Preview

Fundamental Contradictions due to Historical Materialism

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1348 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Fundamental Contradictions due to Historical Materialism
This essay will be firstly looking at what Engels means by exploring historical materialism. I will implement what it is and show how it changed the feudal society. I will show how it connects to alienation, capital, and the individual production and individual appropriation. Second I will be touching on the advancement of technology and private ownership of production in regards to the fundamental contradictions in capitalism and I will explain how the contradictions came about. Third I will be explaining the two contradictions that arise from the fundamental contradiction, some of the things I will consider are the means of production and the mode of production. Lastly, I will show what Engels envisions as the ultimate outcome of the historical development of capitalism.
“The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production, and with production the exchange of its products, is the basis of every social order; that in every society which has appeared in history the distribution of the products, and with it the division of society into classes or estates is determined by what is produced and how it is produced and how the product is exchanged.” Production is the way to support human life and with production, the way products are exchanged is the key to all social structure. To Engels, historical materialistic approach is tracing feudalism to capitalism. Some of the ideas that characterize this shift from feudalism to capitalism are individual production and social production. Back in the feudal days when individuals produced something they called it “theirs” they owned it. Now in capitalism they cannot call a product “theirs”. There is no such thing as individual appropriation because what we produce or what we make is owned by the owner, either an individual of a large corporation or the corporation itself. After they have made the product it is then given to someone else who sells it. Alienation can play a part in this production

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that Capitalist society, which is based on the right of each individual to own private property, is the cause of the main class divides evident in today's society. That the basic right to own property results in the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, becoming obsessed with the accumulation of possessions and, as a consequence, becoming slaves to commodities; Commodity fetishism. This resulted, they argued, in the widening of class divisions. Capitalist society is described by some as protecting freedom and individuality. However, it also, undeniably, encourages self-interest, greed and - as Marx argued - an obsession with private property. It is a society whose basis lies in the fundamental need to accumulate property. The people within this society who do not have the means to amass material possessions are pitied, considered the underclass. They are seen to be lacking in something, incomplete, and are encouraged to 'make something' of themselves. To acquire qualifications, a job that pays well, to set themselves up so that they too can begin to accumulate material goods. This, society argues, is what everyone should strive for.…

    • 2330 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    sosc1140 essay 2

    • 1294 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Capitalism is the most productive economic system that ever exists. Its emergence and development have brought an amazingly rapid increase in productivity. However, the fact that cyclical capitalist economic crisis arises proves that capitalism does not make sense because it has contradictions in it. In this article, I am going to provide explanations about what Engels means by historical materialism, the fundamental contradiction in capitalism and two other contradictions that arise from this contradiction. And I will conclude by explaining Engels’ s anticipation of the eventual outcome of the historical development of capitalism. My main argument is that the fundamental contradiction in capitalism is the contradiction between social production and individual appropriation which leads to the contradiction between the systematic organization of production inside factories and the disorganization of production in society as a whole and the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of exchange, and the contradiction between market and production (Frederick 295; Frederick 299; Frederick 302).…

    • 1294 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Best Essays

    In the books introduction, Engels, one of the manifesto’s co-authors, defines the bourgeoisie as the class of the capitalist who controls means of production in society. Likewise, he considers the proletariat to be the working majority, which sells its labor to support a system it has no control over (7). Marx, on the other hand, works to apply moral judgments to these two classes, allowing for him to write on more than just a class struggle. His bourgeoisie is exploitative, manipulative, and inherently evil, while he sees the proletariat as the masses destined to rule itself (10, 17) .…

    • 1485 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    They thought that as the working classes grew more aware of the exploitation that they suffered from the upper classes they would rise up and as feudalism was replaced by capitalism, that communism would replace capitalism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels also argued that capitalism is associated with the unfair distribution of wealth and power; a tendency toward market monopoly.…

    • 528 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    “With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity” (p. 32). He shrinks in comparison to the world of objects that he created but belong to capitalism.…

    • 2988 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    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.”…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    4. This relates to the previous reading by going into deeper detail about the outcomes of Marxism by also comparing to social constructivism, clarifying that a nation’s environment in which it acts, is social, ideational, and…

    • 487 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Best Essays

    Marx's Theory of Alienation

    • 2653 Words
    • 11 Pages

    Alienation, a concept that became widely known during the 19th and 20th century has been looked at extensively by a number of leading theorists. Theorists such as Georg Hegel first used the idea of alienation as a philosophic idea, but his work was later grasped upon by theorists known as Ludwig Feuerbach and more importantly Karl Marx. The world till now has been witness to a change in different social structures and forms in which society operates. We as human beings must ask, what purpose do we serve within society? What means do we have to sustain an effective or prosperous way of living? Marx believed we have been through different economic stages and ownership of the things we need to live, beginning with the times of the ancient to feudalism (land granted from the crown) to now where we have arrived at capitalism (private ownership). He saw this as historical stages of development where each stage has the characteristics of a system of production and division of labour, forms of property ownership and a system of class relations (Morrison,K.1995:40). This brought forward Marx’s idea of historical materialism which centred on how to interpret the history of mankind and the development of one stage of society to the next. In turn it looks for reasons for changes in human society and how humans together produced the necessary requirements to live. In relation to historical materialism there was another idea of dialectal materialism. This was a term used by Marx to study natural phenomena, the evolution of society and human thought itself as a process of development which rests upon motion and contradiction (Clapp,R: Acc 10/11/2012). Marx further explains historical and dialectical materialism which will be looked at further in the essay. By understanding how humans produce the necessities to live (historical materialism) and how a way of reasoning helps us to see the growth…

    • 2653 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Marxism, created by philosopher Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is an economic system that criticizes capitalism. Many often think of Marxism as a type of socialism. Marxism is the foundation that communism is built on which says that one should live in a “socialist, classless society” (Marxism). Marx and Engels wrote a book entitle “The Communist Manifesto,” which encourages the working class to overthrow the upper class. He makes a point of saying that Marxism is against capitalism because it is an exploitation of the working class. He believed that a socialist economy would work far better with a big population than would a capitalist economy. Another important idea of Marxism is historical materialism. Marx believed that history was shaped by people’s materialistic ways of living. A person’s will to survive is shown by their want to acquire things to keep on living. Marx and Engels were the first to predict that industrial…

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This paper intends to compare the first industrial revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries and the second industrial revolution of the mid-18th and 19th centuries. It will highlight the transformation from the first revolution to the second revolution, focusing on the presence of giant firms and role of science and technology in economic activities. Additionally, it will introduce the two worldly philosophers Karl Marx and Adam Smith on these issues.…

    • 1420 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Fernand Braudel, a modern French historian, sees three intertwined but distinguishable strands of history. They are: material life, economic life, and capitalism. Material life, he says, sets “the limits of the possible”. Material life means the routines of daily work, the everyday tasks that we perform so that we can sustain ourselves. It covers the means by which we travel to work, the efforts we perform there, the products we make in use, etc. Without including knowing how material life has changed, we would not be able to understand the economic transformation of America. Economic life mainly encompasses market activity, which includes the jostling of buyers and sellers on the market square, the complex acts of offer and bid, purchase and sale that make possible the essential social relationship of exchange. The strand of our overall theme is the evolution of our involvement with the market, both as buyers of goods and as suppliers of our energies. A vital part of the economic transformation of America is the enlargement of economic life. The third strand is capitalism itself. The best way we can gain an understanding about the nature of capitalism is if we focus our attention on the three elements that it introduces into material and economic life: capital, the market mechanism, and the division of economic and political activity.…

    • 7707 Words
    • 31 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Marx

    • 1839 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Group Members: Leslie-Ann Bolden, Michela Bowman, Sarah Kaufman, Danielle Jeanne Lindemann Selections from: The Marx-Engels Reader Karl Marx’s broad theoretical and political agenda is based upon a conception of human history that is fundamentally different from those of the social, and especially the philosophical, thinkers who came before him. Most importantly, Marx develops his agenda by drawing on and altering Hegel’s conception of the dialectical nature of the human experience. As Marx describes in his essay, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” and again in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Hegel did little to base his ideas in the “real” history of man.1 Instead, Hegel’s theory of the nature of man is a “mystical” one. Hegel sees history as a story of man’s alienation from himself. The spirit (Geist, God), is the “true” nature of man, and man must bring the spirit (God) back into himself through the powers of thought (most specifically, philosophy). Drawing on this idea, and also on Feuerbach (see The German Ideology), Marx constructs his conception of history by “standing Hegel on his head.” Unlike Hegel, Marx regards God or spirit as the projection of man’s “true” self. To understand the true self of man, Marx argues, one must understand his “real,” social, material conditions. He states: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (4). From this idea, Marx proposes to understand the alienated state of man through an understanding of what he terms “historical materialism.” By understanding the material conditions of man through history, Marx argues, man can come to understand his social and political conditions. As he states, “The sum total of these [material] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on…

    • 1839 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The industrial revolution which took place from the 18th to 19th century began in the United Kingdom, and then spread throughout Europe, North America and eventually the world. It was a historical period that marked a major turning point in human social society, almost every aspect of daily life including agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transport and technology was eventually in some way influenced. The Industrial Revolution brought great riches to those who put it in motion (the entrepreneurs). However, the revolution also brought high poverty rates and harsh living conditions for others such as those who were not entrepreneurs. In response, the Catholic Church then rose concerns of the “ugliness of capitalism” which is the social systems in which motives are to produce goods and services and to sell them for profit while not satisfying people’s needs.…

    • 1344 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Technological Pessimism

    • 1207 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Marx begins by reminding us of the “progressive world picture” which emerges out of the Enlightenment. For the cultures of modernity, “conceptions of history,” he explains, “serve a function like that served by myths of origin in traditional cultures: They provide the organizing frame, or binding meta-narrative, for the entire belief system.” And the “conception of history” animating Enlightenment society expected “steady, continuous, cumulative improvement in all conditions of life” driven by the advance of science and what was then called, among other phrasings, “the practical arts.” The West’s “dominant belief system,” in Marx’s words, “turned on the idea of technical innovation as a primary agent of progress.” But then come the shifts Marx perceives in the concept of technology. The first development is artifactual, it relates to the actual technological artifacts. The introduction of mechanical, chemical, and electric power led to the development of “large-scale, complex,…

    • 1207 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    History

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages

    10. The materialist theory of history generated by Marx and Engels taught that what mattered was…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays