Sociology 2111: Week Three

I. Video: "Roger and Me"

II. Marx: Sociology of capitalism

A. Defining characteristic: markets (supply and demand) determine not only the value of goods and services but the value of labor. Workers as "commodities."

B. Driving force: profit

C. Strengths of capitalism:

1. Technological innovation

2. Massive increase in productivity and production

3. Expansiveness: creates a world system. "The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls." (Marx)

D. Weaknesses of capitalism

1. Pauperization.

2. Proletarianization.

3. Class simplification: the proletariat and the grand bourgeoisie

4. Crises of overproduction (depressions)

5. Eventual loss of legitimacy (compare with Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy)

III. Marx the philosopher

A. Alienation: Systems that people create take over their lives and people lose track of their creativity. Even the capitalists are not free.

B. Species being: what is unique to humans as a species = social creativity.

C. How are workers alienated under capitalism?

1. From the profits of their labor

2. From the product of their labor

3. From their true human nature

4. From other people, who become means to an end.

D. Two views of revolution under capitalism

1. Result of actual economic impoverishment of a large majority in the midst of potential abundance

2. Result of capitalism's destruction of the human essence, which is creative, cooperative work, done freely and joyously. What if wages increase? Workers would still be alienated.... "well paid slaves"

IV. Marx the revolutionary

" For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat,which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung(1842), the Paris Vorwarts(1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung(1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune(1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else." Engels, oration at Marx's funeral

V. Discussion: The Communist Manifesto: Bourgeois and Proletarians

VI. Strengths and weaknesses of Marx's social theories

a. Strength: Emphasis on inequality and conflict, sociology of capitalism, capitalism as a world system

b. Weaknesses: Political predictions, utopian vision .