different. Nowadays you can meet your future spouse at a party or a disco,
and if you are sufficiently in love, you’ll find somewhere to live.”
“I could never have put up with my parents deciding who I was to marry.”
“No, that’s because you are a child of your time. Marx emphasized
moreover that it is mainly society’s ruling class that sets the norms for what is
right or wrong. Because ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the
history of class struggles.’ In other words, history is principally a matter of who
is to own the means of production.”
“Don’t people’s thoughts and ideas help to change history?”
“Yes and no. Marx understood that conditions in society’s superstructure
could have an interactive effect on the base of society, but he denied that
society’s superstructure had any independent history of its own. What has
driven historical development from the slave society of antiquity to the
industrial society of today has primarily been determined by changes in the
base of society.”
“So you said.”
“Marx believed that in all phases of history there has been a conflict
between two dominant classes of society. In antiquity’s slave society, the
conflict was between free citizen and slave. In the feudal society of the Middle
Ages, it was between feudal lord and serf; later on, between aristocrat and
citizen. But in Marx’s own time, in what he called a bourgeois or capitalist
society, the conflict was first and foremost between the capitalists and the
workers, or the proletariat. So the conflict stood between those who own the
means of production and those who do not. And since the ‘upper classes’ do
not voluntarily relinquish their power, change can only come about through
revolution.”
“What about a communist society?”
“Marx was especially interested in the transition from a capitalist to a
communist society. He also carried out a detailed analysis of the capitalist
mode of production. But before we look at that, we must say something about
Marx’s view of man’s labor.”
“Go ahead.”
“Before he became a communist, the young Marx was preoccupied with
what happens to man when he works. This was something Hegel had also
analyzed. Hegel believed there was an interactive, or dialectic, relationship
between man and nature. When man alters nature, he himself is altered. Or,
to put it slightly differently, when man works, he interacts with nature and
transforms it. But in the process nature also interacts with man and transforms
his consciousness.”
“Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“That, briefly, was Marx’s point. How we work affects our consciousness,
but our consciousness also affects the way we work. You could say it is an
interactive relationship between hand and consciousness. Thus the way you
think is closely connected to the job you do.”
“So it must be depressing to be unemployed.”
“Yes. A person who is unemployed is, in a sense, empty. Hegel was
aware of this early on. To both Hegel and Marx, work was a positive thing,
and was closely connected with the essence of mankind.”
“So it must also be positive to a worker?”
“Yes, originally. But this is precisely where Marx aimed his criticism of