Marxist Perspectives Of Marx And Weber

and subsequent reinvestment of capital, is an end that both Weber and Marx reach in their analyses of society and agree on in definition. However, while Marx tells us that phantoms of the brain i.e. morality, religion, ideology, cannot develop independently of material production or influence it, Weber argues that ideas and religion can indeed determine life and the processes of life, namely our material production. The key difference between the two is their scope of factors that can cause historical development. Marx only allows for one factor, productive forces and the economic conditions resulting from them; Weber, on the other hand, acknowledges that while ideology and religion can support the economic relations as a driving factor, they can also develop independently and become a factor, a force on its own that can alter production, economic conditions, and thus history. By accounting for the multiple ways in which a society can be altered, Weber provides a more complete and applicable understanding of historical development and the powerful concept that an idea from an individual or group of individuals can have a legitimate and significant effect on the direction of society.

Karl Marx was born in Prussia on May of 1818 to a middle class Jewish family. As an adult, Marx attended school in Berlin where he discovered the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel’s main concept was the idea of dialect, which can be explained as the process of logical argumentation and refutation. Marx was greatly influenced by Hegel, which is shown in Marx’s belief that history evolves through a series of predictable conflicts (A+E Television Networks, LLC. 2013). Marx also believed social divisions and civil unrest were due to the increase in industrialization and the widening gap between rich and poor.

The Enlightenment was a period in the eighteenth century where change in philosophy and cultural life took place in Europe. The movement started in France, and spread to Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany at more or less around the same time, the ideas starting with the most renowned thinkers and philosophers of the time and eventually being shared with the common people. The Enlightenment was a way of thinking that focused on the betterment of humanity by using logic and reason rather than irrationality and superstition. It was a way of thinking that showed skepticism in the face of religion, challenged the inequality between the kings and their people, and tried to establish a sound system of ethics. The ideas behind the

During the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Andrew Carnegie had definite opinions about the affects of industrialization on society. A greater understanding of their views on history and humanity can be gained by comparing and contrasting two written artifacts: The Communist Manifesto and “Wealth.”

Marx's ideas on labor value are very much alive for many organizations working for social change. In addition, it is apparent that the gap between the rich and poor is widening on a consistent basis. According to Marx, the course of human history takes a very specific form which is class struggle. The engine of change in history is class opposition. Historical epochs are defined by the relationship between different classes at different points in time. It is this model that Marx fleshes out in his account of feudalism's passing in favor of bourgeois capitalism and his prognostication of bourgeois capitalism's passing in favor of proletarian rule. These changes are not the reliant results of random social, economic, and political events; each follows the other in predictable succession. Marx responds to a lot of criticism from an imagined bourgeois interlocutor. He considers the charge that by wishing to abolish private property, the communist is destroying the "ground work of all personal freedom, activity, and independence". Marx responds by saying that wage labor does not properly create any property for the laborer. It only creates capital, a property which works only to augment the exploitation of the worker. This property, this capital, is based on class antagonism. Having linked private property to class hostility, Marx

Marx’s idea of historical materialism states that material conditions or economic factors affect the structure and development of society. His theory is the materialistic understanding of the history of societies. To do this Marx traced the evolution of human societies from one stage to another then interpreted the evolution of societies in relation of their material or economic bases. He discovered

Marx was a call for difference and for individuality, yet within this clarion call, this prophetic siren, lay the voice of reason, the cold hard effective hands of logic and positivistic certainty, and that greatest weapon of the modern thinker, tautology, but a tautology and logic that came wrapped in layers of culture and humanism. Logic fed humanism, and humanism gave a rhetorical content to logic, Socrates with the tongue of Cicero and the pen of homer. In Marx was the force of the sans culottes, the doubt and romanticism of a Rousseau, the certainty of Mill and Durkheim, the reasoning of Bentham and the millenarian self consciousness of the modern political subject, of the newly imagined man. Marx hardly invented permanent revolution or

Most societies throughout the world have developed a notion of social class. It refers to hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups within society. How these social classes have been determined has been a common topic among social scientists throughout time. Two individuals have headed this long standing debate, Karl Marx and Marx Weber. Karl Marx, on the one hand, ideas about class are still influential in many cultures around the world. On the other hand Max Weber is considered one of the fathers of modern thought and one of the most influential persons in the world of intellect. Despite their clear similarities, such as both coming from a European protestant background, they have

Karl Marx dove into social issues in hope of creating an idealism that eliminated class exploitation. Marx created his materialism of Overdetermination or Dialectical Materialism. This brought in a whole new way to see the world in Marx’s new lens, or line of thinking. Traditionally, there have also been other lines of thinking but the two major idealisms are Rationalism and Empiricism. Each of these idealisms gain their beliefs in different ways. As Marx states, Culture, Nature, Political and economic events shape one’s line of thinking. “This argument takes place within Epistemology, the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature, sources and limits of knowledge” (Stanford). The differences between these lines of thought come from the question how one gains knowledge.

Marx was concerned about relationships between individuals, predominately men, and their access to power; whether this was in the form of scarce resources such as fuel, food and jobs. Marx believed that separate individuals form a class only if they come together as a group in a common interest to battle against the opposing class. In order to do this he believed they would need to develop ‘class consciousness’.

Hegel tended to look at ideas of capitalism but not through the people who held them where as Marx look at both these ideas and the people they came from, as he believed the world to be ever changing through human activities in particular, production. Marx began writing at the start of the industrial revolution and was able to witness the change from a feudal society where we had lords and serfs to a new industrial and capitalist society with owners and workers (what Marx called the bourgeoisie and the proletariats). Unlike the feudal system whereby the lords were controlled by the king in this new state the capitalists were not controlled anymore and were now free and able to maximise their profits and with the workers supposedly free to sell their labour power to the capitalists. In the capitalist society, Marx believed that each class is defined by how they are related to the productive process and how their own interests are related.

Karl Marx was a German academic that studied history and philosophy, and while at the University of Berlin he joined the Young Hegelians; a group of radical philosophers who believed history was driven by intelligence and reasoning and human society progressed through dialectical change- following the beliefs of Georg Hegel (Appelrouth and Edles, 2012, p21). Most of Marx’s work was based on the interests of the working class, which proceeded on to one of his main theories being on class, which lies on the principle that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Engels and Marx, 1848, p1).

While Marx’s economic determinism is definitely a component of his theory of historical materialism, the two are by no means interchangeable. Historical materialism does not place value upon the truth of the status of society; all weight is born on how the material base of society is perceived by its inhabitants and how those perceptions lead the people within society to act accordingly in their political and social relationships. Economic determinism, however, is the truth of the material base of society and a critical examination of how social and political perceptions are built through the economic relationships that people have with each other and institutions, and how these perceptions lead to the truth that humans are not actors with free will or an expansive amount of agency. Economic determinism is the facet of historical materialism that clearly displays how humans interact with the components of society in a way that, Marx believes, does not allow for anything more than the illusion of free will. This paper will explore the depth of historical materialism, economic determinism place within it, and human agency as a fixed point within the two. I will argue, through analyzing selections from The Communist Manifesto, Outlines of the Critique of the Political Economy, and The German Ideology, that economic determinism is the base that historical materialism is built on, and

Karl Marx emphasized the distribution of resources determines how social reality and existence are structured and experienced. He viewed society as a struggle between capitalists and workers, known as class conflict. The bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production, exploited the proletariat, the oppressed class not owning the means of production, by giving them wages less than the value they produced. Marx as well as his associate, Fredrick Engels argued that the proletariat should rise and revolt against the bourgeoisie. Marx also emphasized the importance of the dialectical process of social change. Dialectic is the theory of resolving conflict and argument. Dialectic is the thesis, or original idea versus the antithesis, or opposing idea ultimately ending in a new idea that combines both the thesis and antithesis forming a synthesis. Dialectical materialism, rising-up against capitalism, was the most extreme form of social dialectic. Marx believed the only reasonable synthesis was to overthrow capitalism in favor of communism. One of the fall backs to this synthesis was the false consciousness, where members of a specific class reflect themselves as “I” and “me” versus “we” and “our”. Until the proletariat change their views of “I am being oppressed by my boss!”, to “We are being opposed by our boss!” there would be no revolution.

Karl Marx, all through his life has been influenced by several philosophers. One of the most influential of them all was a German philosopher called Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; We can clearly see that by looking at Mar’s early writings. Marx’s concept of historical materialism evolved from Hegel’s concept of trend in world history and Marx’s criticism on the presence of religion and idealism in Hegel’s philosophies.