Overview
This lecture provides a comprehensive introduction to Karl Marx's key theories, focusing on historical materialism, class struggle, capitalism, exploitation, and the transition to communism.
Marx’s Method and Influences
- Marx combined Hegel’s dialectical process (change through contradictions) with Feuerbach’s materialism (primacy of material reality).
- Historical materialism is Marx’s method for analyzing how material conditions shape social structures and historical change.
- Marx viewed the economic "base" as foundational, shaping the cultural, political, and ideological "superstructure."
Modes of Production and Class Society
- Human societies began as classless, communal systems (primitive communism).
- Class society emerged with slavery, evolving through feudalism (land ownership) and capitalism (ownership of production means).
- Each mode of production creates its own class structure and inherent conflicts.
Capitalism: Key Characteristics
- Capitalism is marked by private ownership, wage labor, mass production, and commodity exchange.
- Workers (proletariat) sell their labor power to capitalists (bourgeoisie) who own the means of production.
- Capital is not a thing but a process: money is invested to generate more money via commodity production.
Exploitation and Surplus Value
- Value created by workers is divided into wages (necessary labor) and surplus value (appropriated by capitalists).
- Exploitation is the extraction of surplus value from workers beyond their wages.
- There are two types of surplus value: absolute (longer working hours) and relative (increased productivity).
Alienation under Capitalism
- Alienated labor separates workers from the product, the process, their own essence (species-being), and from other people.
- Alienation is a structural condition rooted in capitalist production.
Machinery, Technology, and Crisis
- Machines raise productivity but reduce the need for labor, intensifying contradictions.
- The "organic composition of capital" shifts toward more constant capital (machines) and less variable capital (labor).
- This leads to the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" and periodic crises of overproduction.
Capitalism, Colonization, and Globalization
- Ongoing "primitive accumulation" (often via colonization) continually produces propertyless workers.
- Capitalism expands globally, creating a division between wealthy (core) and exploited (periphery) nations.
The State, Revolution, and Communism
- The state under capitalism serves bourgeois interests and cannot peacefully transition to socialism.
- Communism aims for revolutionary change, abolishing classes, private property, and the state as a repressive apparatus.
- Transition involves stages: lower communism (“from each according to ability, to each according to contribution”) to higher communism (“to each according to need”).
Key Terms & Definitions
- Historical Materialism — Analysis of history focusing on material (economic) conditions.
- Dialectic — Change through the resolution of contradictions.
- Base and Superstructure — Economic structure (base) shapes and is shaped by culture and politics (superstructure).
- Surplus Value — Value produced by workers but kept by capitalists as profit.
- Alienation — Separation of workers from the products and processes of their labor, themselves, and others.
- Primitive Accumulation — Ongoing process of transforming people into wage laborers.
- Organic Composition of Capital — The ratio of constant (machines, raw materials) to variable (labor) capital.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Review The Communist Manifesto for details on communist transition stages.
- Study the concepts of surplus value, alienation, and historical materialism for deeper understanding.
- Prepare for discussion on the relevance of Marx’s ideas today.