How Did The French Revolution Affect The Life Of Karl Marx

Karl Marx was the founder of the Marxist approach. It is similar to the functionalist approach. Marx believed that, like Parson’s, society shaped individuals’ behaviour and that the economy decides an individuals’ place within society. He said that the two classes were; bourgeoisie/capitalists and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie were the people who owned factories and businesses that employed people (the proletariats) to work for them. There were many proletariats and fewer bourgeoisies. Marx claimed that there would always be conflict between the two classes because the proletariats wanting higher wages while the bourgeoisies, who have lots of power over the media, legal system and school curricula, want to keep wages low to increase profits. This conflict leads to this approach being called a conflict model, explaining why there would be conflict within society and explaining the cause of revolution. False consciousness occurs because the bourgeoisie shape society without the proletariats being aware of it.

The early humans were not very developed and depended on each other to survive and flourish. Due to the fact that everyone could not survive alone it was very important that the early humans stayed together as a group. While in groups they were able to achieve things that many individuals could not do alone. For example, one main reason the early humans came together was for one of life’s basic necessities, food. The common goal they all shared was to obtain food so that they would not starve. This goal allowed them to think of ways as a group to effectively get food. Eventually they created hunting and gathering which later on lead to more ideas and inventions ultimately leading us to what we are today. As of now people do not come together

Marx perceives society made up as two classes, the powerful and exploitive higher class known as the bourgeoisie and the industrial wage earners that must earn their living by selling their labor known as the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is known as the private property owners and the proletariat works for the bourgeoisie. There is an inequality between these two

Marx begins his analysis of social order with the historical development of materialism that results in the industrial capitalist society. For him, the history of society depends on the understanding of “real process of

Marx viewed society as a conflict between two classes in competition for material goods. He looked at the history of class conflicts and determined that the coming of the industrial age was what strengthened the capitalist revolution. Marx called the dominant class in the capitalist society the bourgeoisie and the laborers the proletariat. The bourgeoisie owned or controlled the means of production, exploited laborers, and controlled the goods produced for its own needs. He believed that the oppressed class of laborers was in a position to organize itself against the dominating class. He felt that it was the course of nature, that is, it is the way that society evolves and that the communist society would be free of class conflict, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." (Marx & Engels 1948, 37)

“to a mere money relation,” (Marx and Engels [1848] 2013:35]. Marx, saw the tear down of the old as the only way for the bourgeoisie to survive. Periodically, a crisis occurred where productive forces threatened their conditions and bourgeoisie would have to bring in new productive forces and destroy the old. Marx believed that these changes to technology and productive capacity were the main influence on how society and the economy were organized. The bourgeoisie had to push for the modern world to quickly and continually develop to protect capitalists’ monopolies. However, constant development caused continual disturbances of social conditions by breaking down stable aspects of human life. Capitalist used their power to push the world to advance so that they could prosper with no concerns to the possible effects on the economy, which would have been most detrimental to the proletariat. For Marx, this showed that capitalists’ self-interest pushed economic progress, which led to societal progress but also risked crisis. Capitalism not only affected society through the creation and separation of social classes but also in influencing societal progress and social relations.

Karl Marx witnessed first hand the rise of the industrial revolution and the beginning of capitalism. He also became one of capitalisms biggest critics. Marx believed that society needed a better way of distrusting wealth but also a better way a finding people’s full human potential or what he called “species-essence”. Marx believed that what we do connects to who we are, for example, work is what makes us human. It fulfills our species essence, as he puts it. Work allows us to be creative and flourish. However, in the 19th century Europe work did the quit opposite, it destroyed workers, particularly those who had nothing to sell but their labor. To the mill and factory owners a worker was simply an abstract idea with a stomach that needed to be filled. The workers had no choice but to work for long hours for a pathetic wage. Even worse, their labor alienated them. Alienation is a disorienting sense of exclusion and separation. Factory labor, under capitalism, alienated the workers from the product of their labor. They made stuff they couldn’t afford to buy themselves. The products they made were shipped out to other places far way to make money

In the following section, I will define terms that Karl Marx used in his works. The term bourgeois is defined as the owners of the means of production. In oppose to bourgeoisie, the proletarian or the wage-earner is defined as “a class of labourers who live only as long as they find work, and who find work only as long as their labour increases capital” (I. Craib, Classical Social Theory, 99). Economic is defined as relating to the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought (Merriam-Webster, 2016). The economic process that we will mainly focus on is capitalism. In a capitalist society, the main goal of any firms is simply to make profits for the owner. In the following essay, I will attempt to explain why do

"The German Jews seek emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they want? Civic, political emancipation"(Tucker, p. 26). From his opening sentences on, Marx looks to the case of the Jews to shed light on how people can become free. Bruno Bauer had argued that Judaism, with its arrogant particularity, prevented Jews from participating fully in the life of the state. If they would agree, for instance, to attend legislative sessions even when they took place on Saturday, then Jews would be eligible for the full set of rights political emancipation (Fischman, p.762). If Jews, Christians, or Muslims hold onto their religious practices, it is evidence that the state is not fulfilling their needs, and that the nonpolitical still exerts great power over their choices. The incapacity of purely political means to make people free is not, however, confined to the state's defeat by religion. The political elevation of man above religion shares the weaknesses and merits of all such political measures. For Bauer and Marx, "the existence of religion is the existence of a defect" (Tucker, p. 31). Marx and Bauer want the Jews to give up there religion in order to be one with the state. They feel like the Jews will never understand political emancipation without first putting the state above their own religion. They have to want the state to come first in both their public and private lives. Marx does not take the Jewish faith that seriously. Marx views the Jewish religion as lacking the power to produce illusory happiness. Marx identifies Judaism with the economic arrangements he finds prevailing in capitalist society and the abolition of Judaism with the transcendence of capitalism (Fischman,

Thus, for Marx the economy is the cause of the resulting social superstructure ideology, politics, and religion. The disparity between the ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the proletariat, which provide the labor, results in a history of

Marx stated that, “ Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Pg. 1). Whether viewed as the struggle of races or as the struggle of classes, Darwinism is clearly a predominant idea in Marx’s theory of social and political life in the late nineteenth-century. In his theory, Marx started with the great political revolution that gave Europe the aspect it had, the French Revolution. This era was known to everyone at the time to have been a struggle for supremacy, waged by the bourgeois against nobility and royalty. After this struggle, new class struggles originated. The struggle carried on in England by the manufacturing capitalists against the landowners dominated politics; at the same time the working class revolted against the bourgeoisie. Marx goes on to prove that these class distinctions were owing to the various functions each one played in the productive process. Production is the social labor process by which men obtain their means of subsistence from nature. It is the production

The philosophy of Karl Marx begins with the belief that humans are inherently cooperative with common characteristics and shared ends. To human beings, life is considered an object and therefore, humans make their “life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness” (Tucker 76). In other words, humans are able to think, imagine, and “produce even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” (p. 76). It exemplifies that idea that humans not only have the capability to create things for survival but express themselves in what they produce, within the standards of the human race or universally. When capitalist wage-labor enters the picture, it forces these shared ends and the freedom of expression in human production to cease, causing a rise of competitiveness among

Karl Marx, also a philosopher was popularly known for his theories that best explained society, its social structure, as well as the social relationships. Karl Marx placed so much emphasis on the economic structure and how it influenced the rest of the social structure from a materialistic point of view. Human societies progress through a dialectic of class struggle, this means that the three aspects that make up the dialectic come into play, which are the thesis, antithesis and the synthesis (Avineri, 1980: 66-69). As a result of these, Marx suggests that in order for change to come about, a class struggle has to first take place. That is, the struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist class, the class that controls

Though Marx views the communist revolution as an unavoidable outcome of capitalism, his theory stipulates that the proletariat must first develop class consciousness, or an understanding of its place within the economic superstructure. If this universal character of the proletariat does not take shape, then the revolution cannot be accomplished (1846: 192). This necessary condition does not pose a problem within Marx’s theoretical framework, as the formation of class consciousness is inevitable in Marx’s model of society. His writings focus on the idea that economic production determines the social and political structure (1846, 1859). For Marx, social class represents a person’s relation to the means of production, a relation that he believes is independent of

Human societies have been class based in some way and the class factor has been the most basic dividing or differentiating factor between broad social groups. In the economic sphere that Marx’s theory focuses on, there is a class that own and control means of economic production which could be referred to as the upper class, and there is the class that maybe own nothing, but their ability to sell their labor power in return for wages which could be referred to as the middle or low class. From that understanding, and based on the conflict theory, one might argue that unequal distribution of resources and access