SOC3070 - Lecture 4

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SOC3070 - Lecture 4

• Karl Marx

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Last week

• Durkheim on history as a social process largely
  independent of the individuals who enact it.
• Forced division of labour as abnormal.
• But, historically, the division of labour
  occurs always in a context of structured
  inequality.

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Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

• Describe well the two-sidedness of history.
• Men make their own history, but they do not make
  it just as they please they do not make it under
  circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
  circumstances directly encountered, given and
  transmitted from the past.
• The Eighteenth Brumaire

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• History is made by the action of individuals in
  pursuit of their intentions.
• But individual action has almost invariably
  unintended consequences
• Task to understand the relationship between
  human intentions and their historical outcome

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Historical Materialism

• Methodology, type of analysis that relates
  present action to the structures of the past
• Historical all human societies are embedded in
  their past
• Materialism the processes and relationships of
  production are essential to the creation of all
  human societies

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• Engels
• The production of the means to support human
  life is the basis of all social structure
• Division of labour as key process.
• At its core is not interdependence, but
  inequality

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• In production men not only act on nature but
  also on one another. In order to produce they
  enter into definite connections and relations
  with one another, and only within these social
  connections and relations does their action on
  nature take place.
• Forces of production / Relations of
  production
• A mode of production is the economic
  structure of society. Which is also a mode of
  power (classes).

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The materialistic conception of history

• Marx, 1859
• In the social production of their life men
  enter into definite relations that are
  indispensable and independent of their will
• ? The priority of society

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• relations of production which correspond to a
  definite stage of development of their material
  productive forces. The sum total of these
  relations of production constitutes the economic
  structure of society, the real foundation on
  which rises legal and political superstructure
  and to which correspond definite forms of social
  consciousness.
• ? the material basis of social organisation

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• The mode of production of material life
  conditions the social, political, and
  intellectual life process in general.
• ? economic production and social organisation

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• It is not the consciousness of men that
  determines their being but, on the contrary,
  their social being that determines their
  consciousness.
• ? the shaping of consciousness

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• At a certain stage in their development, the
  material productive forces of society come into
  conflict with the existing relations of
  production i.e. with the property relations
  within which they have been at work hitherto.
• ? the source of social change

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• From forms of development of the productive
  forces these relations turn into their fetters
• The nature of social change
• Thus begin the epoch of social revolution

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• With the change of the economic foundation,
  the entire immense superstructure is more or less
  rapidly transformed
• the economic sources of social change
• end quote

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• Marxism as a form of historical sociology
• Two-sided interaction of action and structure
  through time
• Division of labour as the source of both
  individuality and inequality
• Contradictions between forces of
  production/relations of production hardens into
  systems of class relationships
• Class domination legitimates itself through
  religion, philosophy, law, and the state

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• Main empirical test the historical transition
  from feudalism to capitalism
• Two kinds of historical writings
• Methodology
• Marx-Engels, The German Ideology
• Marx Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• 2. Historical case-studies. They bring out in
  detail the nature of the interaction of social
  structure and individual action within a specific
  historical setting
• K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France
• K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
  Bonaparte
• F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany

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In these historical studies

• Three levels of analysis
• Events, subjective world of action
• Political structures, institutions, ideologies
• Class structure.

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• Superstructures politics, philosophy, religion,
  culture, etc??Economic situationHistory as
  ultimately determined by economic relationships