Theories of Conflict

Ho-Won Jeong , Eleftherios Michael , in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008

Class Conflict and Bureau

In the Marxist paradigm, conflict between classes arises out of dialectical struggle among differing material interests. The political economy of social relations is important in understanding the causes of conflict. A basic assumption of Marxism is that a social and political structure is adamant by the mode of production and those who control the means of production such equally labor, land, and factory facilities. The economic construction determines forms of social consciousness as well as types of legal and political institutions.

Conflict is rooted in class antagonism, which results from the historical conditions of production. In a capitalist gild – a transitory stage toward socialism – two main classes can exist identified: the proletariat and the bourgeois who owns and controls financial flows and allocation of textile resources needed for production. The workers provide labor in commutation for the wages that are essential for the subsistence of their physical survival. The economic and political power of the bourgeois derives from the ownership of the means of production. The business class dominates the working class until the latter organizes to protest exploitation and alienation. The unfair exploitation of one class by another is the primary source of conflict.

Workers are alienated since their work is not related to the realization of their needs. The work does not reflect a worker's desire or nature. It only serves the interests of the owner of the means of product. The ultimate cause of all crises in a capitalist organization is poverty and restricted consumption of the masses. The emancipation of the working class results from the elimination of private properties. Class struggle is a vehicle for structural modify. Conflict can be somewhen eliminated in a classless society, a phase of communism.

Class conflict is characterized by the absenteeism of mobility and the concentration of ability and property among a few elites, as well every bit the superimposition of economic and political interests on the masses. A clear correlation exists between the distribution of ability and social stratification. The intensity of conflict in a backer club is linked to the concentration of political and economic power in i form. Postindustrialized societies have reduced the degree of form animosity, in part, by introducing effective conflict regulation mechanisms such as mediation, arbitration and, in part, by assuasive workers' participation in electoral processes.

Marxist theory has evolved over the years and has non been completely refuted, despite its theoretical and practical weaknesses. Neo-Marxist approaches advise a structure of social life that shifts from Marx's dialectic human relationship betwixt modes of production and exploitative class relations to the role of ability and command embedded in various social and economic settings. Human being action and interaction is affected by changes in intentions and beliefs that are derived from the ongoing transformation of technologies and institutions. New demand for change can be fabricated not necessarily by representatives of a working course but by those who accept bureau defined in terms of will and capacity to bring about changes to existing conditions.

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Social Equality and Inequality

January Pakulski , in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008

Archetype Theories of Stratification and Conflict

The classic theories differ in the way they explicate the sources of social inequalities, diagnose their major forms, and link these forms with social divisions, antagonisms, conflicts, and social change. While the Marxists and the aristocracy theorists describe inequalities, antagonisms, and conflicts every bit polarized, the followers of Max Weber and modern functionalists depict stratification as multidimensional and graded, and they see conflicts as pathological and containable.

Both Marx's and the elite models of stratification are 'polar' in the sense of stressing the opposition betwixt ii bones social categories: the capital owners versus the labor-selling workers in the case of Marxism, and politically circumscribed 'elites' versus the 'masses' in the case of elite theorists. In classic Marxism, the main source of this polarity, and therefore of class antagonism and conflict, is individual ownership of the means of production that implies opposition of interests, economic exploitation, and political domination between the major classes. Other classes are of lesser importance, and they are likely to wane in the process of capitalist evolution. All important social inequalities and cleavages gradually coalesce with major class divisions. As the working course becomes more impoverished, it is also probable to develop 'class consciousness', political organisation, ideological plan, and leadership, thus becoming the major force of revolutionary modify, inevitable in Marx's view. In this way, Marx also sees class conflict as the 'engine of historical modify'.

The archetype elite theories were formulated in opposition to Marxism by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels (with of import contributions by Max Weber). They stipulate that social ability comes from organization, rather than holding ownership; that the central division in society is between elites (the top power holders) and the masses (the remainder), rather than the major socioeconomic classes; and that elites cannot be eliminated, simply replaced by other elites. Revolutions are merely aristocracy replacements, and classless guild is a dream. Social organization and bureaucratization inevitably give rise to elites – a fact stressed by Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels in his famous 'iron law of oligarchy'. These elites are conscious, cohesive, and capable of defending their ain interests. While the aristocracy–mass gap is constant, the nature of elites changes with the processes of elite circulation that accompanies – and affects – social modify. The fundamental disharmonize in all societies is betwixt established elites and the challengers. Elites replace each other in the cycles of peaceful takeovers and revolutionary coups; they typically alternate between tough and violent 'lions' and cunning 'foxes'.

In contrast with these polar visions, the Weberian theory and the 'mainstream' American theories of inequality reflect the 'multidimensional' and 'gradational' image of overlapping and crosscutting 'social ladders'. Social inequalities reflect historically variable patterns of property ownership, marketable skills, social conventions regarding honour, and positions in political hierarchies of command, especially in the land and large corporations. Social hierarchies develop independently in the economical society (classes), social order (status groups), and political-institutional social club (parties). Classes, status groups, and parties typically overlap and crosscut each other. Different combinations of economic ability, social honor, and political command may crystallize into distinct 'social classes' that are separated by mobility barriers and social distances. Moreover, the relative importance of inequalities generated by the market (classes), cultural conventions (status groups), and the structures of political command vary historically. Weber saw grade animosity and conflict every bit contingent on proximity and communication between class members, visibility of the 'class enemy', ideological organization, and the skills of political leaders.

Finally, the functional theorists see social inequalities as reflecting primarily popular evaluations of social standing. These evaluations, according to Emile Durkheim, accompany pop classifications and reverberate human relationship to and distance from 'the sacred', that is, special realm of objects, symbols, and formulas representing the collectivity. Social stratification inevitably follows social differentiation, and inequalities of social standing are anchored in social values. Conflicts are pathological symptoms of anomie, that is, normlessness or 'moral vacuum'. Such a view reflects an prototype of gild in which social inequalities are often seen as a 'functional necessity' for optimal allocation of talent, strengthening motivation, and/or as the ways for strengthening social integration.

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Marxism/Marxist Geography I

A. Cumbers , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Fundamentals of a Marxist Approach

For Marx, capitalist accumulation is underpinned by the tension betwixt capital (employers) and labor (employees). Marx was the outset to recognize the centrality of labor, and the importance of the 'labor procedure', to the operation of capitalism. Marx recognized that human labor is fundamentally different to other commodities as the source of surplus value or profit, which in plow drives the process of economic evolution (referred to as capital accumulation) under capitalism. A central observation was that the surplus value accruing to the holders of upper-case letter from the manufacture and sale of commodities was based upon the exploitation of labor. Surplus value is created past labor which Marx refers to as 'variable capital letter'. Other factors of production (due east.g., country, machines and raw materials) are all fixed, in the sense that the capitalist pays a toll that is then a fixed cost in the production process. Labor, however, is non fixed. The capitalist pays a price for labor (wages) simply tin can then extract more endeavor from labor in the course of producing bolt than what has been paid. This gives rise to surplus value, which operates either through the capitalist making labor work for longer than the real exchange rate of labor (absolute surplus value) or by making labor more productive, normally through reorganization of product through management or technical innovation (relative surplus value). Hence, surplus value is not the 'just' return to entrepreneurs for chance taking, every bit classical economists prior to Marx believed, but is instead the result of a fundamentally unequal exchange in the labor market place. How does this exploitation come most? In a vivid uncovering of the inner workings of the backer economy, Marx elaborates his theory in the pages of his major work Capital letter. Here, we will sum up the chief points.

Marxism and Dialectical Reasoning

An important starting signal in Marxist analysis is the dialectical method. At the nigh basic level, a dialectical perspective emphasizes the importance of processes and relationships for interpreting the earth, rather than fixed things or categories. Historical change is driven by the tensions betwixt opposing forces, commonly represented in the class thesis–antithesis–synthesis, where thesis represents the original position, the antithesis its negative relation, and the synthesis the resolution of the contradiction. Mapping this onto Marx's understanding of social change, this is most manifestly expressed in the Communist Manifesto, co-written with his long-fourth dimension comrade and collaborator Friedrich Engels:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of form struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in abiding opposition to i another … The modern bourgeois order that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. Information technology has simplified the class antagonisms. It has merely established new classes, new conditions of oppressions, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. ( Marx and Engels, 1967: 79, lxxx)

Throughout history, social modify has been driven by the battle betwixt opposing classes, the dominant and the dominated, with the subservient grade eventually overpowering the ruling class to create new conditions of society. Many critics have defendant Marx of teleological thinking in this respect, suggesting that his key dialectical insight is the inevitability of the working grade or proletariat overpowering the bourgeoisie or backer class to create a utopian communist guild. There are, nonetheless, many different interpretations of Marx; normally, some, such as Richard Peet in his 1998 textbook for geographers, make a distinction between the early philosophical Marx and the later political economy work. It is in the latter that arguably his most important contribution lies, as an analyst of capitalism and its contradictions, rather than as an architect of communism.

Using dialectics, Marx provides new insights into the way opposing class relations shape the economy and the process of commodity production. In his most sophisticated and powerful analysis of commercialism, Capital (Volume 1), Marx starts off with a long word of the commodity form and what it represents. In backer societies, commodities are the useful products of labor that are bought and sold. These include objects equally diverse as an automobile, banana, or haircut. Like the classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, earlier him, but in dissimilarity to mainstream economists from the mid-nineteenth century onward, Marx based his assay of bolt on the 'Labour Theory of Value'. The value of a article from this perspective is related to the labor needed to produce it. Withal, where Smith and Ricardo related the value of labor to the work of individuals, Marx started from the perspective of society as a whole, introducing the concept of 'abstract labor'. For the classical economists, the wages of labor reflect the truthful value of the labor supplied. For Marx, the wages of labor do not reflect the existent value of labor, but instead reverberate the value of the full amount of labor needed to produce a commodity ('abstract labor') minus the caste of exploitation of labor by majuscule. The fundamental point here is that the product of commodities is underpinned by social relations, representing the class struggle between capital and labor. It is not the free and equal exchange associated with a mainstream economic perspective on markets.

Apply Value and Exchange Value in Commodity Production

Out of this basic premise, Marx develops the concepts of 'use value' and 'substitution value' symbolizing the twofold graphic symbol of all commodities. Utilize values signal the applied value of commodities – a shoe can be worn, bread eaten, etc. The exchange value, in contrast, reflects the value of a commodity in substitution for some other commodity, that is, its market cost. This twofold graphic symbol of commodities becomes evident in what is known every bit the 'circuit of upper-case letter', where the commutation value of a commodity (C) is first realized in exchange for money (Yard). Yet, when that money is exchanged for another article (C), exchange value turns back into use value (Figure 1). Where Marx differs, in relation to Smith and Ricardo, is in seeing this excursion as underpinned by social relations (and power). He is famously scathing of the classical political economists (CPE) for viewing exchange value as the value betwixt things rather than nigh relations between people, something that has become known as 'commodity fetishism'. He notes:

Effigy i. The circuit of capital.

Human being's reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, too, his scientific analysis of those forms, accept a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, postal service festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that postage products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, take already acquired the stability of natural, cocky-understood forms of social life, earlier man seeks to decipher, not their historical graphic symbol, for in his optics, they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently, information technology was the analysis of the price of bolt that alone led to the decision of the magnitude of value, and information technology was the common expression of all commodities in coin that solitary led to the establishment of their characters equally values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that really conceals, instead of disclosing, the social grapheme of private labour, and the social relations between the private producers. (Marx, 1906: 87)

In its simplest sense, we can think of commutation value equally the perspective of capital and utilise value as the perspective of labor. From labor's indicate of view, bolt represent the need to consume in order to achieve bones social reproduction (e.chiliad., food, clothing, housing, energy, etc.). For capitalists, their value is in terms of what they can be sold for to create turn a profit, which can, in turn, be reinvested. When thought of in these terms, there is clearly an underlying tension between use value and exchange value. A concrete example of expressing this would exist in the tensions between economical growth and environmental sustainability. Capital's logic is to encourage greater and greater consumption, product, and exploitation of resources in the pursuit of expanded surplus value, whereas the logic from the point of view of labor (and the planet) is to continue to reproduce the conditions for man survival. Product for value is fundamentally at odds with creating the sustainable conditions for human development.

In deepening his analysis, Marx thinks of labor in two opposing senses: as socially useful labor and as 'abstruse labor'. Socially useful labor or piece of work exists in all human societies throughout history, whatever the forms of social relations (e.m., slavery, feudalism, etc.). All societies, as a necessary condition of human existence, have to piece of work: basic tasks, such every bit obtaining food, making clothes, constructing shelter, and producing forms of usable energy, take to exist performed to ensure the reproduction of the species. In fifty-fifty the about primitive human societies, simple efficiency savings requite rise to a division of labor between different people, often on a gender basis, which becomes more than complex and hierarchical equally societies go more advanced. Specific to the way of product that is capitalism, still, human labor becomes geared toward commodity production for exchange value or 'abstruse labor'. Under capitalism, all work becomes subservient to producing surplus value and "merely has meaning and only appears as a social relation when it is embodied in a product that is exchanged" (Cleaver, 2000: 111). In the procedure, the individual worker becomes alienated from the product of his/her labor.

A cardinal difference between Marx and the CPE tradition is the way Marx reveals the procedure of commodity production as being both riddled with contradictions and underpinned by combative class relations. Information technology is through the exploitation of labor in the production process that capital deepens and sustains surplus value in the excursion of capital (Figure two). Majuscule in its coin form (M) is transformed into commodity grade (C) by purchasing the means of product (MP) – factories, machines, materials, etc. – and labor power (LP). The means of product (MP) and labor power (LP) are so combined in the production process, nether the supervision of the owners of capital or their managers and representatives, to produce a article for sale (C′) – for case, a auto, house or, even, a haircut. This commodity is sold for the initial money outlay plus a profit, or surplus value.

Effigy ii. The process of production within the excursion of capital. From Castree, Northward., Coe, N., Ward, G. and Samers, K. (2003). Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour, p 28. London: Sage.

The Labor Process

Following on from this, capital needs not just to purchase labor merely also to control it, achieved through the labor process, if it is to increase surplus value. Hence, the segmentation of labor under capitalism is not geared primarily toward the efficient organization of work to improve the general wealth of society (although this may occur at sure points in time and space) merely is intrinsically a role of the imperative to create the conditions to realize surplus value. Opportunities to expand surplus value also exist inside the production process itself and its associated labor process. To increment surplus value, capital needs either to reduce the costs of production or increment the toll of the final product – the article for sale. In highly competitive markets, it is conspicuously more difficult to do the latter, and then attention then falls upon reducing costs and raising the productivity of the means of product. Whereas mainstream economics largely ignores what happens in product – when labor is paid a wage, this is causeless to reflect its market value and this is the end of the affair – for Marxists what happens in product and in the labor process is critical to agreement the basic disharmonize between capital and labor. Because of the importance of the labor procedure in extracting surplus value, capital letter will always be driven to increase labor productivity and extract more value from labor, which is in a fundamental conflict with labor's demand to earn plenty to brand a decent living. At that place is, therefore, an imperative for the backer to take control over the labor process from the worker, introducing forms of management which allow piece of work to be organized on more capitalistic lines.

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Marxist Geography

Andrew Cumbers , Neil Gray , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020

Fundamentals of a Marxist Approach

For Marx, capitalist accumulation is underpinned by the tension between capital (employers) and labor (employees) in the production process. Marx recognized and systematically examined the centrality of the "labor process," to the operation of commercialism. He recognized that man labor is fundamentally unlike from other commodities as the source of surplus value or profit, which in turn drives the procedure of economic development (referred to as capital accumulation) nether capitalism. Surplus value is created by living labor whose costs for the capitalist in the production process Marx refers to every bit "variable majuscule." "Variable" considering living labor's value varies within the product procedure, as the worker can produce value over and to a higher place what they demand to live ("socially necessary labor time"), which is paid in wages. Other factors of product (eastward.m., land, machines, and raw materials) are all described as "constant capital," in the sense that, in one case added to the product process, they do not add any further value to products without variable capital. The capitalist pays a cost for labor (wages) only tin then extract more than try from labor in the course of producing commodities than what has been paid. This gives ascent to surplus value, which operates either through the capitalist making labor work for longer hours and more intensely (absolute surplus value) or by making labor more productive, usually through the reorganization of product via technical innovation (relative surplus value). Hence, surplus value is non "just" the render to entrepreneurs for risk taking, equally mainstream economic science insists but is instead the result of a fundamentally unequal exchange in the labor market. How does this exploitation come about? In a vivid uncovering of the "hidden abode" of the production process under capitalism, Marx elaborates his theory in the pages of Uppercase. We volition shortly sum up the main points, but get-go a cursory digression into Marx's historical and dialectical idea.

Marxism and Dialectical Reasoning

Marx's arroyo is first and foremost a historical materialist one. Marxist geography'south innovation is to ground this perspective in place, insisting on the necessarily spatial dimensions of production, circulation, distribution, and consumption in backer relations. One way this approach is indexed is in the practice "historical geographical materialism," as developed initially by David Harvey and Erik Swyngedouw. Marxist geographers view economic development in terms of irresolute forms of social and political organization in time and infinite, characterized by different forms of class struggle. Commercialism as a item "manner of production" emerged out of a feudal lodge in Western Europe from the 15th Century onward, and over the past 200 years has spread inexorably to the point that we can at present talk of a global capitalist economy. At the most basic level, a dialectical perspective emphasizes the importance of processes and relationships for interpreting the world, rather than stock-still things or categories. Historical change is driven by the tensions between opposing forces, usually represented in the grade thesis–antithesis–synthesis, where thesis represents the original position, the antithesis its negative relation, and the synthesis the resolution of the contradiction. Mapping this onto Marx'due south understanding of social change, this is most patently expressed in the Communist Manifesto, co-written with his long-fourth dimension comrade and collaborator Friedrich Engels:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of form struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, society-master and journeyman, in a give-and-take, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to ane another … The mod bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done abroad with class antagonisms. It has simplified the class antagonisms. Information technology has but established new classes, new weather condition of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the erstwhile ones

Marx and Engels (1967): 79, eighty.

Throughout history, social alter has been driven by the battle between opposing classes, e'er the possibility of the subservient class eventually overpowering the ruling class to create new conditions of society. Many critics have defendant Marx of teleological thinking in this respect, suggesting that his cardinal dialectical insight is the inevitably of the working class or proletariat overpowering the bourgeoisie or capitalist class to create a utopian communist gild. This is certainly true of The Communist Manifesto, whose aim, as a manifesto afterwards all, was to inspire proletarian revolution. Yet, the gimmicky reader of Marx may be struck by just how little prediction is manifest in his major theoretical works, where the concern was more to evidence the detrimental, alienating effects of capitalist relations, the violence that underpins them, the fallacy of their "common sense," and the possibility (not inevitability) of their supersession. Kevin Anderson'due south Marx at the Margins and Massimiliano Tomba'south Marx's Temporalities have added much-needed dash to interpretations of Marx's historical thinking. They, and others, have shown how his ideas of historical development shifted from the 1850s onward as new developments arose (cf. Marx's affidavit of the nonindustrial Paris District revolt of 1871, his then unfashionable defence force of the Irish Country Wars, and his position that a peasant commune-based revolution in Russia was possible without passing through a backer stage of development). They have besides shown how he increasingly conceived of multiple temporalities simultaneously rather than in a linear, teleological conception.

Apply Value and Substitution Value in Commodity Production

In Capital Volume I, his about fully realized piece of work, Marx starts off with a long word of the commodity form and what it represents. In capitalist societies, commodities are products of labor that are bought and sold. Out of this basic premise, Marx develops the concepts of "use value" and "commutation value" symbolizing the twofold character of all commodities. Utilise values signal the practical value of commodities—a shoe tin can be worn, breadstuff eaten, and then on. The exchange value in dissimilarity reflects the value of a commodity in exchange for some other commodity, that is, its market price.

This twofold character of bolt becomes evident in what is known as the "circuit of capital," where the substitution value of a commodity (C) is first realized in exchange for money (Thousand). However, when that coin is exchanged for another commodity (C), commutation value turns back into utilise value (Fig. one). Where Marx differs in relation to classical political economist (CPE) such every bit Smith and Ricardo is in seeing this circuit as underpinned past social relations (and power). The fundamental indicate here is that the production of commodities is underpinned by antagonistic social relations, which stand for a class struggle between capital letter and labor. Information technology is not the free and equal exchange associated with a mainstream economic perspective on markets. At that place is also an important contradiction at the heart of this relationship every bit capital's incentive to reduce the toll of labor in the pursuit of surplus value can undermine its own sustainability. This volition happen if wages fall below the socially necessary level or when decreases in the wage paid to labor affects demand for the products of capital. Marx is famously scathing of the CPEs or viewing exchange as a social relation between things rather than a definite social relation betwixt people, something that has go known equally "article fetishism." He notes:

Figure 1. The circuit of capital.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.

Marx (1990): 173–74

From labor's point of view, bolt represent the need to consume in gild to achieve bones social reproduction (e.k., food, article of clothing, housing, and energy). For capitalists, their value is in terms of what they tin be sold for to create profit, which can, in turn, be reinvested. When thought of in these terms, there is clearly an underlying tension between utilise value and exchange value. A concrete instance of expressing this would be in the tensions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Capital'south logic is to encourage greater and greater production, consumption and exploitation of resources in the pursuit of expanded surplus value, whereas the logic from the point of view of labor is to go on to reproduce the conditions for human survival. Product for surplus value is fundamentally at odds with creating sustainable weather for man evolution.

In deepening his analysis, Marx thinks of labor in two opposing senses equally "concrete labor" (socially useful labor) and as "abstract labor." Socially useful labor exists in all homo societies throughout history, whatever the forms of social relations (e.thou., slavery, feudalism, and then on). All societies every bit a necessary condition of human being take to work: bones tasks have to exist performed to ensure the reproduction of the species such as obtaining food, making clothes, constructing shelter, producing forms of useable energy, and then on. This, for Marx, is a "concrete universal" with enormous political implications. In even the most primitive human being societies, simple efficiency savings give rise to a partitioning of labor between different people, often on a gender basis, which becomes more complex and hierarchical every bit societies become more avant-garde. Specific to the capitalist mode of production, nevertheless, homo labor becomes geared toward commodity production for exchange value or "abstract labor" within the wage–labor relation. Within capitalist social relations, all piece of work becomes subservient to producing surplus value and "only has meaning and but appears every bit a social relation when it is embodied in a production that is exchanged" (Cleaver, 2000: 111). In the process, the private worker becomes alienated from the product of his/her labor.

While Marx primarily wrote almost surplus value in the production procedure, Italian Marxist feminists in the 1970s extended Marxist conceptions of value by addressing how unpaid caring labor contributes to the reproduction of the paid labor strength and thus to the production of surplus value. A key publication was The Ability of Women and the Subversion of Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James in 1972, whose arguments around the 'hidden abode of reproduction' were adult by Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, published in 2004. Federici extended Marx's work on primitive accumulation from a feminist viewpoint past showing how the historical development of capitalism through the enclosures was premised on a sexual division of labor that bars women to unwaged domestic reproductive piece of work and men to waged exploitation in the production process. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici were cardinal to the international "Wages for Housework" campaign founded in Italy in 1972, which was, in turn, central to the emergence of the domestic labor debate. Work drawn from these and similar debates has been developed in the literature on the geographies of social reproduction by Katz in 2004 and in edited collections by Mitchell, Katz, and Marston in 1993 and past Meehan and Strauss in 2015.

The Labor Process: Subject field and Supervision

Every bit we accept noted, for Marx, it is through the exploitation of labor in the production process that capital deepens and sustains surplus value in the excursion of majuscule (Fig. ii). Uppercase in its money course (M) is transformed into article form (C) past purchasing the MP—factories, machines, materials, so on—and LP. The MP and LP are then combined in the production procedure (P), under the supervision of the owners of capital or their managers and representatives, to produce a commodity for sale (C′). This commodity is sold for the initial money outlay plus a profit, or surplus value. Notwithstanding, since majuscule is dependent on living labor for the product of value, so living labor has the potential to disrupt, appropriate, or overthrow the production procedure. In turn, majuscule must respond with increasingly complex forms of supervision to ensure the continued production of surplus value.

Figure ii. The process of production inside the circuit of capital (simplified class).

Capital must not only purchase labor but must control information technology if it is to increment surplus value. Hence, the sectionalization of labor under capitalism is not geared primarily toward the efficient organization of work to improve the general wealth of society (although this may occur at sure points in time and infinite) but is intrinsically a part of the imperative to create the conditions to realize surplus value. Whereas mainstream economics largely ignores what happens in what Marx termed the "subconscious domicile of product," for Marxists uncovering what happens in the labor process is critical to understanding the basic conflict between capital and labor. Considering of the centrality of LP in extracting surplus value, capital volition ever be driven to increase labor productivity and extract more than value from labor, which generates a primal conflict with labor'south needs to earn enough to make a decent living. There is therefore an imperative for the capitalist to have control over the labor process from the worker, introducing forms of management, which allows work to exist organized on more capitalistic lines.

Struggle for control over the labor process becomes a critical dimension of ability relations and form struggle in the backer economy. For Marx and Engels, the emergence of the manufactory system in the belatedly 18th and early 19th centuries and the accumulation of workers under i roof and under managerial command—and away from the household where early industrial craft work was organized according to noncapitalist principles—was a critical moment in the transformation of the backer labor process. Grasped dialectically by Marx, this both increased the potential for capitalist productivity and simultaneously created the conditions for the massification and deepening organisation of workers: "the gravediggers of capitalism." A second critical transformation occurred subsequently in the 19th Century when employers began to pursue a more scientific arroyo toward the organization of work, observing and closely supervising job tasks with the view to developing more productive systems. This led to an increased "technical sectionalisation of labor" with the realization that productivity could be increased if work became increasingly fragmented into its component tasks, allowing workers to become more specialized and skilful. Scientific management or Taylorism—after its near famous advocate, the engineer, FW Taylor—also encouraged greater experimentation with new techniques to increase productivity, the most famous existence the introduction of the moving assembly line by Henry Ford at his car factory in Dearborn, Michigan in 1911. At the same time, this led to the increasing massification and integration of labor within the production process, opening upwards new possibilities of unionization and organized struggle within mass industry. Ultimately, with a Marxist analysis, the forms and scale of the wage–labor relation may shift, but the underlying contradictions betwixt uppercase and labor remain.

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Revolutions

Jeff Goodwin , Adam Isaiah Green , in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Disharmonize (Second Edition), 2008

Marxist and Neo-Marxist Perspectives

Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of revolution identify the material or economic organization of a given society, that is, the forces and relations of product, as the principle context determining revolutionary conflicts, which are understood as peculiarly acute struggles between social classes. For Marxists, revolutions are the effect of class struggles between dominant 'ruling' classes, on the 1 paw, and 'rising' or revolutionary classes, on the other. Revolutionary situations are understood to develop during those historical periods when the evolution of the forces of production (technology, skills, the segmentation of labor) comes into disharmonize with the existing relations of production, or course relations, which are based on the ownership and control of productive property.

During revolutionary situations, the existing social system is paralyzed, as it were, and further social evolution requires a fundamental reorganization of the economy or mode of production, every bit well every bit of the state, by the revolutionary form. In short, objective structural atmospheric condition produce growing grade antagonisms that culminate in the overthrow of the existing state and economic order. The state itself is seen by many Marxists as an instrument of the dominant grade, and politicians and bureaucrats are attributed little autonomy as independent political agents. (Other Marxists advise that such autonomy equally the country may possess is functional for the conception of far-sighted policies that are in the long-term interests of capitalism as opposed to short-term interests of particular capitalists or fractions of the backer class.) Nether bullwork, the revolutionary class was the bourgeoisie or capitalist class; nether capitalism, the revolutionary form is the proletariat or working class. Marx believed that commercialism would inevitably compel the working class to seize state power, destroy capitalism, and create a socialist society.

Since Marx start formulated his materialist approach to revolutions, many derivative explanatory models of revolution take emerged, frequently modifying components of his original formulations. What makes more contempo neo-Marxist approaches definitively 'Marxist' is the emphasis they all place on grade struggle as the primal expression and determinant of revolutionary situations and outcomes. One such neo-Marxist approach identifies the rural peasantry, as opposed to or in addition to the urban working class, as a potentially insurgent force and agent of socialist revolution. According to this approach, the commercialization of agronomics often leads to the radicalization of the peasantry. More more often than not, variations in the dynamics of the commercialization of agriculture produce variations in rural grade conflict. In ane version of this approach, the more than landowners and cultivators become tied to global capital and markets, the greater their corresponding tactical mobility in political struggles; conversely, the more than dependent landowners and cultivators remain on the land for income (as opposed to capital or wages), the less tactical mobility each is thought to take. The least revolutionary conditions are thought to exist where landowners draw income from their capital investments and peasants draw income from the land. Conversely, the conditions most conducive to revolution are allegedly plant where landowners are dependent for income on the land and peasants depict their income from wages (i.east., sharecropping and migratory labor systems).

Class struggles accept clearly played a major office in many revolutions and in most, if not all, social revolutions. Religion and especially nationalism, nonetheless, have played a much greater function in revolutions than Marxist theory would permit. Moreover, grade exploitation, even during periods of intense economic crisis, does not necessarily result in the development of form consciousness among the exploited, let alone bodily rebellion. Members of exploited classes, including peasants, sharecroppers, and urban workers, may view their problems every bit the outcome of their ain personal failures or as the result of impersonal (and perchance other-worldly) forces that are across anyone's command. Or they may view their situation as unjust merely feel they are powerless to change it. In gild to understand how class exploitation and other 'objective' realities come to exist collectively perceived as both unjust and alterable, some scholars take turned to modes of analysis that place greater weight than does Marxism on cultural and ideological factors, on the one hand, and state policies and organization, on the other.

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FINDING Grade CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NEW ECONOMY

Michael Wallace , Azamat Junisbai , in Enquiry in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2003

Marx predicted that capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction. Commercialism's internal contradictions, foremost among them the polarization of the class construction, would breed a revolutionary course consciousness among the working class, resulting in the overthrow of commercialism and the dawn of a new classless society. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1959 [1848]) wrote

Our epoch, the epoch of the suburbia, possesses   … this distinctive characteristic: it has simplified the form antagonisms. Gild as a whole is splitting upward more and more than into two great hostile camps, into 2 great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

A century and a one-half afterwards this ascertainment, capitalism has shown remarkable resilience to survive the boom and bust cycle of its own economical evolution. The polarization of the class structure anticipated past Marx has waxed and waned in dissimilar historical periods. Merely since the end of World War II, the rise of the middle class has served as a potent antidote to revolutionary course consciousness in the United states of america and other advanced capitalist nations. The triumph of capitalism has occurred in no modest role considering of the failure of the working class to develop the caste of revolutionary course consciousness anticipated by Marx. In the view of many neo-Marxists, capitalist credo has produced a promise of affluence that has led to a "fake consciousness" among the working class, thus staving off the revolution.

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