Marxist concern with the role of the Capitalist state in the maintenance of the social relations of economic production was powerful and corrective to those investigations of everyday life, which tended to ignore external economic and political determinations. Uneven economic development on a global scale was dissected, showing that the process of industrial restructuring was passing beyond the control of the notion-state, increasing economic insecurity for many.
The social power accruing to owners of land and capital, the effects of class position on private consumption and the impact of residential segregation on life chances were all identified as important material determinants of social inequalities. However, although there is a strong affinity between capitalist structuring of everyday life and the experience of modernity, one is not reducible to the other.
Berman suggests that the modern experience cuts across other divisions such as nationality, class and religion. However, there currently seems to be some danger that the universal aspects of modernity will again eclipse interest in the material bases of social divisions.
A key area to look at of Marx’s work when discussing theories of modernity is his study of human nature. Marx opposed the idea that humans have a fixed nature which exists independently of the society they live in. He demonstrated that many of the features attributed to unchanging human nature in fact vary enormously in different societies. However, Marx did not reject the idea of human nature itself. He argued that the need to work to satisfy human needs was the only consistent feature of all human societies.
Human beings, like all other animals, must labour on nature to survive. The labour of humans, however, was distinguished from that of animals because human beings developed consciousness. To support these ideas, Ernst Fischer also described what is unique about human labour. He explained that because we act on nature consciously, we build our successes and develop new ways of producing the things we need. This means that we create a history, whereas animals do not.
Working on nature alters not only the natural world, but the labourer himself. Marx frequently reinforced this idea and explained that by acting on the external world and changing it, the labourer at the same time changes his own nature. Therefore labour is a dynamic process through which the labourer shapes and moulds the world he lives in and stimulates and motivates himself to create and innovate.
The first recognition of the fact that the world can be changed by conscious activity contains all future, as yet unknown, but inevitable change. The emergence of class divisions in which one class has control over the means of producing what society needed, led to a further division between individuals and the society to which they belonged.
In feudal society, humans had not yet developed the means to control the natural world. All social relationships conditioned by development of the productive powers of the labour force and limited relations of men between the process of creating and reproducing their material life. Land was the source of production and so dominated the feudal-manorial system, so that men saw themselves not as individuals but in relation to the land. Ownership of land was dependent on inheritance and bloodlines; your birth determined your destiny.
To produce ‘their means of subsistence’ is an essential aspect of human nature. This is an aspect that not only defines us as different from animals but is a necessity for defining ourselves. That humans are self-conscious is one claim, but the state of consciousness or subjectivity is seen as being entirely dependent for its origins on the society one lives in. All features of human existence can be tied to society. As Marx quoted ‘ It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’. Rather than being given, or determined by biological factors, Marxist subject consciousness is given from a material positioning. It is our social class that determines our form of consciousness.
Alienation arose from the low level of the productive forces, from human subordination to the land and the domination of the feudal ruling classes. However, despite this the peasants worked their own land and produced most of the things they needed in their own family units. The social relationships in feudal society were those of domination and subordination, but social relationships all the same.
However, the constraints of feudalism were very different from the dynamic of capitalism. The bourgeoisie wanted a society in which everything could be bought and sold for money. The creation of such a society meant the enclosure of common land. This meant that for the first time the majority of society were denied direct access to the means of production and subsidence creating a class of labourers subjected to a new form of exploitation and waged labour in order to survive.
John Urry (Social Theory, 1994) outlined what he took to be a fundamental transition occurring in the contemporary world. He pointed out that Marx had diagnosed long ago the expanding nature of industrial capitalism. The analysis of modernity, which Marx, along with Frederich Engels, developed, holds that modern production unleashes extraordinary transformative powers, which capitalist society is poorly equipped to control.
In their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels analyse modernity and see the bourgeoisie as a profoundly revolutionary class, setting in motion an extraordinary train of events, creating more formidable and sophisticated forces of production that any previous century had managed. People’s lives are, therefore, controlled by a revolutionary bourgeoisie class- a class with a vested interest in change, crisis and chaos. In the manifesto Marx and Engels foretell a massively influential set of social developments which have characterised Western societies from around the nineteenth century onwards. However, it is suggested that this era of ‘organised capitalism’ that they outline, has, in certain societies, come to an end and there is a set of significant transformations that have recently been disorganising contemporary capitalist societies. (Social Theory, 1994)
Marx has built a relational model of economic production relations and attempts to demonstrate the implications of this model, not just for the economy but for the political, social and cultural aspects of a society. His theory is holistic and his work sees individuals as second to the social structures that surround them. Marx is committed to the view that history and society are the products of invariant laws that individuals must come to understand.
