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Marx (1818–1883) focused most of his attention on the structure of capitalist society, a relatively new phenomenon in his day. Marx defined capitalism as an economic system based on the fact that one group of people—the capitalists—owns what is needed for production, including factories, machines, and tools. A second group—the proletariat, or workers—owns little or nothing except their capacity for work and labor. In order to work and survive, the workers must sell their labor time, primarily their working hours, to the capitalists in exchange for wages. In Marx’s view, the capitalist system is marked by exploitation (Carver 2018). The proletariat produces virtually everything but gets only a small portion of the income derived from the sale of the products. The capitalists, who do little productive work, reap the vast majority of the rewards. In other words, the capitalists exploit the workers. Furthermore, driven by the need to compete in the marketplace, the capitalists are forced to keep costs, including wages, as low as possible. Then, as competition with other capitalists intensifies, the pressure is on to reduce wages further. As a result, the proletariat barely subsists, living a miserable, animal-like existence.

Karl Marx was in many ways the most important social theorist because his thinking profoundly affected both social theory and the social world.

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In addition, the workers experience alienation on the job and in the workplace (Carver 2018; Mészáros 2006). They are alienated because

 The work they do—for example, repetitively and mechanically inserting wicks into candles or attaching hubcaps to cars—is not a natural expression of human skills, abilities, and creativity.

 They have little or no connection to the finished product.

 Instead of working harmoniously with their fellow workers, they may have little or no contact with them. In fact, they are likely to be in competition or outright conflict with them over, for example, who keeps and who loses their jobs.

Thus, what defines people as human beings—their ability to think, to act on the basis of that thought, to be creative, to interact with other human beings—is denied to the workers in capitalism. As capitalists adopt new technologies to make their companies more competitive, alienation among the workers increases. For example, faster, more mechanized assembly lines make it even more difficult for coworkers to relate to one another.

Over time, Marx believed, the workers’ situation would grow much worse as the capitalists increased the level of exploitation and restructured the work so that the proletariat became even more alienated. The gap between these two social classes would grow wider and increasingly visible in terms of the two groups’ economic positions and the nature of their work. Once workers understood how capitalism “really” worked, especially the ways in which it worked to their detriment, they would rise up and overthrow that system in what Marx called a proletarian revolution.

According to Marx, the outcome of the proletarian revolution would be the creation of a communist society. Interestingly, Marx had very little to say explicitly about what a communist society would look like. In fact, he was highly critical of utopian thinkers who wasted their time drawing beautiful portraits of an imaginary future state. Marx was too much the sociologist and concentrated instead on trying to better understand the structures of capitalist society. He was particularly interested in the ways in which they operated, especially to the advantage of the capitalists and to the disadvantage of the proletariat.

Marx believed that his work was needed because the capitalist class tried hard to make sure that the proletariat did not truly understand the nature of capitalism. One of the ways in which the capitalists did this was to produce a set of ideas, an ideology, which distorted the reality of capitalism and concealed the ways in which it really operated. As a result, the proletariat suffered from false consciousness—the workers did not truly understand capitalism and may have even believed, erroneously, that the system operated fairly and perhaps even to their benefit. Marx’s work was devoted to providing the members of the proletariat with the knowledge they needed to see through these false ideas and achieve a truer understanding of the workings of capitalism.

Marx hypothesized that the workers could develop class consciousness, and such a collective consciousness would lead them to truly understand capitalism, their role in it, and their relationship to one another as well as to the capitalists. Class consciousness was a prerequisite of the revolutionary actions to be undertaken by the proletariat. In contrast, the capitalists could never achieve class consciousness because, in Marx’s view, they were too deeply involved in capitalism to be able to see how it truly operated.

Ask Yourself

Do you agree with Marx’s characterizations of false consciousness and class consciousness? Why or why not? Give some examples from your own experience to support your answer.

Marx’s theories about capitalism are relevant to contemporary society. For example, in the United States, a capitalist country, the income gap that Marx predicted between those at the top of the economic system and the rest of the population is huge and growing. In 2016, the top 20 percent of the population in terms of household income had a greater average income than the rest of the population combined (U.S. Census 2017a). As you can see in Figure 2.1, those at the top have greatly increased their average income since 1967; this is especially true of the top 5 percent of the population. Furthermore, the top 1 percent controlled almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016.

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Figure 2.1 Mean Income Received by Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent, All Races: 1967–2017

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements.

Marx also theorized that capitalism would force the capitalists to find the cheapest sources of labor and resources wherever they existed in the world. As Marx predicted, corporations continue to scour the globe for workers willing to work for lower wages, driving down pay closer to home and reaping as much profit as possible from lower labor costs.

However, history has failed to bear out much of Marx’s thinking about the demise of capitalism. For example, there has been no proletarian revolution, and one seems less likely than ever. This is the case, if for no other reason, because the members of the proletariat of greatest interest to Marx—manufacturing workers—are rapidly declining in number and importance, at least in developed countries like the United States (Rifkin 1995). Despite the threats to the proletariat, capitalism continues to exist, and Marx’s ways of thinking about it, and the concepts he developed for that analysis, continue to be useful. The development of several of these concepts is portrayed in the recent film The Young Karl Marx (2017).