Karl Marx's Classical Sociological Theory and Capitalism

The Historical Context of Marxist Theory

Classical sociological and economic theories like those of Karl Marx emerged in Western Europe during the Enlightenment — a period marked by the rise of the scientific method, a growing sense of individual autonomy, the emergence of private property, rapid urban growth, and a total shattering of social relations that had been in place for centuries, if not millennia. Christianity and other traditional religions were being undermined by new developments in science and technology, while urban industrial capitalism was breaking up the old feudal-agrarian order across Europe and the Americas. All the founders of modern sociology had to grapple with this radically new society, and they attempted to describe its historical origins, the social and economic problems of industrial capitalism, and how governments and societies should respond to them.

Karl Marx received his doctorate in Germany during the dawn of industrialization and the factory system. He predicted that socialist revolutions would occur first in the advanced Western nations — Britain, France, and the United States — and believed that the revolutions of 1848 were harbingers of this transformation. When they failed, he was exiled from Germany and spent the rest of his life in England.

Class Structure and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism

In classical Marxist theory, changes in technology, transportation, and communications led to the rise of the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, which first began to take political power in Europe and the northern United States during the 17th and 18th centuries. As certain regions became urbanized and industrialized, a new working class — the proletariat — began to emerge among displaced and landless peasants who flocked to the cities in search of work. In the 19th century, the hours of work in the new factories were extremely long, and the wages earned by laborers left families on the brink of destitution, while living conditions in cities like Manchester were, by many contemporary accounts, nearly uninhabitable.

For Marx and Friedrich Engels, the three main classes of society were workers, capitalists, and landowners, while the older classes of peasants and artisans were gradually disappearing and being absorbed into the proletariat. Class struggle was the prime mover of history, and — like other socioeconomic systems before it — capitalism had unintentionally produced the class that would ultimately destroy it through violent revolution.

Bourgeois Revolutions and the Materialist View of History

Marx and Engels regarded the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 as liberal, or bourgeois, revolutions that opened the door to a capitalist phase of economic development. At the time these revolutions occurred, the new middle class was in the vanguard and represented a progressive force whose task was to sweep away the old feudal order. Further liberal revolutions broke out in Europe in 1830 and again in 1848, although most were defeated by the forces of conservatism; nonetheless, capitalist industrialization continued to expand, as did the urban working class.

Unlike Hegel, Marx was a historical materialist who argued that class conflict — not ideology — was the driving force of history. He confined religion and ideology to the superstructure of society, regarding them as expressions and reflections of the ruling class in any given historical epoch. Marx and Engels were perhaps premature in 1848 when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto that communism was a specter haunting Europe, although socialist and working-class parties were already appearing across the Western nations. The second phase of the 1848 revolution in France led briefly to the creation of a Red Republic, which was harshly repressed by the military. Marx and Engels recognized this event as a harbinger of future socialist revolutions — though, in the end, none of those revolutions occurred in the Western capitalist core as they had expected.

When workers' revolutions did take power, Marx and Engels believed the working class would control the state as well as industry, trade, banking, and distribution. Even if repressive measures were temporarily needed to eliminate remaining class enemies, the final form of government would be a democratic republic. In the distant future, they expected the state apparatus to fade away entirely and a truly classless society — which they called communism — to emerge. They also assumed that by that point, technology would have advanced to the degree that many economic activities would be automated, freeing human beings from much of the drudgery of labor.