Concise Reader in Sociological Theory

Theorists, Concepts, and Current Applications

Michele Dillon, Michele Dillon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119536178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Essential writings from classical and contemporary sociological theorists engagingly introduced and brought to life for students

This Concise Reader in Sociological Theory contains excerpts from the writings of a wide range of key theorists who represent the dynamic breadth of classical and contemporary, macro- and micro-sociological theory. The selected writings elaborate on the core concepts and arguments of sociological theory, and, along with the commentary, explore topics that resonate today such as: crisis and change, institutions and networks, power and inequality, race, gender, difference, and much more.

The text contains editorial introductions to each section that clearly explain the intellectual context of the theorists and their arguments and reinforce their relevance to sociological analysis and society today. The excerpts include writings from the classicists Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, W.E.B. Du Bois to the contemporary Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy Smith, Raewyn Connell. This indispensable book:

• Offers a concise review of the diverse field of sociological theory
• Includes contributions from a wide range of noted classical and contemporary theorists
• Incorporates engaging empirical examples from contemporary society
• Demonstrates the relevance and significance of the ideas presented in the theorists' writings

Designed for undergraduate and graduate students in sociology and in social and political theory, Concise Reader in Sociological Theory is an engaging and accessible guide to the most relevant sociological theorists.

PART I
CLASSICAL THEORISTS

CHAPTER ONE
KARL MARX

---

CHAPTER MENU

• 1A Wage Labour and Capital (Karl Marx)
• II
• 1B Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels)
• Profit of Capital
  • Capital
  • The Profit of Capital
• 1C The German Ideology(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)

---

Karl Marx who was born in Germany in 1818 and died in London, England, in 1883, remains the foremost theorist in explaining the deep structural inequalities within capitalism. Despite the rapid pace of ongoing social change today – just think of the use and impact of the iPhone alone – and the many transformative changes in society since Marx’s lifetime, which was the epoch of expanding industrialization, factory production, and urbanization – his understanding of how capitalism works, and why it expands and endures, exposes the economic, political, and cultural logics that enable capitalism to thrive despite the many personal and societal ills it simultaneously causes. In the popular imagination – among those who have not studied Marx – Marx is frequently thought of as someone who is opposed to work and for this reason postulated The Communist Manifesto (not included) as a vision of a world in which work would not be necessary. This, however, is a gross mischaracterization and misunderstanding of Marx and his theorizing. Yes, Marx envisioned the revolutionary downfall of capitalism as part of a long historical process and its replacement with a society built on a utopian equality in which, with each person working or contributing based on their particular skills and talents, the individual and collective needs of the community would be satisfied. Clearly this vision has not been realized, and in fact capitalism has grown exponentially such that today we live in a truly global capitalist society, with capitalist processes and consequences apparent in every country in the world (including those that are nominally communist, such as Cuba and North Korea). However, the explanatory power of much of Marx’s theorizing (notwithstanding its frequent polemical tone and some erroneous assumptions and predictions) is such that it sharply illuminates why and how capitalism has so successfully endured.

It’s not that Marx was opposed to work or to labor. Rather, what he critiqued was the empirical fact that across history – from slavery through feudal times and in capitalist society – work and inequality were two sides of the same coin. He emphasizes a materialist conception of history wherein the way in which wealth is produced and distributed is based on a system of unequal social classes (Engels1878/1978: 700–1). Workers – the producers or makers of things or of ideas – do not get to fully own or fully enjoy the fruits of their labor. Rather, their creative work and its products are extracted from them by others for their own advancement. The ancient slave‐master, the feudal lord, and the capitalist, though occupying quite distinct positions in historical formation, share in common the fact that their material and social well‐being relies on the labor of others. Focusing on capitalism in particular, Marx, along with his frequent coauthor Friedrich Engels (1820–95), drew attention to and analyzed the inherent inequality structured into the relation between capitalists or the bourgeois class and wage‐workers or the proletariat, and how such inequality is structured into and is sustained within capitalism. Moreover, in Marx’s analysis, the economic logic of capitalism (anchored in the capitalist motive to make profit and accumulate economic capital), extends beyond the purely economic sector and economic relationships to underlie and motivate all social, political, and cultural activity. The excerpts I include here illuminate the lived material processes involved in the production and maintenance of capitalist inequalities, and also convey a far more searing analysis of capitalism – and of how it is talked about and understood – than is typically found in the discourse of economists or indeed in the everyday conversations of ordinary people. Thus Marx compels us to critique the principles, processes, and vocabulary of our everyday existence in what is today a global capitalist society.

For example, wages for Marx (see excerpt 1a Wage Labour and Capital) are not merely a worker’s take‐home pay or salary determined by a formula that pays attention to a worker’s skills and education, the cost of living, and the scarcity of particular kinds of workers. Rather, as he elaborates, wages are a function of the exploitation of workers by the owners of capital (whether corporations or landowners) and result from the system of commodity production that is distinctive to capitalism and which in essence requires that workers, too, be considered as, and used and exploited, in ways similar to other commodities. As Marx also elaborates, profit, that motivating engine of capital accumulation (and of capitalist greed) cannot be seen simply as the reward to capitalists for their entrepreneurialism and hard work. To the contrary, profit for Marx is only possible because the capital and investments required to maintain the capitalist production system are inherently tied to the work produced by workers on a daily basis and whose wages (whether they are relatively low or impressively high) are always going to be less than the actual amount of products or value they produce for their employers (whether factory owners or the owners of a sports team franchise or a hospital). The difference between the cost of maintaining a worker (the costs of wages, raw materials, infrastructure, etc.) and the value the worker produces is the surplus the employer receives and takes as profit. And this profit is assured by the structured organization of the production process (which includes the specialized division of labor) and the fact that profit can never be sacrificed for the betterment of workers. Moreover, it is the whole class of workers which is exploited and alienated within capitalism; a worker is free to leave any given employer and go work for another; but is never free to not work – because in capitalism, workers are reliant on the class of employers for the wages (the livelihood) that allows them to live. In capitalist society, if a worker can’t earn a wage (a wage that is invariably less than capitalist profit), they can’t have much of a life; hence for Marx, the relationship between workers and capitalists/employers is inherently antagonistic and this is necessarily and objectively the case owing to the structural inequality built into the organization and workings of capitalism, no matter how benign the employer and how subjectively happy or fulfilled the worker.

Marx elaborates on the objective alienation or estrangement of the worker (see excerpt 1b Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) and shows how this alienation inheres in the capitalist production process. Importantly, too, alienation results in private property being appropriated by the capitalists as rightfully theirs (though it is the product of alienated labor) and used by them as an object (such as money) in furthering their own ends. Therefore, while humans have, as Marx notes, a higher consciousness than animals and a great capacity for much creativity (see excerpt 1c The German Ideology), the capitalist production process diminishes them of their creativity and reduces them (as commodities) to cogs in the profit–production process.

Marx’s insights about the labor process – what’s entailed in the actual production and commodification of work – extend beyond work/labor to the whole lifeworld of the worker (and of the capitalist). A critical and enduring insight of Marx is that people’s being, their everyday material existence, determines what they think about and how they think about or evaluate the things they think about (see excerpt 1c The German Ideology). For Marx, ideas do not come from nowhere or from a mind abstracted from material existence. Ideas, rather, emerge from individuals’ lived everyday experiences. The economic or material activity of individuals and the actual circumstances (of structured inequality and objective alienation) in which they do these activities determine and circumscribe their whole consciousness and, by extension, their personal relationships, social lives, and political ideas. Marx notes that people have a certain freedom to make or to remake their lives but they must necessarily do so in circumstances which are not of their own choosing. As he states: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances…transmitted from the past”; Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 103; excerpt not included). As Marx conveys, individuals and social and political protest movements must always operate within the actual material circumstances they have inherited, and in a capitalist society, these circumstances are always inherently unequal and determined by the ruling capitalist class. Hence, for Marx, ideology, i.e. the dominating or ruling ideas in society – everyday ideas about the nature of capitalism, hard work, money, consumerism, the law, politics, relationships, etc. – is derived from and controlled by the dominance of the standpoint of the capitalist class, a standpoint which marginalizes the objective human and social interests of the workers (who are invariably exploited by capitalism) even as the ruling class (capitalists) insists that capitalism advances not only the interest of capital (e.g. profit) but simultaneously the interests of workers.

REFERENCES

1. Engels, Friedrich. 1878/1978. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” pp. 683–717 in Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx–Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.
2. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1848/1967. The Communist Manifesto. Introduction by A.J.P. Taylor. London: Penguin.
3. Marx, Karl. 1852/ 1978. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” pp. 594–617 in Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx–Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.

1A Karl Marx from Wage Labour and Capital

Original publication details: Karl Marx, from Wage Labour and Capital (1891/1978). Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, pp. 17–18, 19–21, 27–29, 29–30, 41. Reproduced with permission of Lawrence & Wishart via PLS Clear.

What are wages? How are they determined?

If workers were asked: “What are your wages?” one would reply: “I get a franc¹ a day from my bourgeois”; another, “I get two francs,” and so on. According to the different trades to which they belong, they would mention different sums of money which they receive from their respective bourgeios for a particular labour time² or for the performance of a ...