Abstract
Karl Marx developed some of the main alternatives to the presuppositional universe of bourgeois ideology to which the sociological tradition is heir. He gave pride of place to the notion of interaction and the dialectics between subject and object - their mutual constitution; he also made paramount a concept that was an even greater break away from that presuppositional core - the concept of social class. His approach, in its very essence, was for this reason a challenge to bourgeois ideologies, penetrating levels of reality made opaque by the routines of capitalist social formations.
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References
K. Marx. ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) pp. 3ff.
The proclamation that men make their own history, even though in conditions they cannot choose, shares the same ground. See K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979) p. 103.
G. Lukacs, The Ontology of Social Being (London: Merlin, 1978) pp. 70ff.
K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), especially pp. 276–9, 333–7. Marx oscillates, though, over the precise connections between individual and society. Although he praised Feuerbach for bringing social relations to the centre of his critique of Hegel’s dialectics in the later sections of these tentative notes (p. 328), he had earlier advanced propositions that were at variance with this idea, assuming a more platonic perspective on the nexus between these two poles (pp. 298–9).
See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) p. 505;
and also, in particular, K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951).
K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) pp. 210–12. For the competition and collaboration between workers, consult also K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, p. 493, and Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 496.
K. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (1894) (London: Penguin, 1981) pp. 1025–6.
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) p. 57.
G. Lukács, Üher die Besonderheit als Kategorie der Ästhetik, in Werke, B. 10, p. 604. See also A. Swingewood, Marx and Modern Social Theory (London: Macmillan, [1975] 1979) pp. 33–50.
K. Marx, Contribution to the Critic of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Col/ected Works, vol. 3, p. 187.
See Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited (London: Harper Collins, 1991) ch. 1.
I therefore only partially agree with Anthony Woodiwiss, Social Theory after Postmodernism (London: Pluto, 1990) p. 25.
K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 247ff, 549ff, 499–501. See also K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, passim. If the general motivational set of individuals and classes stems from this socio-economic situation, we have an explanation for their trying to secure, in all spheres, the interests thereby yielded (as we see in the last cited text, p. 479). For a further view, with a general ‘systematicity’ for social systems being brought about through coercion (or without it), see F. Engels, ‘On Authority’ (1874), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951).
They can be largely referred to a too immediate identification between socialist parties and the working classes, with the loss of specificity of the political level. For his programme in this connection, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) pp. 108ff.
K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., [1859] 1904) pp. 11–13.
L. Althusser, ‘Marxisme et lutte de classe’ (1970), in Positions (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976) pp. 62–3.
Whereby positions that establish, in economic terms or not, the structural positioning of classes turn to be misleading – and in the end dependent upon a reliance upon the notions of class in itself and for itself. Such is the case of G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1978] 1979) pp. 73ff. At the same time, subjectivist positions (which, in the last instance, at least partly accept this backdrop of structural determination) do not fare that well either. Thompson suffers from this limitation, notwithstanding his perception of classes as ‘relationships’ and as processes, and his later too far fetched onslaught on Althusser.
See Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Hannondsworth: Penguin, [1963] 1981) pp. 8–9; and The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978). Moreover, a deeper acceptance of the contingent character of class consciousness might entail a vision of the relation between proletariat and socialism much closer to Lenin than Thompson would be willing to grant.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) pp. 153–4 (text of 1929–30).
The incongruity of an individualistic Marxism is brought out, in spite of a ‘plea’ for this type of methodological canon, in a very interesting discussion about socialism and electoral systems in contemporary Europe (p. 97); we are, in fact, introduced to a complex setting wherein political parties and unions as well as social classes – unfortunately frozen as structural dimensions of individual perspectives – are endowed with much more central explicative capacity. See Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, [1985] 1988).
Cf. Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), especially pp. 65, 183.
See, for instance, Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (London: Virago, 1987), specifically pp. 65, 231; plus Slow Motion. Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990).
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© 1995 José Maurício Domingues
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Dọmingues, J.M. (1995). Marx: the Critique of Liberalism and the Social Classes. In: Sociological Theory and Collective Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376342_4
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