Marx: Capitalism, Class, and Alienation

Karl Marx, born in Trier, Germany in 1818, developed the most comprehensive and influential critique of capitalism in the history of social thought. His theoretical framework, historical materialism, holds that the material conditions of production form the foundation of all social life. The mode of production, consisting of the forces of production, meaning technology, raw materials, and human labor power, and the relations of production, meaning the social relationships through which production is organized, particularly property relations, constitutes the economic base of society.

This base shapes the superstructure, the political institutions, legal systems, religious beliefs, cultural norms, and ideological frameworks that characterize a given society. Marx did not argue that the economic base mechanically determines every aspect of the superstructure, but rather that the base sets limits and exerts pressures on social, political, and cultural life. Historical materialism provides a framework for understanding social change. Marx identified a sequence of modes of production in European history: primitive communism, ancient slave-based society, feudalism, and capitalism, each characterized by distinctive relations of production and forms of class conflict.

The transition from one mode to another occurs when the forces of production develop to the point where they come into contradiction with the existing relations of production. Feudal property relations, which tied serfs to the land and restricted economic activity through guild regulations, eventually became fetters on the productive forces unleashed by commercial and industrial development. The bourgeois revolution, exemplified by the French Revolution, swept away feudal relations and established capitalist property relations.

Marx analyzed capitalism as a system based on the private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of wage labor. Capitalists purchase labor power from workers who, owning no means of production, have no choice but to sell their capacity to work in order to survive.