Mass Society and Marxist Theory

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Mass Society and Marxist Theory
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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Liberalism, with its origins in the writings of
  John Locke, favored Enlightenment principles of
  personal liberty and free trade.
• Liberalism was strongest among the growing middle
  class who favored the social and economic changes
  produced by industrialization.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Since the early 17th century, European statesmen
  and economists had agreed that a rising
  population was a sign of prosperity.
• It was commonly believed that Kings should try to
  increase the number of their subjects because
  this would provide more taxpayers and soldiers,
  and that a bigger population was an indication of
  a vibrant economy.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Late 18th-early 19th century British clergyman
  and economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) saw the
  effects of the British population explosion and
  industrialization and was horrified.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Malthus vision was the murderous competition of
  mankind over arable land and food, with the poor
  (the largest of the population) suffering the
  most (the Malthusian theory).
• Malthus saw overcrowded slums, pollution,
  disease, unemployment, hungerthe misery of the
  masses as unavoidable consequences of
  industrialization because the population was
  growing faster than the food supply.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Malthus believed the only checks on population
  growth were natures natural methods sexual
  abstinence, wars, disease, famine.
• His bleak view caused him to urge poor families
  to have fewer children, he discouraged charities
  from helping the poor, and he didnt think the
  poor should get vaccinations.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Another British economist, David Ricardo
  (1772-1823), believed that wage increases during
  industrialization were futile because the
  increases would only cover the cost of
  necessities.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• He believed that when wages were high, people
  would have more children, lowering their standard
  of living.
• Both Malthus and Ricardo opposed government help
  for the poor.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• They believed the best cure for poverty was not
  government relief but the unrestricted laws of
  the free market.
• They believed in the ideas of middle class
  liberalism (often referred to as the Protestant
  Work Ethic) individuals should improve their
  situation through hard work, thrift, and limiting
  the size of their families.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• In 1800, British philosopher and economist Jeremy
  Bentham (1748-1832) advocated the idea that the
  goal of society should be the greatest happiness
  for the greatest number of its citizens.
• All laws or actions should be judged by their
  usefulness or utility.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• All actions (from a person, company, or
  government) are utilitarian if they produce more
  pleasure and happiness or prevent pain or
  unhappiness.
• Bentham strongly believed in liberalism (which
  guaranteed personal happiness through personal
  choice and freedom) but he saw the need for the
  government to get involved in the economy under
  certain circumstances.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Bentham, like most British liberals, wanted the
  government to deregulate trade, maintain the
  value of the currency, enforce contracts, and
  finance the military and railroads.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Bentham was among the first to propose that
  prisons should rehabilitate rather than merely
  punish, that the poor should be managed.
• Benthams ideas of limited governmental social
  involvement led to the ideas of another
  influential British philosopher and
  economistJohn Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Mill believed in personal freedoms, but building
  on Benthams ideas, Mill wanted the government to
  step in to improve the hard lives of the working
  class.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Mill believed that even though middle-class
  business and factory owners were entitled to
  increase their own happiness, the government
  should prevent them from doing so in a manner
  that would harm the workers.
• In other words, they should not exploit the
  working class.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) sometimes referred
  to as the second founder of sociologygrew up in
  England during the Industrial Revolution.
• Spencer believed (and greatly promoted) the idea
  that no one or no government should intervene in
  societys evolution.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Spencer believed that societies evolve from lower
  (barbarian) to higher (civilized) forms.
• As generations pass, the most capable and
  intelligent (the fittest) members of society
  survive, while the less capable die out. So over
  time, societies improved.
• Spencer believed that if you helped the lower
  classes, you interfere with this natural
  process.

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Mass Society Economic Theories

• Spencer theorized that the fittest members
  would produce a more advanced societyunless
  misguided do-gooders got in the way and helped
  those who were less fit to survive.
• Spencers survival of the fittest idea is
  usually attributed to Darwin, which is why it
  became known as social Darwinism.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• As a reaction to the growing gulf between wealth
  and poverty (primarily in Britain and Germany),
  some middle-class, reform-minded intellectuals
  began to condemn industrial capitalism.
• To end the growing poverty of the masses, they
  offered a radical solution socialism.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• Socialists deplored economic inequalities, as
  represented by the vast difference in wealth
  between a captain of industry and a factory
  laborer.
• They condemned the system that permitted the
  exploitation of laborers, especially women and
  children.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• Early socialists wanted to expand the
  Enlightenment understanding of equality they
  understood equality to have an economic as well
  as a political, legal, and social dimension, and
  they looked to the future establishment of a just
  and equitable society.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• By the 1840s socialists considered liberalism
  inadequate to deal with the class inequalities
  caused and perpetuated by industrialization.
• Socialists believed liberalism only benefited the
  middle-class so they wanted to reorganize society
  and recreate it based on cooperation, not
  competition.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• Under socialism, the people as a whole (rather
  than the wealthy few) would own and operate the
  means of production (the farms, factories,
  railways, and other large businesses that
  produced and distributed goods).
• Some early socialists established communities
  where all work was shared and all property was
  owned in common.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• These early socialists were called Utopians
  (implying that they were impractical dreamers).
• When there was no difference between rich and
  poor, they believed most human conflict and
  misery would end.

• Robert Owen

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• The Utopian Robert Owen (1771-1858) set up a
  model community in New Lanark, Scotland to put
  his ideas into practice.
• Between 1815 and 1825, over 20,000 people visited
  New Lanark to study Owens reforms.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• Owen was a successful mill owner (who was poor
  growing up). Unlike most industrialists of the
  day, he refused to use child labor.
• Owen pressed the British government for laws that
  limited child labor, reforms in working hours,
  education, and he encouraged the organization of
  labor unions.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• Owen believed that the conditions which people
  lived in shaped their character.
• He reduced working hours (10, instead of 12-17 in
  other factories), built homes for his workers,
  started a school for children of the workers, and
  opened a company store where workers could buy
  food and clothes at fair prices.
• Owen showed that an employer could make a profit
  while treating workers with respect and dignity.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• At New Lanark, Owen had Jeremy Bentham as a
  partner.
• Education for the workers children included a
  nursery school, among the first in Great Britain.
• In 1825, Owen left New Lanark to start a new
  cooperative agricultural community in New
  Harmony, Indiana.
• When this community failed, Owen returned to
  Britain to help establish the trade union
  movement, another important legacy.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• The ideas of the Utopian socialists (like Owen)
  resonated widely in the nineteenth century, and
  their followers established utopian communities
  from eastern Europe to the United States.
• But most of these communities failed, so the
  socialists turned to the large-scale organization
  of working people as the best means to bring
  about a just and equitable society.

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Socialist Thought Emerges

• In the 1840s, the German philosopher and
  historian Karl Marx (1818-1883) condemned the
  ideas of the Utopians as unrealistic.
• He developed a new theory called scientific
  socialism which was based on the scientific
  method in its study of history.

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Marxist Theory

• Made its first appearance in 1848 with the
  publication of the Communist Manifesto.
• Written by Marx and Friedrich Engels, another
  19th century German intellectual, philosopher and
  socialist, the Manifesto is considered to be the
  most important political document of the 19th
  century.

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Marxist Theory

• Marxism as an intellectual theory is persuasive
  because it is egalitarian (meaning advocating
  full political and social equality) the
  Manifesto was an indictment of the awful living
  and working conditions caused by the Industrial
  Revolution.

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Marxist Theory

• The Manifesto held that capitalism divided people
  into two main classes, each with its own economic
  interests and social status the capitalists or
  bourgeoisie, who owned the industrial machinery
  and factories (the means of production)

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Marxist Theory

• And the proletariat, who were the wageworkers,
  who only had their labor to sell to the
  capitalistic owning class in order to stay alive.
  

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Marxist Theory

• The Manifesto was a call for the workers (the
  proletariat ) to rise up against those awful
  conditions and those who oppress them (the
  bourgeoisie).

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Marxist Theory

• Marxist theory held that since the beginning of
  time, economic conditions and institutions of
  private property have been the driving force of
  history (i.e. greed has driven people to do what
  theyve done).
• In sociology, this created whats known as the
  Conflict Theory.
• Private property gave rise to rival economic
  classes (the haves vs. the have-nots). In
  general, the exploiting owning class and the
  oppressed laboring class develop.

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Marxist Theory

• Marxist theory stated that this new
  capitalistic/industrial system was destructively
  competitive. As it spreads and intensifies, more
  will fall into the proletariat and there will be
  fewer bourgeoisie (the Wal-Mart syndrome).
• Eventually the proletariat would rise up and
  overthrow the few bourgeoisie that were left
  (creating the revolution).

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Marxist Theory

• The Communist Manifesto ended with a call for
  workers to unitecreating a Communist Revolution.
  

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Marxist Theory

• In this revolution, they would be led by the
  vanguard of the proletariat, the intellectual
  leadership of those who understood the workings
  of world history.

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Marxist Theory

• Right after the revolution, a dictatorship of the
  proletariat would emerge for a short period of
  autocratic power to ensure that the revolution
  would stick.
• The theory proposed that the state would
  eventually wither away and there would be no need
  to protect class differences (or national
  borders) since there would be none.

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Marxist Theory

• The revolution would abolish private property.
• Everything (i.e. all property) would belong to
  the state.
• This would end all the divisions between economic
  classes (the Robin Hood Effect-no more haves/have
  nots).
• Humanity would now live in peace and cooperative
  harmony.

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Marxist Theory

• Religion (Marx called it the opiate of the
  people) and the state would disappear since both
  institutions were developed by their own classes
  in the past to protect their interests and keep
  the exploited classes down.
• The goal was to have a freer, more equal world
  where each person would contribute what they had
  and get what they need.

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Marxist Theory

• What would replace the state was never made very
  clearMarx was more concerned with the revolution
  than what would happen after it occurred.
• This vision is what led to the great political
  revolutions of the 20th century the Bolshevik
  Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of
  1949 (and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and
  several others).

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Marxist Theory

• In the 1860s, Marxs vision led German
  socialists to create social democracy.
• This was a gradual shift from a capitalistic
  system to a more socialistic one (rather than the
  violent overthrowing that Marx predicted).
• Many countries (including our own) practice some
  form of social democracy.
• True or absolute Marxism though, has been a
  failure. The Soviet Union, China, North Korea,
  Cuba, and others perverted Marxs ideas.

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Marxist Theory