Marxism- Structural Interactionism Week 7

Content Standards
The learners demonstrate an understanding of the key concepts and approaches in the Social Sciences.
Performance Standards
The learners can:
● interpret personal and social experiences using relevant approaches in the Social Sciences
● evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the approach

Most Essential Learning Competencies

● Analyze social inequalities in terms of class conflict
● Appraise the meanings that people attach to everyday forms of interaction to explain social

Lesson Presentation
Dominant Approaches and Ideas
Marxism
Terminologies
● Bourgeoise – the social order that is dominated by the so-called middle class.
● Proletariat – the class of wage-earners in an economic society whose only possession of significant
material value is their labor-power
● Capitalist – a person who has a lot of money, property, etc., and who uses those things to produce
more money.
● Laborer – a person who does hard physical work for money
Understanding Marxism
Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class
conflict theory. Marxism was first publicly formulated in the 1848 pamphlet, The
Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory
of class struggle and revolution. Marxian economics focuses on the criticism of
capitalism brought forth by Karl Marx in his 1867 book, Das Kapital. Marx’s class
theory portrays capitalism as one step in the historical progression of economic
systems that follow one another in a natural sequence driven by vast impersonal
forces of history that play out through the behavior and conflict between social
classes. According to Marx, every society is divided into several social classes,
whose members have more in common with one another than with members of
other social classes. In a capitalist system, Marx believed that the society was made
up of two classes, the bourgeoisie, or business owners who control the means
of production, and the proletariat, or workers whose labor transforms raw
commodities into valuable economic goods.
The bourgeoisie’s control of the means of production gives them power over the proletariat, which allows
them to limit the worker’s ability to produce and obtain what they need to survive.
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Marx believed that capitalism is based on commodities, which are things bought and sold. In Marx’s view, an
employee’s labor is a form of commodity. However, since ordinary laborers do not own the means of
production, such as factories, buildings, and materials, they have little power in the capitalist economic system.
Workers are also readily replaceable in periods of high unemployment, further devaluing their perceived
worth. To maximize profits, business owners have an incentive to get the most work out of their laborers while
paying them the lowest wages possible. They also own the product that is the result of the worker’s labor, and
ultimately profit from its surplus value, which is the difference between what it costs to produce the item and
the price for which it is eventually sold.
Marx felt that capitalism creates an unfair imbalance between capitalists and the laborers whose work they
exploit for their gain. In turn, this exploitation leads the workers to view their employment as nothing more
than a means of survival. Since the worker has a little personal stake in the process of production, Marx
believed he would become alienated from it and resentful toward the business owner and his humanity.

Basic Goals of Marxism

While Marxism is a complex ideology, we can boil its goal down to two basic ideas:
1. Marxism aims to expose the contradictions of capitalism.
Marx and Engels believed that capitalist ideologies were misleading and meant to keep workers
submissive. For example, the free market was described as a democratic institution, one of the people,
but was built to benefit individuals above the collective. The workers spend their time and labor to
produce goods, but the free market determines the value of their work. As a result, the workers are
alienated from society because their labor is appropriated by the market, a process that also alienates
the other social classes from the humanity of the workers.
2. Marxism is meant to introduce a pathway for the creation of a communist society. A communist
society is one in which the means of production are taken away from individuals and controlled by the
collective (represented by the state). Communism is an alternative to the free market system,
something with which Marx and Engels could replace capitalism. The two weren’t meant to coexist.
Marxist Stage Theory

Class is the most important unit of human society to Marxism, and so all human history can be explained
through the struggle between social classes. Marx specifically identified five eras in human history.

Stage 1 – Primitive Communism

Men performed the same economic function – hunter hunter-gathering and working together. There was no
private property and there were no classes. Eventually, the most successful hunter-gatherers gained power and
control over the others.

Stage 2 – Ancient Epoch

Slavery was introduced and economies were split between the exploited slave who worked and the owners
who didn’t

Stage 3 – Feudalism

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The land was owned by the aristocracy who exploited the peasantry who worked it. There was a surplus of
food which the aristocracy sold to others – creating a class of merchants and capitalists who wanted to share
political power.

Stage 4 – Capitalism
The wealthy merchants and factory owners (bourgeoisie) obtain political power and exploited the workers
(proletariat). As the proletariat became politically aware, they would rise to overthrow the bourgeois
government.

Stage 5 – Socialism
There would be a dictatorship of the proletariat as workers’ organizations re-distributed food, goods, and
services according to need, and profits were shared by all. The middle classes would come to understand that
equality was superior to private ownership.

Dominant Approaches and Ideas

Symbolic Interactionism Interactionists
● Symbolic Interactionism – a theory that human interaction and communication are facilitated by words,
gestures, and other symbols that have acquired conventionalized meanings.
● Endowed – provided or equipped
● Looking-glass self – the process wherein individuals base their sense of self on how they believe others
view them.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic Symbolism is a major framework of sociological theory.

This perspective relies on the symbolic meaning that people
develop and build upon in the process of social interaction.
Although symbolic interactionism traces its origin to Max
Weber’s assertion that individuals act according to their
interpretation of the meaning of their world, the American
philosopher George Herbert Mead introduced this perspective
to American Sociology in the 1920s.

The Subjective Meanings

Symbolic interactionism theory analyzes society by addressing
the subjective meanings that people impose on objects, events, and behaviors. Subjective meanings are given
primacy because it is believed and not just what is objectively true. Thus, society is thought to be socially
constructed through human interpretation. People interpret one another’s behavior, and it is these
interpretations that form the social bond. These interpretations are called the “definition of the situation.”

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For example, why would young people smoke cigarettes even when all objective medical evidence points to
the dangers of doing so? The answer is in the definition of the situation that people create. Studies find that
teenagers are well informed about the risks of tobacco, but they also think that smoking is cool, that they will
be safe from harm, and that smoking projects a positive image to their peers. So, the symbolic meaning of
smoking overrides the facts regarding smoking and its risk.

Principles of Symbolic Interactionism

1. Human beings unlike lower animals, are endowed with a capacity for thought.
2. The capacity for thought is shaped by social interaction.
3. In social interaction, people learn the meanings and the symbols that allow them to exercise their distinctive
human thought.
4. Meanings and symbols allow people to carry on distinctively human action and interaction.
5. People can alter meanings and symbols that they use in action and interaction based on one of the
situations.

Cooley’s ‘Looking Glass Self

Along with his friend Mead, Charles H. Cooley helped originate the
symbolic interaction theory. Cooley is best known for the concept of
the ‘looking glass self,’ which Cooley illustrated with the following
statement: I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think
I am; I am what you think I am.
This means that we as individuals define how we perceive ourselves
by how we think others perceive us. To put this component of the
theory in perspective, consider this: If your teachers and fellow
students give you the message that you are “smart,” you will come
to think of yourself as an intelligent person. If others tell you that
you are attractive, you will likely think of yourself as attractive.
Conversely, if people repeatedly laugh at you and tease you about
being clumsy, you will probably come to decide that you are clumsy.
In Cooley’s terms, you use other people as a mirror into which you
look to see what you are like (Farley, 1990).

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Conclusion

● Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx, which focuses on the
struggle between capitalists and the working class.

● Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were inherently exploitative
and would inevitably create class conflict.

● He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working class would
overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy.
● Symbolic interactionism theory analyzes society by addressing the subjective meanings that people
impose on objects, events, and behaviors.
● People interpret one another’s behavior, and it is these interpretations that form the social bond. These
interpretations are called the “definition of the situation.”
● In the “Looking Glass Theory”, we develop a self-image based on the messages we get from others, and
as we understand them.

References and Supplementary Material

1. [Link] Understanding Marxism

2. [Link] Basic Goal of Marxism and
Marxist Stage Theory
3. [Link] Symbolic Interactionism
4. [Link] Looking
Glass Theory

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