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| Question | Answer |
| Socialism: Core Socialist Themes | - Community: social creatures engaging in collective effort for the common good - Cooperation: against competition - Social equality as a demand of justice - Significance of socioeconomic class (better off in most aspects, considered more highly) - Common ownership: against private property and capitalism |
| Early Socialism: Thomas More (1478-1535) | -Against poverty and inequality - Abolish money and private property - No more pride, greed, or envy - Conflict and inequality are unnatural |
| Early Socialism: Saint-Simon (1760-1825) | - Class-based historical stages - Belief-based economic systems - Replace capitalist inefficiency with expert planning and organizational hierarchy |
| Early Socialism: Fourier (1772-1837) | - Evils of commercial society - Utopian socialist ideal: stateless free cooperation for the common good - Socialism can change human nature |
| Early Socialism: Robert Owen (1771-1858) | Human nature is malleable Capitalism rewards greed and selfishness Produce cooperatively for the public |
| Karl Marx: Marx's Life | - Drinking, duelling, law, philosophy - Radical Journalism: Brussels, Paris - 1849-1883: ‘Temporary’ exile in London - Political agitation - Family and poverty - Scholarly research - Marx lived on Dean Street in Soho, London, UK |
| Karl Marx: Themes in Marx (1) | Religion - Georg Hegel (German philosopher) → History as the development of the Spirit → God comes to self-awareness in history → Development of the Geist - move beyond material realm to the mind and spirit → History is going somewhere - Feuerbach → We create God in our own image → No God, we create God using ideals we’d like to have or we like other people to have → We alienate our human capacities for knowledge, power, and goodness → What is the role of religion? - Marx on Religion → Religion is created in response to poverty and suffering → People create reasons for God wanting us to suffer (story of Job) or they explain it through fatalism → “Religion is the opium of the people” - produces euphoria (A ‘buzz’), painkiller (if you’re feeling bad about something, religion becomes a way to deal pain), can render you incapable of flourishing |
| Karl Marx: Themes in Marx (2) | Alienation - Human essence detached from human existence - Creative producers whose work is punishing, degraded, commodified (humans = $$) - Workers’ lives are subject to alien forces (forces outside of their control → Globalization) 1) The alienation from the product (you don’t have a say in what you create, you don’t know what’s going to happen with it, you don’t necessarily know how it works) 2) The alienation in productive activity (repetitive - doing it again and again and again, which becomes mindless activity, reliant on machines) 3) Alienated from our species-being (we should be producing and creating a better life, learning and growing, but we don’t really care about what we do) 4) Alienated from other human beings (we go and use machines and machines and machines to remove human interaction) |
| Karl Marx: Marx’s Theory of History | - All of history up to now is the history of class struggle - History is the growth of human productive power (The ‘productive forces’ tend to develop) - Our production methods develop within economic structures - Economic structures have characteristic ‘relations of production’ - Society is like a three-level building: → Legal and political superstructure → Relations of production (Sweatshops vs. local factories, etc.) → Forces of production (labour, inanimate objects like factories and resources) - Level of development of productive forces explains the nature of the economic structure - Economic structure determines the legal and political superstructure - Objection: can’t capitalism continue? |
| Karl Marx on Exploitation | - Exploitation is the extraction of surplus labour - Distinction between labour and labour-power → i.e. McDonald’s hires employees to make 55 burgers an hour, which is equal to more money than they make an hour - Capitalist profit is the surplus value created by workers |
| Karl Marx on Class Struggle | - History is the history of class struggle: under capitalism, it is the bourgeoisie (capitalists) vs. proletarians (workers - Conflicts of interest are linked to our relation to the means of the production: the future communist society will be classless - The state exists to deal with conflicts of interest generated by coercive surplus extraction: under communism, the state will wither away (laws to lock out workers, rules to ensure workers’ rights) |
| Marx’s Two Accounts of the State | 1) The state as a committee for managing the common interests of the bourgeoisie (based on 19th century British politics) 2) The state as an independent actor (based on 19th century French and German politics) |
| Marx on Revolution | - Revolution is likely in states that fail to integrate their excluded classes - Bismarck’s strategy: buy off the working class and maintain a local army - Universal suffrage could lead to the election of a socialist government |
| Engel’s Objections to Capitalism | - The destructive trade cycle - Large number of unproductive people - The capitalist market generates unjust inequalities |
| Engel’s Objections to Capitalism: Bernstein | - Evolutionary socialist: no need for revolution (people die, they don’t always work out, etc.) - Revisionist: update and revise Marx’s claims - Morality: freedom, respect, and a peaceful movement for change - Politics: socialist parties can achieve social reforms - Economics: working class standard of living has improved, so they aren’t going to revolt |
| Engel’s Objections to Capitalism: Fabian Socialism in Britain (1884) | - G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, S. & B. Webb - Move through a parliamentary path to socialism - National efficiency and social justice - Nationalization and social welfare |
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