CONTINUING VALIDITIES OF MARXIST THEORY
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
Those of you who wish to do work in a wide variety of scholarly endeavor would do well to consider some of marxian theory as a way to help students and governments understand the many pressing problems which beset the good earth.
Below I have attached my [partial] list of the continuing validities of marxian theory...I commend them to graduate students everywhere.
...with two major major modifications:
1. There are many, many virtues to private capital and to market systems...these should be presented before and at the same time as is a marxist critique of political economy.
a. Capitalism is the most productive economic system in history.
b. ...it is the most innovative of any prior economic system...
c. ...it is the most flexible in moving labor, capital and goods around the marketplace.
d. ...it drives the best knowledge process in all of human history.
e. ...it tends to destroy ancient structures of domination; racism gender privilege, ethnic/national hierarchies and claims of inherent elitism everywhere.
These positivities exist in dialectic and transforming relationship with the negativities listed below...replacing capitalism is not an easy task as centralist/bureaucratic socialists have learned the hard way.
2. Marxist theory...as do all theories in social science have special validity problems. Austin began to mention some of these problems when he said, rightly, that one could no longer use falsification and parsimony as validity tools.
The new sciences of non-linearity teach us that, when key variables bifurcate, entirely new patterns of causality emerge; that predict- ability [and falsification] fades and fails as bifurcations continue; that differing patterns of feedback change which key variables are at work at any given phase in a bifurcation map.
All this constitutes a new, postmodern philosophy of science which had been pretty well adopted in physics, chemistry, physiology and biology...and has made great progress in psychology...but which has yet to be given adequate attention by radicals and conservatives alike in American Sociology.
Then too, other variables gain and lose causal efficacy in a given social regime; sometime racism drives a system; sometimes class antagonisms; sometimes gender wars flare and fade. And always these interact with each other in changing patterns...along with religious imperative and the usual suspects in physiology and psychology.
So...with these two very important reservations, learn and use marxian theory for whatever intellectual leverage it gives for those of us concerned with crime, war, poverty, immiseration, suicide, divorce, domestic violence, alienated sexualities and environmental degradations.
CONTINUING VALIDITIES of Marxian Social Theory:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the totalistic forms of Socialist ownership instituted in it and in many of its neighbors, there has been much in the way of celebration of the victory of capitalism over communism; the victory of modernization theory over Marxian theory. These enthusiasms are greatly misplaced. As long as capitalism exists, Marxian theory continues to be helpful to both theory and practice of a humanist, transforming practice of sociology and social science itself.
Below are some of the major theses which embody a marxist critique of capitalism today.
1. Capitalism tends to disemploy people and thus create a
"surplus" population. Of the five great economic systems in
history, capitalism is the only mode of production to do so.
Thus people are separated from the means of production of
themselves as species (human) being and the creation of human
culture.
2. Capitalism tends to degrade the work process. Work is divided
and subdivided in order to increase control over the work
process, to reduce the costs of labor power, and to automate
as many tasks as possible.
3. Capitalism requires layer after layer of unproductive
employees in order to reproduce itself: Managers to deal
with reluctant and uninspired workers, public relations to
deal with a surly public, advertizing firms to generate false
needs, lawyers to help evade the law, salespersons to push
commodities and millions of security guards to watch workers,
customers, and competitors.
4. Capitalism tends to destroy moral relations between workers by
forcing them to compete with each other, with other companies,
and with workers in other countries.
5. Morality is threatened when capitalism trains its employees to
prey on the consumer by offering commissions, prizes,
bonuses, vacations, medals, and promotions for sales.
6. Capitalism tends to destroy morality by replacing the self
system as the central mediator of behavior with external
controls: rules, orders, commands, managers, behavioral
modification, drugs, therapy, and police. The self system
becomes archaic as the locus of social action.
7. Capitalism destroys morality in its bureaucracies by requiring
a lower level worker enact the orders of a middle echelon
worker to embody the policy set by the top level officer. The
dirty work of bureaucracy is always two or three levels
removed from its victims.
8. Capitalism subverts morality when it uses the sacred days to
create possessive individualism. Christmas and other holy
days become vehicles for corporate ads.
9. Capitalism tends to destroy all social relations. Its
interest is in production, not workers; in consumption, not
consumers. It will discard workers, customers, and communities
alike if profits are higher elsewhere.
10. Capitalism tends to destroy morality by pushing consumerism as
the central test of the good life rather than praxis,
cooperation, conservation, or future generations.
11. Capitalism is an irrational system of production in that its
goals are growth, profit and control of its environment
(workers, consumers, suppliers, competitors and governments)
rather than the needs of individuals, communities or the environment.
12. Capitalism is irrational in that it tends to over-concentrate
in high profit lines of production and neglect low profit but
essential goods and services of the community and nation.
13. Capitalism is irrational in that its concern with growth
wastes raw materials, uses energy resources needlessly, and
creates mountains and canyons of trash.
14. In the effort to avoid costs, capitalism pollutes the air, the
water, and the soil. Demand for profits requires that the
manager avoid the responsibility and costs of cleaning up
after production.
15. Capitalism despoils the land; scarring it with strip mines,
patching it with asphalt, saturating it with chemicals, and
covering it with tract housing.
16. Capitalism gets its highest profits from the poorest nations
in the world.
17. Capitalism exports food from the hungriest nations in the
world and imports it to the fattest.
18. Capitalism subverts the political process in the third world
countries in order to maintain the flow of profits, raw
materials, and the freedom to control markets in those
countries.
19. Capitalism encourages the migration of skilled professional
trained at the expense of workers in the third world but
erects an iron fence to prevent the migration of those who
would follow the food, the wealth, and the profits exported
from the Third World to the twenty rich capitalist countries.
20. The world capitalist system requires a false peace as well as
huge military apparatus to control resistance and rebellion in
the Third World.
21. Capitalism is inimical to democracy at home and abroad; buying
it at home and repressing it abroad. Capitalism replaces the
meaning of democracy from full participation at work and in
other important life activities with the narrow act of voting
for preselected candidates once every two or four years.
22. Capitalism creates poverty and works to transfer the costs of
its poor to other economic systems: that of state welfare,
that of the family, that of tribal societies, that of church
and charity, or all too often, crime.
23. Capitalism fosters five kinds of crime: street crime as
people are separated from the means of production and are
socialized to false needs; corporate crime as profits decline or
competition increases, organized crime as solidarity supplies
become mere commodities produced for individual escape rather
than sacred supplies used to celebrate cherished social relations.
White collar crime increases as the middle classes
come to realize the need for a portfolio for their senior
years, as they come to realize the futility of serving the
corporation, and as they come to face life crises and false
needs beyond even their extensive resources. Political crime
increases as capitalism tries to control workers and peasants
in the Third World as well as dissent and the impetus for
social justice at home.
24. Capitalism and the profit motive leads to dangerous food
additives; unsafe toys, automobiles, drugs, and unsafe working
conditions in factory, mine, and sports.
25. Capitalism dumps unsafe products in the Third World when they
cannot be sold in advanced capitalist countries.
26. Capitalism crushes small business and drives the small farmer
off the land. Wealth and the means of production come to be
concentrated in fewer and fewer owners even as personal,
consumer goods accumulate among the upper working class.
27. The capitalist state tends to grow and grow: to help small
capitalists and farmers, to control the surplus population, to
guard the interests of the multinational corporation over-
seas, to police the excesses of amoral domestic corporations,
and to provide a cheap-sided and mean-spirited welfare to the
disemployed and the aged.
28. Capitalism will use or destroy any established social
structure to secure its interests in profits, growth, and
control: fascism, racism, sexism, patriotism or bigotry--
anything which will maintain legitimacy or help accumulate
profits, weaken its foes or bolster its allies.
29. Capitalism has converted the university into the unpaid
servant of the corporation while subverting its capacity to
provide the authentic self knowledge for critique, change and
renewal.
30. Capitalism buys or rents the means to produce meaning from the
mass media in order to serve the information and political
needs of private ownership for ideological hegemony, the
realization of profit, the pre-selection of political
candidates and for opposition to workers struggles at home or
abroad.
31. Capitalism distorts the health and medical profession by:
emphasizing therapeutic rather than preventive health care, by
excluding the poor from adequate health care, by eliminating
holistic therapies, by pushing drugs and high tech means of
treatment, by limiting the role of the nurse to that of a
menial, and by using mass production tactics in handling the
poor, the aged and minorities who cannot yield high profits
through more labor intensive therapies.
32. Capitalism creates masses of chronically ill and chronically
anxious workers and women then pushes drugs, sports and
religion as escape rather than as enlivening.
33. Capitalism must externalize its costs: to women, workers and
to consumers if possible; if not, to the Third World, to the
environment and now to future generations with ever increasing
federal, corporate, and family deficits.
34. Capitalism cannot provide profits to its owner unless it has
parallel economic systems to which to obtain resources and to
which to transfer its costs. The family, women, minorities, the
state, and weaker economies in the Third World absorb much of
the costs of capitalism...and provides much of the comfort of
those of us who praise capitalism too much.
35. The power of the state to police is turned from the necessary
repression of activity harmful to the human process and the
environment to the unnecessary repression of workers,
minorities and emancipatory activity.
36. Capitalism begins with an exploitation of labor of workers.
It ends with an exploitation of the labor of everybody; workers,
managers, professionals, politicians and professors alike.