Comte's Positivism

Main articles: Positivism and Law of three stages

Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive
Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the
1848 work, A General View of Positivism (published in English in 1865). The first three volumes
of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence
(mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasised the
inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation
in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher
of science in the modern sense of the term.[7] Comte was also the first to distinguish natural
philosophy from science explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first,
before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex
"Queen science" of human society itself. His View of Positivism would therefore set out to define,
in more detail, the empirical goals of sociological method.[citation needed]
Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its
quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. The idea bears some similarity
to Karl Marx's view that human society would progress toward a communist peak.[citation needed] This
is perhaps unsurprising as both were profoundly influenced by the early Utopian socialist, Henri
de Saint-Simon, who was at one time Comte's teacher and mentor. Both Comte and Marx intended
to develop, scientifically, a new secular ideology in the wake of European secularisation.[citation
needed]

Comte's stages were (1) the theological stage, (2) the metaphysical stage, and (3)
the positive stage.[8] (1) The Theological stage was seen from the perspective of 19th century
France as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions
upon man were referenced to God. Man blindly believed in whatever he was taught by his
ancestors. He believed in a supernatural power. Fetishism played a significant role during this
time. (2) By the "Metaphysical" stage, Comte referred not to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or other
ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society
subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical stage involved the justification
of universal rights as being on a vauntedly higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to
countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. This
stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning
although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world that
questioned authority and religion. (3) In the Scientific stage, which came into being after the failure
of the revolution and of Napoleon, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them
into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science
started to answer questions in full stretch. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy
Bentham. For its time, this idea of a Scientific stage was considered up-to-date, although from a
later standpoint it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. Comte's law of three
stages was one of the first theories of social evolutionism.

Herbert Spencer

Spencer rejected what he regarded as the ideological aspects of Comte's positivism, attempting to
reformulate social science in terms of his principle of evolution, which he applied to the biological,
psychological and sociological aspects of the universe. Given the primacy with which Spencer
placed on evolution in his work, Spencer's sociology might be described as socially
Darwinistic (though strictly speaking he was a proponent of Lamarckism rather than Darwinism).
Despite the popularity of this view, such a description of Spencer's sociology is mistaken. While
Spencer's political and ethical writings had themes consistent with social Darwinism, such themes
are not present in Spencer's sociological works, which focus on building a theory regarding how
processes of societal growth and differentiation lead to changing amounts of complexity amongst
the various forms of social organization [18]
The evolutionary progression from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to complex,
differentiated heterogeneity was exemplified, Spencer argued, by the development of society. He
developed a theory of two types of society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to
this evolutionary progression. Militant society, structured around relationships of hierarchy and
obedience, was simple and undifferentiated; industrial society, based on voluntary, contractually
assumed social obligations, was complex and differentiated. Society, which Spencer
conceptualised as a 'social organism' evolved from the simpler state to the more complex according
to the universal law of evolution. Moreover, industrial society was the direct descendant of the
ideal society developed in Social Statics, although Spencer now equivocated over whether the
evolution of society would result in anarchism (as he had first believed) or whether it pointed to a
continued role for the state, albeit one reduced to the minimal functions of the enforcement of
contracts and external defence.
Though Spencer made some valuable contributions to early sociology, not least in his influence
on structural functionalism, his attempt to introduce Lamarckian or Darwinian ideas into the realm
of sociology was unsuccessful. It was considered by many, furthermore, to be actively
dangerous. Hermeneuticians of the period, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, would pioneer the distinction
between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).
In the United States, the sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who would be elected as the first president
of the American Sociological Association, launched a relentless attack on Spencer's theories of
laissez-faire and political ethics. Although Ward admired much of Spencer's work he believed that
Spencer's prior political biases had distorted his thought and had led him astray. [19] In the
1890s, Émile Durkheimestablished formal academic sociology with a firm emphasis on
practical social research. By the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German
sociologists, most notablyMax Weber, had presented methodological antipositivism. However, it
should be noted that Spencer's theories of laissez-faire, survival-of-the-fittest and minimal human
interference in the processes of natural law had an enduring and even increasing appeal in the
social science fields of economics and political science, and one writer has recently made the case
for Spencer's importance for a sociology that must learn to take energy in society seriously.[20]

Emile Durkheim

While Durkheim's work deals with a number of subjects, including suicide, the family, social
structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge.
While publishing short articles on the subject earlier in his career (for example the essay De
quelques formes primitives de classification written in 1902 with Marcel Mauss), Durkheim's
definitive statement concerning the sociology of knowledge comes in his 1912 magnum opus The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This book has as its goal not only the elucidation of the social
origins and function of religion, but also the social origins and impact of society on language and
logical thought. Durkheim worked largely out of a Kantian framework and sought to understand
how the concepts and categories of logical thought could arise out of social life. He argued, for
example, that the categories of space and time were not a priori. Rather, the category of space
depends on a society's social grouping and geographical use of space, and a group's social rythme
that determines our understanding of time.[85] In this Durkheim sought to combine elements
of rationalism and empiricism, arguing that certain aspects of logical thought common to all
humans did exist, but that they were products of collective life (thus contradicting the tabla rasa
empiricist understanding whereby categories are acquired by individual experience alone), and
that they were not universal a priori's (as Kant argued) since the content of the categories differed
from society to society.[86]
Another key elements to Durkheim's theory of knowledge is his concept of représentations
collectives (collective representations), which is outlined in The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life. Représentations collectives are the symbols and images that come to represent the
ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual
constituents. They can include words, slogans, ideas, or any number of material items that can
serve as a symbol, such as a cross, a rock, a temple, a feather etc. As Durkheim
elaborates, représentations collectives are created through intense social interaction and are
products of collective activity. As such these representations have the particular, and somewhat
contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual (since they are created and
controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole), and yet simultaneously within each
individual of the society (by virtue of that individual's participation within society).[87]
Arguably the most important "représentation collective" is language, which according to
Durkheim is a product of collective action. And because language is a collective action, language
contains within it a history of accumulated knowledge and experience that no individual would be
capable of creating on their own. As Durkheim says, 'représentations collectives', and language in
particular:
add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which
the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing
reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it,
penetrates it and transforms it.[88]

As such, language, as a social product, literally structures and shapes our experience of reality.
This discursive approach to language and society would be developed by later French
philosophers, such as Michel Foucault.

Max Weber

Unlike some other classical figures (Comte, Durkheim) Weber did not attempt, consciously, to
create any specific set of rules governing social sciences in general, or sociology in particular.[4] In
comparison with Durkheim and Marx, Weber was more focused on individuals and culture and
this is clear in his methodology.[14] Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber concentrated
on the individuals and their actions (see structure and action discussion) and whereas Marx argued
for the primacy of the material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating
actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.[14][56][57]
Sociology, for Max Weber, is:
... a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive
at a causal explanation of its course and effects.
— Max Weber[58]

Weber was concerned with the question of objectivity and subjectivity.[4] Weber
distinguished social action from social behavior, noting that social action must be understood
through how individuals subjectively relate to one another.[4][59] Study of social action
through interpretive means (Verstehen) must be based upon understanding the subjective meaning
and purpose that individuals attach to their actions.[4][33]Social actions may have easily identifiable
and objective means, but much more subjective ends and the understanding of those ends by a
scientist is subject to yet another layer of subjective understanding (that of the scientist).[4] Weber
noted that the importance of subjectivity in social sciences makes creation of fool-proof, universal
laws much more difficult than in natural sciences and that the amount of objective knowledge that
social sciences may achieve is precariously limited.[4] Overall, Weber supported the goal of
objective science, but he noted that it is an unreachable goal – although one definitely worth
striving for.[4]
There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture.... All knowledge of cultural reality
... is always knowledge from particular points of view.... an "objective" analysis of cultural events,
which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality
to "laws", is meaningless ... [because] ... the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social
reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.
— Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science, 1904[60]

The principle of "methodological individualism", which holds that social scientists should seek to
understand collectivities (such as nations, cultures, governments, churches, corporations, etc.)
solely as the result and the context of the actions of individual persons, can be traced to Weber,
particularly to the first chapter of Economy and Society, in which he argues that only individuals
"can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action". [55][59] In other words,
Weber argued that social phenomena can be understood scientifically only to the extent that they
are captured by models of the behaviour of purposeful individuals, models that Weber called "ideal
types", from which actual historical events will necessarily deviate due to accidental and irrational
factors.[55] The analytical constructs of an ideal type never exist in reality, but provide objective
benchmarks against which real-life constructs can be measured.[61]
We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous
than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age
of subjectivist culture.
— Max Weber, 1909[62]

Weber's methodology was developed in the context of a wider debate about methodology of social
sciences, the Methodenstreit.[33] Weber's position was close to historicism, as he understood social
actions as being heavily tied to particular historical contexts and its analysis required the
understanding of subjective motivations of individuals (social actors).[33] Thus Weber's
methodology emphasises the use of comparative historical analysis.[63] Therefore, Weber was
more interested in explaining how a certain outcome was the result of various historical processes
rather than predicting an outcome of those processes in the future.[57]
Ferdinand Toennis

Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings. Gemeinschaft — often translated
as community (or left untranslated)— refers to groupings based on feelings of togetherness and on
mutual bonds, which are felt as a goal to be kept up, their members being means for this
goal. Gesellschaft — often translated as society — on the other hand, refers to groups that are
sustained by it being instrumental for their members' individual aims and goals.
Gemeinschaft may be exemplified historically by a family or a neighborhood in a pre-modern
(rural) society; Gesellschaft by a joint-stock company or a state in a modern society, i.e. the society
when Tönnies lived. Gesellschaft relationships arose in an urban and capitalist setting,
characterized by individualism and impersonal monetary connections between people. Social ties
were often instrumental and superficial, with self-interest and exploitation increasingly the norm.
Examples are corporations, states, or voluntary associations.
His distinction between social groupings is based on the assumption that there are only two basic
forms of an actor's will, to approve of other men. (For Tönnies, such an approval is by no means
self-evident, he is quite influenced by Thomas Hobbes[9]). Following his "essential will"
("Wesenwille"), an actor will see himself as a means to serve the goals of social grouping; very
often it is an underlying, subconscious force. Groupings formed around an essential will are called
a Gemeinschaft. The other will is the "arbitrary will" ("Kürwille"): An actor sees a social grouping
as a means to further his individual goals; so it is purposive and future-oriented. Groupings around
the latter are called Gesellschaft. Whereas the membership in a Gemeinschaft is self-fulfilling,
a Gesellschaft is instrumental for its members. In pure sociology — theoretically —, these
two normal types of will are to be strictly separated; in applied sociology — empirically — they
are always mixed.
Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, like others between tradition and
modernity, has been criticized for over-generalizing differences between societies, and implying
that all societies were following a similar evolutionary path, an argument which he never
proclaimed.[10]
The equilibrium in Gemeinschaft is achieved through morals, conformism, and exclusion - social
control - while Gesellschaft keeps its equilibrium through police, laws, tribunals and prisons.
Amish, Hassidic communities are examples of Gemeinschaft, while states are types of
Gesellschaft. Rules in Gemeinschaft are implicit, while Gesellschaft has explicit rules (written
laws)
George Simmel

Simmel refers to "all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are
made into a 'society,'"[9] which he describes as a, "higher unity,"[9] composed of individuals. He
was especially fascinated, it seems, by the, "impulse to sociability in man,"[9] which he described
as "associations...[through which] the solitariness of the individuals is resolved into togetherness,
a union with others,"[10] a process he describes by which, "the impulse to sociability distils, as it
were, out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association,"[10] and "through which a
unity is made,"[10] which he also refers to as, "the free-playing, interacting interdependence of
individuals."[10]
He defines sociability as, "the play-form of association,"[10] driven by, "amicability, breeding,
cordiality and attractiveness of all kinds."[10] In order for this free association to occur, he says,
"the personalities must not emphasize themselves too individually...with too much abandon and
aggressiveness."[10] He also describes, "this world of sociability...a democracy of equals...without
friction," so long as people blend together in a spirit of fun and affection to, "bring about among
themselves a pure interaction free of any disturbing material accent."[11] As so many social
interactions are not entirely of this sweet character, one has to conclude that Simmel is describing
a somewhat idealised view of the best types of human interaction, and by no means the most typical
or average type.
The same can be said of Simmel when he says that, "the vitality of real individuals, in their
sensitivities and attractions, in the fullness of their impulses and convictions...is but a symbol of
life, as it shows itself in the flow of a lightly amusing play,"[12] or when he adds: "a symbolic play,
in whose aesthetic charm all the finest and most highly sublimated dynamics of social existence
and its riches are gathered."[13] Again, one has to conclude that he is describing human interactions
at their idealised best and not the more typical ones, which tend to fall a long way short of his
descriptions.

Edward Taylor

Taylor's poems, in leather bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left
instructions that his heirs should "never publish any of his writings," and the poems remained all
but forgotten for more than 200 years.[2] In 1937 Thomas H. Johnson discovered a 7,000-
page quarto manuscript of Taylor's poetry in the library of Yale Universityand published a
selection from it in The New England Quarterly. The appearance of these poems, wrote Taylor's
biographer Norman S. Grabo, "established [Taylor] almost at once and without quibble as not only
America's finest colonial poet, but as one of the most striking writers in the whole range
of American literature."[3] His most important poems, the first sections of Preparatory
Meditations (1682–1725) and God's Determinations Touching His Elect and the Elects Combat in
Their Conversion and Coming up to God in Christ: Together with the Comfortable Effects
Thereof (c. 1680), were published shortly after their discovery. His complete poems, however,
were not published until 1960. He is the only major American poet to have written in
the metaphysical style.
Taylor's poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired during a strict
upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist Puritans, who developed
during the 1630s and 1640s rules far more demanding than those of their co-religionists in England.
Alarmed by a perceived lapse in piety, they concluded that professing belief and leading a scandal
free life were insufficient for full participation in the local assembly. To become communing
participants, "halfway members" were required to relate by testimony some personal experience
of God's saving grace leading to conversion, thus affirming that they were, in their own opinion
and that of the church, assured of salvation.[4] This requirement, expressed in the famous Halfway
Covenant of 1662, was defended by such prominent churchmen as Increase and Cotton
Mather and was readily embraced by Taylor, who became one of its most vocal advocates.[5]
Though not for the most part identifiably sectarian, Taylor's poems nonetheless are marked by a
robust spiritual content, characteristically conveyed by means of homely and vivid imagery
derived from everyday Puritan surroundings. "Taylor transcended his frontier circumstances,"
biographer Grabo observed, "not by leaving them behind, but by transforming them into
intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual universals."[6]

William Graham Sumner

As a sociologist, his major accomplishments were developing the concepts of diffusion, folkways,
and ethnocentrism. Sumner's work with folkways led him to conclude that attempts at government-
mandated reform were useless.
In 1876, Sumner became the first to teach a course entitled "sociology" in the English-speaking
world, though this course focused on the thought of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, rather
than the formal academic sociology that would be established 20 years later by Émile Durkheim in
Europe.[29] He was the second president of American Sociological Association serving from 1908
to 1909. and succeeding his longtime ideological opponent Lester F. Ward.
In 1880, Sumner was involved in one of the first cases of academic freedom. Sumner and the Yale
president at the time, Noah Porter, did not agree on the use of Herbert Spencer's "Study of
Sociology" as part of the curriculum.[30] Spencer's application of supposed "Darwinist" ideas to the
realm of humans may have been slightly too controversial at this time of curriculum reform. On
the other hand, even if Spencer's ideas were not generally accepted, it is clear that his social ideas
influenced Sumner in his written works.
Sumner and Social Darwinism[edit]
William Graham Sumner was influenced by many people and ideas such as Herbert Spencer and
this has led many to associate Sumner with social Darwinism.
In 1881, Sumner wrote an essay entitled "Sociology". In the essay, Sumner focuses on the
connection between sociology and biology. He explains that there are two sides to the struggle for
survival of a human. The first side is a "struggle for existence",[31] which is a relationship between
man and nature. The second side would be the "competition for life", which can be identified as a
relationship between man and man.[31] The first is a biological relationship with nature and the
second is a social link thus sociology. Man would struggle against nature to obtain essential needs
such as food or water and in turn this would create the conflict between man and man in order to
obtain needs from a limited supply.[31] Sumner believed that man could not abolish the law of
"survival of the fittest", and that humans could only interfere with it and produce the "unfit".[31]
According to Jeff Riggenbach, the identification of Sumner as a social Darwinist:[32]
...is ironic, for he was not so known during his lifetime or for many years thereafter. Robert C.
Bannister, the Swarthmore historian, ... describes the situation: "Sumner's 'social Darwinism,'" he
writes, "although rooted in controversies during his lifetime, received its most influential
expression in Richard Hofstadter['s] Social Darwinism in American Thought," which was first
published in 1944. ... Was William Graham Sumner an advocate of "social Darwinism"? As I have
indicated, he has been so described, most notably by Richard Hofstadter and various others over
the past 60-odd years. Robert Bannister calls this description "more caricature than accurate
characterization" of Sumner, however, and says further that it "seriously misrepresents him." He
notes that Sumner's short book, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, which was first published
in 1884, when the author was in his early 40s, "would ... earn him a reputation as the Gilded Age's
leading 'social Darwinist,'" though it "invoked neither the names nor the rhetoric of Spencer or
Darwin."
Sumner was a critic of natural rights, famously arguing
Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more
right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to
maintain the struggle for existence...
— William Graham Sumner, Earth-hunger, and other essays, p. 234.

One of Sumner's most famous quotations neatly highlights his social Darwinist views:
A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of
things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things
which have survived their usefulness.[33]
Friedrich Engels

Vladimir Lenin wrote: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest
scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world.... In their scientific
works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers,
but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern
society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the
rule and victory of certain social classes over others."[91]
But Labour Party politician Tristram Hunt argues that Engels has become a convenient scapegoat,
too easily blamed for the state crimes of the Soviet Union, Communist Southeast Asia and China.
"Engels is left holding the bag of 20th century ideological extremism," Hunt writes, "while Marx
is rebranded as the acceptable, postpolitical seer ofglobal capitalism."[25] Hunt largely exonerates
Engels stating that "in no intelligible sense can Engels or Marx bear culpability for the crimes of
historical actors carried out generations later, even if the policies were offered up in their honor."[25]
Other writers, while admitting the distance between Marx and Engels and Stalin, are less
charitable, noting for example that the anarchist Bakunin predicted the oppressive potential of their
ideas. "It is a fallacy that Marxism's flaws were exposed only after it was tried out in power....
[Marx and Engels] were centralisers. While talking about 'free associations of producers', they
advocated discipline and hierarchy."[92]
Paul Thomas, of the University of California, Berkeley, claims that while Engels had been the
most important and dedicated facilitator and diffuser of Marx's writings, he significantly altered
Marx's intents as he held, edited and released them in a finished form, and commentated on them.
Engels attempted to fill gaps in Marx's system and extend it to other fields. He stressed Historical
Materialism in particular, assigning it a character of scientific discovery and a doctrine, indeed
forming Marxism as such. A case in point is Anti-Dühring, which supporters of socialism, like its
detractors, treated as an encompassing presentation of Marx's thought. And while in his extensive
correspondence with German socialists Engels modestly presented his own secondary place in the
couple's intellectual relationship and always emphasised Marx' outstanding role, Russian
communists like Lenin raised Engels up with Marx and conflated their thoughts as if they were
necessarily congruous. Soviet Marxists then developed this tendency to the state doctrine
ofDialectical Materialism.[93]
Thornstein Veblen

In spite of difficulties of sometimes archaic language, caused in large part by Veblen's struggles
with the terminology of unilinear evolution and of biological determination of social
variation[citation needed] that still dominated social thought when he began to write, Veblen's work
remains relevant, and not simply for the phrase “conspicuous consumption”. His evolutionary
approach to the study of economic systems is once again in vogue and his model of recurring
conflict between the existing order and new ways can be of great value in understanding the new
global economy.
The handicap principle of evolutionary sexual selection is often compared to Veblen's
“conspicuous consumption”.[54]
Veblen, as noted, is regarded as one of the co-founders (with John R. Commons, Wesley C.
Mitchell, and others) of the American school of institutional economics. Present-day practitioners
who adhere to this school organise themselves in the Association for Evolutionary Economics
(AFEE) and the Association for Institutional Economics (AFIT). AFEE gives an annual Veblen-
Commons (see John R. Commons) award for work in Institutional Economics and publishes
the Journal of Economic Issues. Some unaligned practitioners include theorists of the concept of
"differential accumulation".[55]
Veblen is cited in works of feminist economists.[56] Veblen's work has also often been cited in
American literary works. He is featured in The Big Money by John Dos Passos and mentioned
in Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. One of Veblen's Ph.D. students was George
W. Stocking, Sr., a pioneer in the emerging field of industrial organization economics. Another
was Canadian academic and author Stephen Leacock, who went on to become the head of
Department of Economics and Political Science atMcGill University. Influence of Theory of the
Leisure Class can be seen in Leacock's 1914 satire, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich.

Karl Marx

Marx's thoughts on labour were related to the primacy he gave to the economic relation in
determining the society's past, present and future (see also economic
[196][199][222] [199]
determinism). Accumulation of capital shapes the social system. Social change, for
Marx, was about conflict between opposing interests, driven, in the background, by economic
forces.[196] This became the inspiration for the body of works known as the conflict theory.[222] In
his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human historybegan with free, productive and
creative work that was over time coerced and dehumanised, a trend most apparent under
capitalism.[196] Marx noted that this was not an intentional process; rather, no individual or even
state can go against the forces of economy.[199]
The organisation of society depends on means of production. Literally those things, like land,
natural resources, and technology, necessary for the production of material goods and the relations
of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the
means of production.[222] Together these compose the mode of production, and Marx distinguished
historical eras in terms of distinct modes of production. Marx differentiated between base and
superstructure, with the base (or substructure) referring to the economic system, and
superstructure, to the cultural and political system.[222] Marx regarded this mismatch between
(economic) base and (social) superstructureas a major source of social disruption and conflict.[222]
Despite Marx's stress on critique of capitalism and discussion of the new communist society that
should replace it, his explicit critique of capitalism is guarded, as he saw it as an improved society
compared to the past ones (slavery and feudal).[80] Marx also never clearly discusses issues
of morality and justice, although scholars agree that his work contained implicit discussion of
those concepts.[80]

Memorial to Karl Marx in Moscow. The inscription reads "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

Marx's view of capitalism was two-sided.[80][151] On one hand, Marx, in the 19th century's deepest
critique of the dehumanising aspects of this system, noted that defining features of capitalism
include alienation, exploitation, and recurring, cyclical depressions leading to mass
unemployment; on the other hand capitalism is also characterised by "revolutionising,
industrialising and universalising qualities of development, growth and progressivity" (by which
Marx meant industrialisation, urbanisation, technological progress, increased productivityand
growth, rationality and scientific revolution), that are responsible for progress.[80][151][196] Marx
considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly
improved the means of production, more so than any other class in history, and was responsible
for the overthrow of feudalism and its transition to capitalism.[199][223] Capitalism can stimulate
considerable growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new
technologies and capital equipment.[213]
According to Marx, capitalists take advantage of the difference between the labour market and the
market for whatever commodity the capitalist can produce. Marx observed that in practically every
successful industry, input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference
"surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference
between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.[80] Marx's dual view of
capitalism can be seen in his description of the capitalists: he refers to them as to vampires sucking
worker's blood, but at the same time,[196] he notes that drawing profit is "by no means an
injustice"[80] and that capitalists simply cannot go against the system.[199] The true problem lies
with the "cancerous cell" of capital, understood not as property or equipment, but the relations
between workers and owners—the economic system in general.[199]
At the same time, Marx stressed that capitalism was unstable, and prone to periodic crises.[94] He
suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and
less in labour.[80] Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labour is the source of
profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew.[172] Marx believed
that increasingly severe crises would punctuate this cycle of growth, collapse, and more
growth.[172] Moreover, he believed that in the long-term, this process would necessarily enrich
and empower the capitalist class and impoverish the proletariat.[172][199] In section one of The
Communist Manifesto, Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social
contradictions play in the historical process:
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built
itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of
production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged ...
the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst
asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political
constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar
movement is going on before our own eyes ... 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 order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property.[224]
Marx believed that industrial workers (the proletariat) would rise up around the world.

Marx believed that those structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way
to socialism, or a post-capitalistic, communist society:
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. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable."[224]
Thanks to various processes overseen by capitalism, such as urbanisation, the working class, the
proletariat, should grow in numbers and develop class consciousness, in time realising that they
have to and can change the system.[196][199] Marx believed that if the proletariat were to seize the
means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally,
abolishing exploiting class, and introduce a system of production less vulnerable to cyclical
crises.[196] Marx argued in The German Ideology that capitalism will end through the organised
actions of an international working class:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will
have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of
things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."[225]
In this new society, the self-alienation would end, and humans would be free to act without being
bound by the labour market.[172] It would be a democratic society, enfranchising the entire
population.[199] In such a utopian world there would also be little if any need for a state, which goal
was to enforce the alienation.[172] He theorised that between capitalism and the establishment of a
socialist/communist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat—a period where the working class
holds political power and forcibly socialises the means of production—would exist.[199] As he
wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies
the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is
also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship
of the proletariat."[226] While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries
with strong democratic institutional structures (such as Britain, the US and the Netherlands), he
suggested that in other countries with strong centralised state-oriented traditions, like France and
Germany, the "lever of our revolution must be force."[227]