SOCI 3692 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Proletariat, Labour Power, Capital Accumulation
9 May 2018
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Theories of Society - 3692
• Superstructure
• Ideologies that dominate a particular era
• Dependent on the modes of production that dominate in a given period
• Everything not directly to do with production
• Ideology, art, family, law, politics, media, education, science
• Passive in the relation
• Maintains and shapes the base
• Capital
• Social, economic relation between people (not between people and things)
• The name of capitalism is that you are in this surplus where you have to continue
the cycle
• The capitalist accumulates for the sake of accumulation
• The surplus should be about the collective decision, for the collective good
• Capitalism has been demonstrating its limits, Marx understand it as a dynamic
system
• The end of capital is something that Marx predicts
• Marx had a theory of capitalism coming to an end
• The falling rate of profit, you have constant capital and variable capital
• Dead labour no longer produces value
• Capitalism
• Capitalism is different from all other modes of production
• It separates domination from exploitation
• Violence belongs to the state in capitalism
• The worker doesn’t have the means of production and is economically helpless
• The laborer is paid in wages and they are less than the market value
• The capitalist is always searching to increase profit
• One way is by reducing the cost of production
• Second is by reorganizing the production process
• Third is by replacing the worker with machines
• Capitalism will be so concentrated and polarized that it will change
• Progressive historical stage
• Thought to eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions
o To be followed by socialism
• Capitalist mode of production
• System of organizing production and distribution within capitalist
societies
• Class
• Structure of capitalism
• All history until the present is a history of classes, rulers and the rules
• Ideas tend to be the ideas of the ruling class
• The ruling class expropriates the surplus
• Class relations are about exploitation
• One class has monopoly over the other class
• The laborer has to sell his labour to the capitalists
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• The worker is desperate for work, and they know that there a lot of people like
themselves who could take their place
• Class in itself, class for itself
• Two main classes:
• Wage earners : those who create the wealth
• Wage owners : those who own the wealth
• Class Consciousness
• The beliefs that a person holds regarding their social class
• Their class interests
• The proletariat
• Workers realize they are being exploited by the bourgeoisie
o A revolution will be inevitable
• Commodity
• Any good or service produced by human labour
• Offered as a product for general sale on the market
• Exchange value + use value make a commodity
• You have a commodity, you sell it and buy something else with it
• You have equivalents on the ends
• Some priced goods are also treated as commodities
• Human labour-power
• Exchange value
• An item is produced and sold on the market
• Exchange value turns quality into quality
• When we think of exchange value we think of money, it involves some form of
monetization
• This renders everything equivalent to everything else
• Exchange value is fundamentally abstract, constituted in the economic process
• The subsets become separated from the reality
• This value is determined by labour input
• The value given to someone during a transaction
• Usually expressed as a money-price
• Use value
• Physical properties of the commodity
• The material used to where the object can fulfill human needs
• False consciousness
• The way in which material, ideological and institutional processes mislead
members of the proletariat
• Workers are not aware at how unjust their situation really is
• They have taken on beliefs and values that benefit the bourgeoisie
• Forces of production
• Physical means and techniques where labourers add value and transform capital
into products for sale
• Means of production
• Physical non-human inputs used for production
• Natural resources, facilities, machinery
• The means of production have different classes
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
