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Week 4: Karl Marx & The Critical School, Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie,…

- - - - Marx used to be a Hegelian = society progress because of wars, revolutions and struggles of the oppressed against their oppressors.
        
        But Hegel focused on religious struggle & proposed state and authority over religious matters
        
        After Feuerbach's perspective on Class Conflict, Marx became an Anti-Hegel. He radicalized class conflict, class struggle, advocating an overthrow of factory owners and government hierarchies
        
        converted to communism in 1843 (age 25)
        
        As a journalist, Marx was outspoken about exposing corrupt officials and the living conditions of the poor. This led to his exile from Germany
        
        Strong critic of capitalism
        
        enlightenment thinker: science and freedom
      - Friedrich Engels: Marx's coauthor of The Communist Manifesto (1848)
        
        Social Conflict Theory: class struggle and conflicts between exploitees and exploiters is based on the individual's differential access to the means of production
        
        conflict and struggle = main engines of social progress
        
        Heavily influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory.
- - - - Division of Labour (specialisation) is the source of human alienation.
      - Socially Necessary Labour Time (SNLT) -- labour power being the commodity that determines the price of what is produced
  - - - Capitalism is imperfect and ought to be changed.
        
        Inequality and Social conflict are undesirable.
        
        Working class (proletariat) consciousness must be formed to unite and push for social change.
      - How does that relate to Media?
        
        mass media inhibits working class consciousness
        
        media creates a false consciousness among the proletariat
        
        media reinforce dominant values of society--the bougie
- - - - Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm brought psychoanalytic practice and Fruedian theory into the Institute of Social Research Frankfurt
  - - - The Frankfurt School
        
        concentrated on Marx, Freud and avant-garde art and literature (neo-marxists)
        
        Critiqued:
        1) Positivism - belief that real facts can be obtained from observation and experiments. a false consciousness
        2) Marxism - predicting proletariat revolutions that never happened
        3) Irrational society - lulls individuals into a false acceptance of their conditions
        4) capitalism - contradictions and human exploitation
  - - - The autoritarian personality project, Studies on Authority and Fmaily, Escape from Freedom were all books that researched on authoritarianism--a largge scale empirical study of prejudice in the US