Syllabus
Readings
Marx and Engels:   Excerpt from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Key points, pages 194-196

Note the emphasis on historical materialism: production and exchange are the bases of social structure, the distribution of wealth is related to production and exchange of goods. The final cause (a term Aristotle initiated) of social change is not:
 

                but


The major example of such economic change is that from the medieval world (feudalism: recall the reference to William Penn as a "feudal land baron") to the bourgeois  world of 19th century capitalism, which has speedily ripped apart the old ties of the medieval world and replace them with:
 

In the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere Marx describes this process as one of great energy and vitality but also great loss of freedom as workers became "proletarianized" and impotent.
 
Feudalism
Capitalism
   
Handicraft, petty industry Manufacture
Guilds Factories
Nobility  Capitalists
Laborers (peasants, etc.)own means of production Means of production concentrated and enlarged by capital and the bourgeoisie
Individualized means of production Social means of production (social acts
Product becomes dommodity Commodity
Spntaneous division of labor Planned division of labor
Apprentices work for education, workers live of their labor Workers work permanently for pay
Owner of instruments of labor owns product Owner owns the product of labor of others: this is a "contradiction" between group production and capitalistic appropriation; workers possess nothing of their own.

 

We will return to this topic. For the moment the key item to keep in mind is the distinction between the two great economic eras, and the brutal efficience with which capitalism has triumphed over feudalism