SOC-4040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Artificial Scarcity, False Consciousness, American Revolution
19 Oct 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Constrained is when you cannot labor with all of those conditions or some of those conditions. To labor is human; i labor and i transform that cotton into clothes, grass seed into wheat, and i eat it. The purpose of labor is to transform the human environment into a physically useful one. It leads to social structure, exploitation, contradiction, alienation, false consciousness. It leads to robbing of humanity in other words (cid:498)i become the mere appendage to the machine(cid:499), marx said. Throughout history all economic formats have created scarcity; in other words all previous economic formats could not produced sustained and regular surplus. In a capitalist society, there could be scarcity, but we produce artificial scarcity, an ill- distribution of what is produced, also known as stratification or socially structured inequality. First thing is social structure, then second is history, then third is the state (government).
