Marxism - Book chapter Rupert

9 important questions on Marxism - Book chapter Rupert

What concept is fundamental to Marxism?

Fundamental to Marxism is the critical interpretation of capitalism. Capitalism is a historically produced - and therefore mutable - form of social life and not the outcome of human nature.

How does Rupert define capitalism in the book chapter?

Capitalism is a historically particular way of organizing social life. This way of organizing can be understood as a dynamic ensemble of social relations not necessarily contained within the territorial boundaries of nation-states.

Karl Marx had a relational and process-oriented view of human beings. He argued humans live their lives at the intersection of a three-sided (organic) relation encompassing which 3?

  1. The Natural World: humans are material beings who engage in productive interchange with the natural world to ensure survival.
  2. Social relations and institutions: this productive activity will be socially organized.
  3. Human persons: socially productive activity has a consequence that humans continuously remake their world (socially and naturally) and themselves
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What are organic relations in Marxism?

Each element of the relation is what it is by virtue of its place in the relation, and none can be understood in abstraction from that context.

What does Marx's dialectical understanding of history entail?

Humans are historical, social beings, simultaneously the producers and the products of historical processes. Units and systems constitute each other. Humans can actively shape their history.

What does capitalist freedom entail?

Capitalism frees workers to treat their labour as their own property.

What does capitalism unfreedom entail and what is the result of this for the workers?

The means of production are under the ownership and control of a class of private owners. The workers are compelled to sell their labour to members of this owning class in order to gain access to those means of production, engage in socially productive activity, and secure through their wages the material necessities of survival.

What did early twentieth-century Marxist writers argue concerning the relation between globalizing capitalism and imperial power?

Early twentieth-century Marxist writers argued that advanced processes of capitalist accumulation were driving the major capitalist countries into colonial expansionism.

What 3 factors make capitalism drive towards imperialism?

  1. The quest for raw materials;
  2. Overproduction requires a search for new market;
  3. Overaccumulation compels the export of capital.

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