideas that circulate in society; the ideas that justify things and make things seem normal; ideas arise from our everyday material/social existence; our lived realities

• “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”

Ideology of Consumption

• the freedom to shop

• commodity consumption is crucial to commodity production (and the accumulation of capital/profit)

• consumerism: consumption of “new wants” is crucial to the continuation of capitalism

  • “all these things you cannot do, your money can do”

• the primacy of consumption in our everyday existence lures us into embracing and reproducing capitalism

Commodity Fetishism

• giving things a value that they do not necessarily have

  • raw materials transformed into an object (a product, a commodity) as a result of the exploitation human labor

• commodities become reified, as if they have a life of their own

• obsession w/ commodities obscures the unequal social relations that determine commodity production

• in the process, we objectify the workers, and ourselves (we are what we own)

  • dampens the development of class consciousness; we can all, more or less, go shopping

The Fetishism of Commodities & the Secret Thereof

• social relation among labor exists due to the products of their labor

• it is through commodities exchange (and the division of labor) that the social characteristics of labor are expressed

• value of labor hidden in relative values of commodities

Capitalistic Superstructure

• Social institutions have evolved in ways that are compatible w/ capitalism

  • the state, law, education, religion, mass media, politics

• all promote practices and ideas that bolster capitalist production, profit, and inequality

• serve to protect, maintain, & reproduce the economic base of capitalism

• the capitalist class is the ruling class

• ideas and practices that challenge the status quo are suppressed

Ultimate Answer: Communism

• communism results from the overthrow of capitalism

• communism calls for the elimination of:

  • private property

  • profit

  • the division labor

  • social classes

• communism as: “the end of history”; no more structural tensions or contraditions to resolve

• “universal emancipation”; the proletarian revolution would produce not just the emancipation of the working class but of all people

The Manifesto of the Communist Party

• under capitalism…

  • freedom & individuality really only belong to the bourgeois

  • culture within nation is class based

  • nation states exploit one another

  • external truths based on morality, religion, philosophy, law uphold class antagonism

  • undo all the above under communism

Variation among countries but generally application of communism calls for:

• abolition of property in land and rents applied to public purposed

• a heavy progressive or graduated income tax

• confiscation of property of all emigrants and rebels

• centralization of credit (national bank)

• centralized means of communication & transport by the state

• factories and production owned by the state

• equal obligation of all to work; establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture

• factories and production owned by the state

• equal obligation of all to work; establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture

• integrate industrial & agricultural areas : equal distribution of population

• free education for all

  • an association replaces class antagonism

Review of Key Concepts

• division of labor

• surplus value

• ideology

• false consciousness

• alienation

• dialectical materialism

• fetishism of commodities

Feminization of the Global Workforce

• a feminist application/critique of marx

• Growth in women’s low skilled work in export (global) industries, but not in other areas

• In Thailand, 88% of shop - floor workers are women; 4% in managerial positions

• In China, 85% of the state-owned cotton mill workers are women

• In Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sri Lanka, women equal 70% of production/assembly line workers but account for 35% of those employed

• women combine factory work and farming activities

• women still involved in informal commercial life, i.e. petty trad, community projects, exchange labor

• feminization of labor concentrated in manufacturing & farming in Asia

• feminization of labor in the service industry in the west

• Maquiladora, 1980s, NAFTA

  • Maquiladors

    • about 2500 factories

    • employ about 1.15 million Mexican workers

    • make about $5.75 a day

    • line workers are all women (70% of work force)

    • poor labor conditions and living conditions surrounding the plants

    • capital flight to asia