ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall deal with a specific piece of analysis by Marx-his analysis of capitalism. In doing so we hope to clarify many of the issues raised in the previous chapter and to demonstrate how Marx wove them together in a highly intricate pattern in order to form a substantive analysis of capitalist society. Thus many of the concepts which were introduced in the previous chapter-historical materialism, the base/ superstructure distinction, the mode of production, the dialectic, the class struggle-will be encountered again. We shall find it necessary to elaborate and extend our discussion of them as well as providing a much deeper understanding of Marx’s theoretical scheme within the context of his discussion of capitalist development. Thus by the end of this chapter we should be in a much better position to evaluate Marx’s contribution to the history of sociological thought. In particular we shall be able to examine the claims (to which readers of commentaries on Marx’s work are frequently exposed) that ‘Marxism’ is something entirely separate from ‘bourgeois sociology’ with its own unique and definitive ‘problematic’. In doing so we shall also return to the distinction introduced in the previous chapter between ‘humanist’ and ‘scientific’ Marxism and seek to demonstrate how Marxism is itself now divided over the same problems of explanation which plague ‘bourgeois’ (that is, non-Marxist) schools of social theory. In fairness, however, it should be stated that the interpretation offered in this chapter leans more to the ‘humanist’ rather than the ‘scientific’ interpretation of Marxism.
