Any entry or section of an entry not in quotes (double or single) and without some kind of citation on its bottom left-hand corner was written by me. I have only written the content of entire entries where I could not find an adequate definition elsewhere and those entries should not be regarded as anything other than rough and provisional. Elsewhere I have added comments where I felt the definition incomplete or partly mistaken.
Alienation:
“Alienation is the process whereby people become foreign to the world they are living in.
[...]
“Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” [Marx, Karl. Comment on James Mill]
In this work, written in 1844, Marx shows how alienation arises from private labour, from commodity production:
“Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.” [Comment on James Mill]
Marx went on to show that the specific form of labour characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labour, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labour process, the product of the workers’ labour is in a very real sense alien to the worker. It is not her product but the product of the capitalist. The worker makes a rod for her own back.
Once a product enters the market, no-one has any control of it, and it sets off on a course which appears to be governed by supra-human laws.
“... with commodities. ... it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.” [Capital, Chapter 1]
Alienation, and the ‘Fetishism of Commodities’, are therefore related to the concept of reification, in which social relations are conceived as relations between things. Alienation can be overcome by restoring the truly human relationship to the labour process, by people working in order to meet people's needs, working as an expression of their own human nature, not just to earn a living.
Further Reading: Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hegel's Theory of the Modern State by Shlomo Avineri, Lukacs' The Young Hegel and Origins of the Concept of Alienation by Istvan Meszaros.”
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/l.htm#alienation
Anarchist:
'"In common with the founders of Socialism, Anarchists demand the abolition of all economic monopolies and the common ownership of the soil and all other means of production, the use of which must be available to all without distinction; for personal and social freedom is conceivable only on the basis of equal economic advantages for everybody. Within the Socialist movement itself the Anarchists represent the viewpoint that the war against capitalism must be at the same time a war against all institutions of political power, for in history economic exploitation has always gone hand in hand with political and social oppression.”
Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, pp. 17-18
The aim of Anarchism is the creation of a Communist society. Anarchists stress the importance of achieving individual liberty and social equality for the working class, through the abolition of authority.
The practices of Anarchists can be divided into two fundamental categories: individual and social. Social anarchists are made up of such trends as communist-anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, while Individual anarchists are made up of reformist-anarchists and terrorists.
Further Reading [off-site]: An Anarchist FAQ'
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/n.htm#anarchism
Bourgeoisie/ capitalist class:
“The class of people in bourgeois society who own the social means of production as their Private Property, i.e., as capital.
See The Communist Manifesto for Marx and Engels' description of the historical role of the bourgeoisie.”
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeoisie
I might also add that, under capitalism, the bourgeoisie are that class which rules by exploiting the working class.
Capitalism
“Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread into every corner of life. The family and the state still exist, but – the family is successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other; the state retains its essential instruments of violence, but more and more comes under the sway of commerical interests, reduced to acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.
The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production as Private Property, despite the fact that the productive forces have become entirely socialised and operate on the scale of the world market.
The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a class of people who have nothing to sell but their capacity to work; since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, workers have no choice but to offer their labour-power for sale to the bourgeoisie.
/b/o.htm#bourgeois-society
Class:
“A group of people sharing common relations to labor and the means of production.
"In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their influence upon nature operate – i.e., does production take place.
"These social relations between the producers, and the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production.
Karl Marx
Wage Labour and Capital
Chpt. 5: The Nature and Growth of Capital
The notion of class, as it is used by Marxists, differs radically from the notion of class as used in bourgeois social theory. According to modern capitalist thinking, class is an abstract universal defined by the common attributes of its members (i.e., all who make less than $20,000 a year constitute a "lower" class); categories and conceptions that have an existence prior to and independent of the people who make up the class.
For dialectical materialism however, the notion of class includes the development of collective consciousness in a class – arising from the material basis of having in common relations to the labour process and the means of production.
[…]
Class Struggle: Classes emerge only at a certain stage in the development of the productive forces and the social division of labour, when there exists a social surplus of production, which makes it possible for one class to benefit by the expropriation of another. The conflict between classes there begins, founded in the division of the social surplus, and constitutes the fundamental antagonism in all class. As capitalism was just beginning to create itself, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels explained the processes they had witnessed:
"Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
"The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
"Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.
Karl Marx
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Chpt 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians
What is the breaking point? When does the class struggle reach such a height that the increasingly backward structure of capitalist production is overthrown?
"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production.
"Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
"The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.
Karl Marx
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Chpt 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians
Marx showed that all class struggle will be resolved in communism, which can be achieved only after a period of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Class struggle underlies most political struggle. But class struggle certainly is not the only form of struggle in society! Race and gender related oppression and struggle are some of the foremost examples of struggle that is not based on class. While these struggles happen in a definite class environment, race and gender oppression is not always based on economic reasons, but also can exist as a result of archaic social understanding. For example, in the 18th-century United States, Negro slavery was imperative for the survival of the cotton and tobacco industry in the south – thus, racial discrimination had a definite class basis: the maintenance of a class of slaves. In the struggle for their emancipation, a Civil War was necessary to break Negroes out of slavery and into proletarian existence. Continuing racial discrimination in the 21st century in the United States, no longer based on economic necessity, stems from deeply ingrained social racism of the past.
Historical Overview: In “primitive communism” there may be a highly developed social division of labour and even social inequality, but no classes, because each appropriates the product their own labour in its entirety, and division of labour and distribution of the product is determined by kinship relations.
In Slave Society, the productivity of labour is such that a slave-owning class is able to hold in bondage another class of slaves who are themselves the property of the slave-owners. The status of the main class of producers themselves as property, is the characteristic of slave society; slaves are not citizens, have no rights and are not regarded in slave society as human beings at all.
In Feudal Society the Nobility expropriate a definite proportion of the product of the producing classes, such as the Serfs, according to a system of traditional obligations, which define the rights and responsibilities, most particularly in relation to the land, of all classes in feudal society. Although the peasantry own their own land, and are recognised as citizens with rights, they are not free to change their station in life which is determined by traditional systems based on kinship. The producers in feudal society own the product of their own labour, except labour given under a specific requirements determined by traditional obligations, such as having to work the Duke's estate every second Saturday, give one-tenth of their crop to the priest or fighting in the army when there's war, etc., etc.
In bourgeois society the producing class, the Proletariat, are “free labourers” in the sense that they are free from any compulsion on the part of any other person as to how, where and when they work. However, the means of production are the private property of the Bourgeoisie (or Capitalists), while the Proletariat (or Working-class) has nothing to sell but its own capacity to work (unlike the peasantry of feudal society who labour on their own land), and must sell their labour power to the capitalists in order to live. The slave-owner was obliged to feed his slaves even when he had no work for them; the peasant always had his own land to work; but the proletariat is entirely free of these restraints, and if there is no work or if wages are too low, she must starve.
In a future Communist Society private property in the means of production will be non-existent and will be used in common by the producing class, marking the dissolution of all classes. This is not, of course, to say that there would be no differences or conflicts or that there would be no division of labour – on the contrary. But the means and products of labour would not be private property, and consequently, the conflicts between different people and groups of people would not be antagonistic.
In all these social formations (and there are others, only the most classic forms are basically mentioned above) there are other classes apart form the two basic classes – the Owners of the Means of Production, and the Producers. These other classes may be intermediate between the two basic classes or may be dependent upon one or the other.
Further Reading: The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology and Hegel's Philosophy of Right.”
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/l.htm#class
Contradiction:
“According to Marx, "in capitalism everything seems and in fact is contradictory" (Marx, 1963, 218). He also believes it is the "contradictory socially determined features of its elements" that is "the predominant characteristic of the capitalist mode of production" (Marx, 1973, 491).
Contradiction is understood here as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another. What is remarked as differences are based, as we saw, on certain conditions, and these conditions are constantly changing. Hence, differences are changing; and given how each difference serves as part of the appearance and/or functioning of others, grasped as relations, how one changes affects all. Consequently, their paths of development do not only intersect in mutually supportive ways, but are constantly blocking, undermining, otherwise interfering with and in due course transforming one another. Contradiction offers the optimal means for bringing such change and interaction as regards both present and future into a single focus. The future finds its way into this focus as the likely and possible outcomes of the interaction of these opposing tendencies in the present, as their real potential. It is contradiction more than any other notion that enables Marx to avoid stasis and one-sidedness in thinking about the organic and historical movements of the capitalist mode of production, about how they affect each other and develop together from their origins in feudalism to whatever lies just over our horizon.
The common sense notion of contradiction is that it applies to ideas about things and not to things themselves, that it is a logical relation between propositions ("If I claim 'X,' I can't at the same time claim 'not X' "), and not a real relation existing in the world. This common sense view, as we saw, is based on a conception of reality divided into separate and independent parts—a body moves when another body bumps into it. Whereas non-dialectical thinkers in every discipline are involved in a nonstop search for the "outside agitator," for something or someone that comes from outside the problem under examination and is the cause for whatever occurs, dialectical thinkers attribute the main responsibility for all change to the inner contradictions of the system or systems in which it occurs. Capitalism's fate, in other words, is sealed by its own problems, problems that are internal manifestations of what it is and how it works, and are often parts of the very achievements of capitalism, worsening as these achievements grow and spread. Capitalism's extraordinary success in increasing production, for example, stands in contradiction to the decreasing ability of the workers to consume these goods. Given capitalist relations of distribution, they can buy ever smaller portions of what they themselves produce (it is the proportion of such goods and not the actual amount that determines the character of the contradiction), leading to periodic crises of overproduction/underconsumption. For Marx, contradiction belongs to things in their quality as processes within an organic and developing system. It arises from within, from the very character of these processes (it is "innate in their subject matter"), and is an expression of the state of the system (Marx, 1973, 137).”
Ollman, Burtell. “The Meaning of Dialectics” in Dialectical Investigations
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/di_ch01.php
Exploitation
The process by which the ruling classes and its members extract value from the work of the labouring classes over and above the value of the components of the labour process (these values are (1) the means and instruments of production and (2) the labour power of the producers. The value generated by the workers in the labour process in excess of the costs of the materials and of reproducing their own labour power is called surplus value).
Ideology:
“The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:
the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
systematically distorted communication;
that which offers a position for a subject;
forms of thought motivated by social interest;
identity thinking;
socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;
the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
action-oriented sets of beliefs;
the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
semiotic closure;
the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality;”
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm#ideology
Middle-class:
'“The middle class, or sometimes “the middle-classes”, is a very general term indicating all those classes which lie in between the ruling class and the producing class – in capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
This middle position gives to the middle-classes their specific character, apart from the fact of their diversity, and the fact that whether or not they form a majority of the population, neither of the major classes can prevail over the other without winning a majority of the middle-classes to their side.
“In essence,” capitalism has two classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat, but no society can survive if oppressed and oppressor stand opposite each other like that (see concentration of capital), and especially since the late nineteenth century, the leadership of the bourgeoisie has taken steps to sustain a “buffer” between itself and the proletariat, and to introduce into the proletariat divisions which help soften the contradictions of capitalist society.
Restricting ourselves to modern capitalist society, the middle-classes may include:
the small business people (Petit-bourgeoisie), the “little people”, who like the proletariat, do real work (private labour), but possibly also employ wage-workers, thereby sharing social interests with the bourgeoisie, but being “little people” are constantly being “done over” by the big firms, and frequently find themselves thrown into the ranks of the proletariat;
the “professional middle-class”, who may earn a salary, in which case they are “strictly speaking” workers, or are self-employed but enjoy a share of the proceeds of exploitation in the form of high incomes and a life-style; this class is crucial in the ideological production of the relations of production;
the small farmers or Peasantry as they used to be called, who work like horses, but like the bourgeoisie, own their own means of production (land) and sell commodities; in some cases they enjoy politically-motivated protection from the state with subsidies and so on; living in the countryside they are often isolated from the political life of the cities; in many countries this class is facing bankruptcy and being propelled into the ranks of the proletariat; but in good times, they may grow to become large-scale landowners;
all sorts of white-collar workers, strictly speaking forming an upper layer of the proletariat, who are engaged in supervision and management of the workers, and consequently often share the standpoint of “their betters”; the ranks of these classes has been swelled throughout the past century by Taylorism, the development of the division of labour and the Commodification of the labour process;
and so on and so forth.
It should be noted however, that “middle-class” is not a subjective denotation, but is defined by the position of a class in the dominant relations of production, and the social interests which flow from that.
Bourgeois sociology determines class differently: when people are asked which class they are, the majority always reply “middle class”, just as people used to think the Earth was the centre of the Universe and “the truth lies in the middle”, etc., etc. Despite the fact that identity is often middle-class, class-consciousness among the middle-class is almost a contradiction in terms, as people finding themselves located in the middle, usually identify themselves with one side or the other when it comes to politics.'
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/i.htm#middle-class
I do not agree section on white-collar workers the Marxist Internet Archive. They claim that people engaged in 'supervision or management of workers' are an 'upper layer of the proletariat' who may nevertheless 'share the standpoint' the ruling classes. Especially with regards to the middle classes it is important to make a distinction between their objective relations to production and their consciousness. Middle-class consciousness often integrates elements from both great classes much more freely than either can and for this reason, and often on a very voluntarist basis, can take the side of either one. Moreover, a low level manager or foreman is likely to have working-class roots and may identify as working class. Nevertheless somebody who controls the labour of others is not proletariat; if such a person is in turn also not in control of her own labour then she is middle-class. Many white-collar workers – think IT workers – do no such thing.
Negation:
The process by which an existing set of relations is transformed by its internal contradictions.
Ruling classes:
The most powerful class or set of classes in any given society. Under capitalism this would include capitalists, land lords, high ranking state and church officials, etc.
Working class/ Proletariat:
'"The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death,whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour...
How did the proletariat originate?
"The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution... [which was] precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and hand looms The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.).The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers....
"labour was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labour made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done.
Fredrick Engels
Principles of Communism
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce.
Karl Marx
Communist Manifesto: Bourgeois and Proletarians
The following features of Marx’s definition of the proletariat should be noted: (1) proletariat is synonymous with “modern working class”, (2) proletarians have no means of support other than selling their labour power, (3) their position makes them dependent upon capital, (4) it is the expansion of capital, as opposed to servicing the personal or administrative needs of capitalists, which is the defining role of the proletariat, (4) proletarians sell themselves as opposed to selling products like the petty-bourgeoisie and capitalists, (5) they sell themselves “piecemeal” as opposed to slaves who may be sold as a whole and become the property of someone else, (6) although the term “labourers” carries the connotation of manual labour, elsewhere Marx makes it clear that the labourer with the head is as much a proletarian as the labourer with the hand, and finally (7) the proletariat is a class.
The proletariat is not a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, etc., but rather a real, historically developed entity, with its own self-consciousness and means of collective action. The relation between an individual proletarian and the class is not that of non-dialectical sociology, in which an individual with this or that attribute is or is not a member of the class. Rather, individuals are connected to a class by a million threads through which they participate in the general social division of labour and the struggle over the distribution of surplus value.
One issue that needs to be considered in relation to the definition of Proletariat is Wage Labour. Wage labour is the archetypal form in which the proletariat engages in the labour process, that is, by the sale of a worker’s labour-power according to labour-time. Firstly, Marx treats piece-work, in which the worker is paid by output rather than by time, as a form of wage-labour, not essentially different from wage-labour. Secondly, nowadays it is increasingly common that workers are obliged to sell their product as such, by means of contract labour, for example. This raises the question of what is essential in the concept of proletariat. Contract labour does undermine working-class consciousness, but at the same time, the person who lives in a capitalist society, and has no means of support but to work, is a proletarian, even if they are unable to find employment (where workers may become lumpenproletariat if their living conditions are very difficult).
The other important issue in relation to the proletariat is its historical path. As Marx explains in Capital, [Chapter 32], capitalism brings about the “revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself”. The proletariat neither requires nor is able to exploit any other class; they are themselves the producers and capitalism has trained the proletariat in all the skills needed to rationally organise social labour for the benefit of humanity, without the aid of money, religion or any other form of inhuman mysticism.
Thus, the future historical significance of the proletariat is ultimately not that it is oppressed, but rather that it is the only class which is capable of overthrowing bourgeois society and establishing a classless society.
The “proletariat” was the class in ancient society who had no property and so could not pay taxes, and were deemed to serve the state by having offspring (L. proles); the word entered the English language from French, via the translation of Communist literature in the 1840s.'
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#proletariat
