struggles,” the Manifestolinked the victory of the
proletariat (the working class) to the development of
capitalism itself, which dissolved traditional bonds,
like family and community, and replaced them with
the naked ties of self-interest.
Initially, Marx believed, capitalism was a revo-
lutionary system itself, destroying all the older, more
traditional forms of social life and replacing them
with what he called “the cash nexus”—one’s position
depended only on wealth, property, and class. But
eventually, capitalism suppresses all humanity,
drowning it in “the icy waters of egotistical calcula-
tion.” We are not born greedy or materialistic; we
become so under capitalism.
His central work was Capital, a three-volume
work that laid out a theory of how capitalism
worked as a system. His central insight was that the
exchange of money and services between capital
(those who own the means of production) and labor (those who sell their “labor
power” to capitalists for wages) is unequal. Workers must work longer than
necessary to pay for the costs of their upkeep, producing what Marx called “sur-
plus value.” And because of competition, capitalists must try to increase the rate
of surplus value. They do this by replacing human labor with machines, lower-
ing wages (and cutting any benefits) until workers can’t afford even to consume
the very products they are producing, and by centralizing their production until
the system reaches a crisis. Thus capitalists are not only fighting against labor,
but they are also competing against each other. Eventually, Marx believed, it
would all come tumbling down.
This work inspired socialists all over the world who saw the growing gap
between rich and poor as both a cause for despair about the conditions of the
poor, and an occasion for political organizing. Marx believed that the “laws of
motion” of capitalism would bring about its own destruction as the rich got so
rich and the poor got so poor that they would revolt against the obvious inequity
of the system. Then workers would rise up and overthrow the unequal capital-
ist system and institute communism—the collective ownership of all property.
Marx believed this would take place first in the industrial countries like
Britain and Germany, but the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century that used
Marx as inspiration were in largely peasant societies, like Russia and China, for exam-
ple. Nowhere in the world has Marx’s political vision been implemented. His eco-
nomic theory that the development of capitalism tends to concentrate wealth and
power, however, has never been more true than today, when the gap between rich and
poor is greater than ever in U.S. history. Currently, the richest 1 percent of people in
the world receive as much income as the bottom 5 percent. Globally, the
United States has the most unequal distribution of income of all high-
income nations (UC Atlas of Global Inequality, 2007).Emile Durkeim.Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was a master of sociolog-
ical inquiry. He searched for distinctly social origins of even the most
individual and personal of issues. His greatest work, Suicide(1897), is a
classic example of his sociological imagination. On the surface, suicide
appears to be the ultimate individual act. Yet Durkheim argued that
suicide is profoundly social, an illustration of how connected an individual16 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?JKarl Marx argued that as
capitalism progressed, the rich
would get richer and the poor
would get poorer—until it
exploded in revolution.
Durkheim’s father, grandfather, and even his
great-grandfather were all Orthodox rabbis.
Durkheim, a more secular Jew, “discovered”
that society itself creates the same bonds
that integrate a person into society.Didyouknow
?
Kirk Anderson, http://www.kirktoons.com. Used by permission.