Thus, what defines people as human beings—their ability to think, to act on the basis of that thought, to be creative, to interact with other human beings—is denied to the workers in capitalism. As capitalists adopt new technologies to make their companies more competitive, alienation among the workers increases. For example, faster, more mechanized assembly lines make it even more difficult for coworkers to relate to one another.
Over time, Marx believed, the workers’ situation would grow much worse as the capitalists increased the level of exploitation and restructured the work so that the proletariat became even more alienated. The gap between these two social classes would grow wider and increasingly visible in terms of the two groups’ economic positions and the nature of their work. Once workers understood how capitalism “really” worked, especially the ways in which it worked to their detriment, they would rise up and overthrow that system in what Marx called a proletarian revolution.
According to Marx, the outcome of the proletarian revolution would be the creation of a communist society. Interestingly, Marx had very little to say explicitly about what a communist society would look like. In fact, he was highly critical of utopian thinkers who wasted their time drawing beautiful portraits of an imaginary future state. Marx was too much the sociologist and concentrated instead on trying to better understand the structures of capitalist society. He was particularly interested in the ways in which they operated, especially to the advantage of the capitalists and to the disadvantage of the proletariat.
Marx believed that his work was needed because the capitalist class tried hard to make sure that the proletariat did not truly understand the nature of capitalism. One of the ways in which the capitalists did this was to produce a set of ideas, an ideology, which distorted the reality of capitalism and concealed the ways in which it really operated. As a result, the proletariat suffered from false consciousness—the workers did not truly understand capitalism and may have even believed, erroneously, that the system operated fairly and perhaps even to their benefit. Marx’s work was devoted to providing the members of the proletariat with the knowledge they needed to see through these false ideas and achieve a truer understanding of the workings of capitalism.
Marx hypothesized that the workers could develop class consciousness, and such a collective consciousness would lead them to truly understand capitalism, their role in it, and their relationship to one another as well as to the capitalists. Class consciousness was a prerequisite of the revolutionary actions to be undertaken by the proletariat. In contrast, the capitalists could never achieve class consciousness because, in Marx’s view, they were too deeply involved in capitalism to be able to see how it truly operated.
Ask Yourself
Do you agree with Marx’s characterizations of false consciousness and class consciousness? Why or why not? Give some examples from your own experience to support your answer.
Marx’s theories about capitalism are relevant to contemporary society. For example, in the United States, a capitalist country, the income gap that Marx predicted between those at the top of the economic system and the rest of the population is huge and growing. In 2016, the top 20 percent of the population in terms of household income had a greater average income than the rest of the population combined (U.S. Census 2017a). As you can see in Figure 2.1, those at the top have greatly increased their average income since 1967; this is especially true of the top 5 percent of the population. Furthermore, the top 1 percent controlled almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016.
Figure 2.1 Mean Income Received by Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent, All Races: 1967–2017
Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements.
Marx also theorized that capitalism would force the capitalists to find the cheapest sources of labor and resources wherever they existed in the world. As Marx predicted, corporations continue to scour the globe for workers willing to work for lower wages, driving down pay closer to home and reaping as much profit as possible from lower labor costs.
However, history has failed to bear out much of Marx’s thinking about the demise of capitalism. For example, there has been no proletarian revolution, and one seems less likely than ever. This is the case, if for no other reason, because the members of the proletariat of greatest interest to Marx—manufacturing workers—are rapidly declining in number and importance, at least in developed countries like the United States (Rifkin 1995). Despite the threats to the proletariat, capitalism continues to exist, and Marx’s ways of thinking about it, and the concepts he developed for that analysis, continue to be useful. The development of several of these concepts is portrayed in the recent film The Young Karl Marx (2017).
Max Weber
Although Karl Marx was an important social theorist, he developed his ideas outside the academic world. It took time for those radical ideas to gain recognition from scholars. In contrast, Max Weber (1864–1920; pronounced VAY-ber) was a leading academician of his day (Kalberg 2011, 2017). Weber, like Marx, devoted great attention to the economy.
Weber’s best-known work—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904–1905] 1958)—is part of his historical-comparative study of religion in various societies throughout the world. One of his main objectives was to analyze the relationship between the economy and religion. Weber focused on the central role religion had played in the Western world’s economic development.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, it was Protestantism in general, and especially Calvinism, that led to the rise of capitalism in the West and not in other areas of the world. Calvinists believed that people were predestined to go to heaven or hell; that is, they would end up in heaven or hell no matter what they did or did not do. While they could not affect their destiny, they could uncover “signs” that indicated whether they were “saved” and going to heaven. Economic success was a particularly important sign that one was saved. However, isolated successful economic successes were not sufficient. Calvinists had to devote their lives to hard work and economic success, as well as to other “good works.” At the same time, the Calvinists were quite frugal. All of this was central to the distinctive ethical system of the Calvinists, and more generally Protestants, that Weber referred to as the Protestant ethic.
Weber was interested not only in the Protestant ethic but also in the “spirit of capitalism” it helped spawn. The Protestant ethic was a system of ideas closely associated with religion, while the spirit of capitalism involved a transformation of those ideas into a perspective linked directly to the economy. As the economy came to be infused with the spirit of capitalism, it was transformed into a capitalist economic system. Eventually, however, the spirit of capitalism, and later capitalism itself, grew apart from its roots in Calvinism and the Protestant ethic. Capitalist thinking eventually could not accommodate such irrational forms of thought as ethics and religion.
Despite his attention to it, Weber was not interested in capitalism per se. He was more interested in the broader phenomenon of rationalization, or the process by which social structures are increasingly characterized by the most direct and efficient means to their ends. In Weber’s view, this process was becoming more and more common in many sectors of society, including the economy, especially in bureaucracies and in the most rational economic system—capitalism. Capitalism is rational because of, for example, its continual efforts to find ways to produce more profitable products efficiently, with fewer inputs and simpler processes. A specific and early example of rationalization in capitalism is the assembly line, in which raw materials enter the line and finished products emerge at the end. Fewer workers performed very simple tasks in order to allow the assembly line to function efficiently. More recently, manufacturers have added