Chapter 4: Marx © 2014 Mark Moberg

Discontent in the English textile industry found expression in the Luddite movement, as unemployed workers destroyed the machinery that had displaced them. By the 1820s, workers organized political parties seeking better conditions. By the 1840s, many parties adopted communist platforms, demanding an end to the private ownership of factories and mines. Karl Marx: like all social orders before it, capitalism contained contradictions that would lead to its demise. Capitalists are driven by competition to reduce production costs. When they suppress wages or displace workers to lower costs (and thereby better compete with other capitalists), who is left to buy their products? The deepening misery of the working class would burst forth in rebellion, overthrowing private property and the state that enforced it. Marx’s dialectical materialism: every society derives its basic character from its mode of production (how property/goods are distributed and the technology used to make them); the mode of production in turn generates corresponding political and social relations, and ideological beliefs that legitimize it. © 2014 Mark Moberg

What prevented revolution in the form that Marx anticipated? Marx noted that the coercive force of the state serves the interests of capitalists (e.g. use of the National Guard to break up strikes). The 20th century Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that hegemony usually made state coercion unnecessary. Hegemony is the internalization of prevailing societal values, so that even the poor and oppressed view existing social arrangements as “right” and “natural.” Among the hegemonic forces mentioned by Marx is racism: as poorly paid as they are, white workers look down on their black counterparts as inferiors, refusing to join with them in challenging the system. Reforms instituted during the Great Depression also headed off the possibility of revolution. FDR’s New Deal provided temporary work, social security, disability and other “safety nets” so that the unemployed could get by. “Fordism,” where Henry Ford raised wages so that workers could buy a Model T of their own, gave them a stake in the system, leading many working people to redefine themselves as “middle class.” © 2014 Mark Moberg