Marx's Theories of Alienation, Class, and Exploitation
Watch these two lectures about Marx's Theory of Alienation and Marx's Theory of Class and Exploitation. Both lectures do an excellent job showing how Marx's theories evolved and the events that influenced them.
Marx's Theory of Alienation
Marx begins his intellectual life as a Young Hegelian, in the company of Bruno Bauer and others. The Young Hegelians, a radical group of scholars, intended to subject Hegel's theories to critical scrutiny. Eventually, Marx breaks with this tradition altogether by saying that alienation does not come from thoughts and therefore cannot be solved by ideas alone. Alienation comes from material conditions and can only be addressed by changing those conditions. Due to his radical, revolutionary ideas, Marx was forced to move around Europe quite a bit. In his lifetime, he saw his predictions about the uprising of the working classes come to fruition in some places, but he also saw these revolutions fail, including the short-lived Commune in France. Next time, we see how the young Marx who is occupied with Hegelian thought and the concept of alienation transitions to a more mature Marx with the concept of the capitalist mode of production.
Marx's Theory of Class and Exploitation
In order to move from a theory of alienation to a theory of exploitation, Marx develops a concept of class and of the capitalist mode of production. He developed these in The Communist Manifesto, the Grundrisse and Das Kapital. Marx argues that what sets the capitalist mode of production apart from the commodity mode of production is not only the accumulation of money; the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the use of labor power as a commodity to create more value. The capitalist compensates the laborer enough for his labor power to reproduce the commodity (the labor power), but the laborers' power produces additional value: a surplus value for the owner. The worker is exploited when he does not keep or control the value created by his own labor power. Marx argues that the capitalist system forces people into one of two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This class dichotomy did not describe accurately social structure in Marx time, when a sizable class of self-employed existed. Marx predicted that this "middle class" will disappear; instead it grew in size over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Source: Iván Szelényi, https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151/lecture-9, https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151/lecture-13
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