Karl Marx
Karl Marx, a German philosopher and capitalist, lived from 1818 to 1883. He and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) collaborated on writing the Communist Manifesto in 1848. One of the most important political books in history is this one. Additionally, Marx's theory of society, which was different from Comte's, is presented in a very concise manner. While Marx developed a critical analysis of capitalism that saw the material or economic basis of inequality and power relations as the cause of social instability and conflict, Comte saw the goal of sociology as recreating a unified, post-feudal spiritual order that would help to institutionalize a new era of political and social stability.
Marx wrote in a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge that the goal of sociology should be the "ruthless critique of everything existing," or what he called historical materialism (the "materialist conception of history"). In this manner, sociology's objective would be to change society using a solid scientific analysis rather than just objectively analyzing or describing it. This conceptual paradigm served as modern critical sociology's cornerstone.
Marx disapproved of Comte's positivism, which placed a focus on outlining the logical rules governing the collective "mind." Marx viewed Comte's sociology as an expression of idealism that attempted to explain the character of society in terms of the beliefs that people hold. According to an idealist viewpoint, people create concepts such as "freedom," "morality," or "causality" and then alter their lives and societal structures to reflect these concepts. Marx believed that this kind of comprehension could only ever result in a limited analysis of social existence.
Instead, he thought that conflicts between social groups for control of the means of production were the cause of how societies developed and changed over time. According to the historical transformations in how human societies interact with their material world (the environment and its resources) in order to meet their needs, historical materialism is a method of understanding society that explains social change and human ideas in terms of underlying changes in the "mode of production" or economy. Marx contends that shifts in this material, economic foundation are what cause changes in people's consciousness or ideas about the world.
Because of this, people's perspectives in hunter-gatherer communities will differ from those in feudal societies, which will differ from those in capitalist societies.
Class conflict served as the catalyst for historical change and the transition between various historical types of society. The Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism had greatly increased societal wealth at the time Marx was formulating his theories, but they had also greatly increased the wealth and power gaps between factory owners (the bourgeoisie) and employees. (the proletariat).
Capitalism's instability is founded on the ways in which capitalists acquire their capital or assets, namely by engaging in ruthless competition with one another through the sale of goods in the competitive market, as Marx demonstrated in his masterpiece Capital (1867). In order to produce goods that are ever more affordable and competitive, there is a constant need to increase the markets for products and to lower manufacturing costs. As a result, there is downward pressure on wages, the development of labor-saving technologies that raise unemployment, the failure of non-competitive businesses, recurring economic crises, and global capitalism expansion as companies look for new markets to dominate and cheaper labor sources.
But as he noted, wealth is genuinely created by the labour of the workers. In a way, the capitalists who controlled the industries and the means of production were parasitic on the labour of the workforce. It was obvious how unfair the system was. Marx predicted that as capitalism's inequalities grew more severe, workers would ultimately come to understand their shared interests and revolt. This is known as a "class consciousness." He predicted that class conflict would result in the abolition of private capital and the arrival of "communism," the ultimate phase of human history.
Marx's sociological invention was to provide a social analysis of the economic system, even though he did not refer to his analysis as sociology. Marx's analysis revealed the social relationships that had created the market system as well as the social effects of its operation, in contrast to Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the political economists of the 19th century who attempted to explain the economic laws of supply and demand solely as a market mechanism (similar to the abstract discussions of stock market indices and investment returns in business pages of newspapers today).
His examination of contemporary society was therefore neither stagnant nor merely descriptive. He was able to identify the constant change and inherent dynamism that defined capitalist society. He and Engels described the restless and destructive propensity for change implicit in the capitalist mode of production in a well-known passage from The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie cannot survive without continuously revolutionising the means of production, which in turn affects the conditions of production and, in turn, all social relations. On the contrary, all previous industrial classes were required to exist under the condition that the old modes of production be preserved in their original form. The bourgeois epoch is distinguished from all previous ones by constant production revolutionization, unceasing disruption of all social conditions, uncertainty, and agitation.
All fixed, quickly frozen relationships are destroyed along with their legacy of venerable and antiquated prejudices, and all recently established relationships age before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is finally forced to confront his true state of existence and his relationships with his kind with sober senses. (Marx and Engels 1848).
By aiming for "the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age," as Marx put it in another letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx was also able to effectively lay the groundwork for critical sociology. While he clearly and firmly stated his values in his criticism, he avoided doing so dogmatically or on the basis of his own subjective moral judgements of what was right and wrong.
He believed that a critical social theory should instead work to explain and support the social justice problems that were ingrained in the prevailing struggles and aspirations of the time. In his own writing, he made an effort to demonstrate how the variety of specific work actions, strikes, and revolts by workers in various professions for better pay, safer working conditions, shorter hours, the right to unionize, etc. contained the seeds for a vision of absolute equality, collective justice, and ultimately the ideal of a classless society.
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