Karl Marx & Conflict Theory: Crash Course Sociology

 

Nicole Sweeney 00:00:00

Most likely, you've heard of Karl Marx. He is regarded as the founder of divisive political movements, and his name is still occasionally used as a verbal insult in American politics. However, I don't wish to discuss that. I want to discuss the philosopher Karl Marx. Marx, the academic. Marx's main concern during the 19th century, which was characterized by extreme inequality and rapid political and technological change in Europe, was what it means to be free.

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Marx built his entire historical theory off of this query. In doing so, he established the paradigm of conflict theory in sociology and encouraged the field to consider issues of power and inequality as well as how these factors can affect societal change.

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Marx was concerned with freedom, whereas Durkheim was focused on social cohesion and how society functions. Marx posed the query, "How can people be free?" because freedom does not come naturally to humans. When you stop to think about it, we are really very limited. In order to survive, our physical bodies require a variety of things from us that we are not really adapted to provide. For instance, if you place a hummingbird in the middle of a forest, it will simply continue to go about its day, gathering nectar and living its life. However, if you abandon someone in the middle of a forest, they will probably starve to death.

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Marx believed that humans are remarkably ill-adapted to the natural world when compared to other animals. In actuality, by collaborating to reshape nature to meet our needs, we are the only species that can survive in it. He explained that this is work, and in order to survive, we must work together. Through our labor, we gradually liberate ourselves from the limitations imposed by nature. Marx observed, however, that as soon as we were freed from these natural restraints, we became entangled in brand-new social restraints. Let's visit the Thought Bubble to learn more about this.

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Consider it in this way. Everyone basically worked all day to get food ten thousand years ago. People were strongly constrained by natural laws in this "primitive communism," as Marx described it, but they were also socially very equal. Compare that to feudalism in the Middle Ages, when a whole class of nobility lived without ever having to worry about where their next meal would come from. The peasantry, however, continued to work nonstop and produced food. They actually spent a significant amount of time preparing food for the nobility. People were producing more than they needed to survive, but society was organized so that some people simply didn't need to share that surplus.

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Therefore, labor, its organization, the beneficiaries, and the evolution of this organization over time are central to Marx's understanding of freedom. This emphasis on labor gave rise to the viewpoint known as historical materialism, which was developed by Karl Marx and his longtime partner Friedrich Engels. Historical materialism is materialistic because it is concerned with these issues of material reality, such as how production is organized and who has access to resources like food or money and who doesn't. Historical materialism is historical because it examines change over time. Marx was not indifferent to other issues like politics or religion, though. But in his opinion, the production and management of resources came first. Also, I'm not saying

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According to this perspective, everything else—politics, culture, religion, even families—were what Marx referred to as the superstructure, which was constructed on top of material reality. The economy, which is the organization of labor and resources in a society, served as the foundation. So Mark didn't concentrate on wars and interstate rivalries when he studied history. Instead, he viewed historical development in terms of economic classes and modes of production. Marx understood "modes of production" to refer to historical stages, even though the term may seem to refer to how things are made.

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Modes of production include primitive communism, feudalism, and capitalism. Additionally, a combination of production forces and relations defines all modes of production. The technical, scientific, and material components of the economy—tools, structures, resources—as well as the labor that propels them—are collectively referred to as the forces of production.

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Factories, oil, and internal combustion engines are examples of the forces of production in capitalism today. However, they also incorporate cultural or social technologies, such as the concept of mass production and the assembly line. In contrast, the organization of society around labor is determined by the relations of production. Do people produce and sell their own goods, or do they work for pay? How does property work or who owns it? Is commerce a key component of the economy? All of these concerns the relations of production.

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And these issues are crucial because, if you consider social constraints and surplus, the relations of production define who controls how the surplus is used and how it is taken from those who produce it. These relationships aren't entirely clear-cut in capitalism. One is that there are no legally established classes. Being a lord or a peasant was a legal distinction during feudalism. A peasant's lord had the legal right to punish them if they didn't work. However, under capitalism, there are no laws dictating who must work and who must not. If you don't show up for work, you'll only get fired rather than sent to jail.

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Marx, however, was a historical materialist, and according to him, social classes were still defined by their position in the production relations, not by the laws that were in place during feudalism. Marx also distinguished between two main classes when he observed industrial capitalism emerging all around him: the proletariat, or working class, and the bourgeoisie, or capitalists. The lack of ownership or control over the means of production—i.e., the resources required to engage in labor and produce goods—defines the proletariat.