HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

According to Marx, the development of history is caused by the contradiction between the productive forces and the production relations of society. By "productive forces, "Marx is referring to the means of production and to the level of human technical understanding. By production relations, Marx is referring to class relations.

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.

The notion of labor is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labor" and the capacity to transform nature labor "power". For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination:

Along with the Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting "nature" with "history". Sometimes they use the phrase "existence precedes consciousness". The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is - the social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability.

Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.

Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology and know-how, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together, these comprise the mode of production. Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than production relations (for example, a new technology develops, such as the Internet, and only later are the laws developed to regulate the new technology). For Marx, this mismatch between (economic) base and social superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or social classes. As a materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict.

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor power. Marx wrote extensively about this in his theory of alienation. Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor - one's capacity to transform the world - is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, which are bought and sold on the market.

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology" Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. According to Marx and Engels, people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor power. one example of this sort of analysis is found in Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Philosophy of Right:

Whereas his gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.