The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx Apologgist?

CAN WE CONSIDER KARL MARX A SOCIOLOGIST?

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
(Marx and Engels 2002[1888]: 219)

I am beginning with the famous quote from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to frame a question to myself about Marx’s theoretical importance and its practical implication. I had my first encounter with Marx when I was in the 11th standard of my formal education. Since then the ghost of Marx has been impelling me to follow him (in one way or the other). I try to look at him, listen to him and learn from him but his immaterial body tells me less about the material aspects. I see through him but I cannot concretize him. May be that’s why I have always understood
Marx partially. Another year with Marx has just begun with a question posed to us in class: why is Marx so popular in all social sciences (including Sociology)? Why has Marxism been such an important subject for all the social scientists to study? Can he be called a sociologist? My effort of writing this paper is an attempt of finding answers to these questions (more for myself).
Sociology is all about a scientific study of society and social relationships. It studies about social institutions, social changes and their impacts in a society, more specifically how it affects the social relationship. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology defines the term as “the analysis of the structure of social relationships as constituted by social interaction” (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 2006[1984]: 367). To know if we can call Marx’s theory a sociological theory depends on whether his theory contains sociological features (some of which are also mentioned above). It is very easy to say it does because other social scientists have said so. What is hard is to correlate it ourselves after reading his works carefully.
Marx’s theory is mainly about historical materialism, capitalism, generation of surplus value, inequality, class formation (bourgeoisie and proletariat), class-consciousness, and social change due to conflict (dialectic materialism), etc. By doing this, he is talking about a relationship between an economy and a society along with its impact on social relationship. “Sociology,” as Anthony Giddens says, “is the scientific study of groups, whole societies and the human world as such. It is a dazzling and compelling enterprise, as its subject-matter is our own behavior as social beings. The scope of sociology is extremely wide, ranging from the analysis of passing encounters between individuals on the street to the investigation of international relations and global forms of terrorism” (2009: 6). Sociology links an individual with all the other aspects in a society. It tries to find out “the connection between what society makes of us and what we make of ourselves and society” (2009: 9).
Marx believed that the structure of the society always depended on what society produced, how they produced and exchanged, and how the wealth was distributed.
So according to him the historical epochs, Primitive Communism, Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism were unlike each other because of the different modes of production. This theory of his is referred to as a historical materialism because “he focuses on the material (economic) conditions in society and how these determine social structures and social relations” (Dillon 2010: 35). Similarly, for a progressive change there should be some kind of conflict. If everything in a society is as harmonious and as prosperous as told by early functionalist theorists, there would have been no requirement of change in a society. Marx talks about functions but with a conflict and change. Marx believed there is always a tension in a society that leads to conflict and then a change. To support this theory of his he has taken a concept of “dialectical” change from Hegel. Hegel defined this dialectical process of change in consciousness or idea whereas Marx implied the same on material aspect. Unlike Hegel, he believed that it was matter, which shaped the consciousness. He retained the notion of dialectics but gave it a new significance in a more grounded social theory. In a dialectic process, a thesis (existing idea) and an antithesis (opposing idea) come into a conflict and because of this there is an emergence of synthesis (a new progressive idea). In a capitalist society, as Michele Dillon says, “…existing material conditions (eg. Capitalist class inequality – the thesis) produce opposition (class revolt – antithesis) which in turn leads to a new economic system (communism – the synthesis)” [2010: 37].Marx says the process also happened in other societies with different modes of production (i.e. slavery and feudalism). May be that is the reason he says history of all existing society is a history of class struggle. “According
to the dialectical view of development the successive stages of equilibrium (syntheses) are marked by higher levels of integration or process (social improvement)” (Dillon 2010: 37).
Young Marx saw capitalism growing rapidly but he especially got interested in it when he was working as a journalist and was able to track down the condition of the wage laborers/workers. Friedrich Engel’s article “Outlines of a critique of Political Economy” also influenced Marx and inspired him to study on this issue (Hands 2007). He concluded: Capitalism is a mode of production where there is an unequal ownership of means of production (private property like land, factory, corporations, etc). He distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production based on its unique features like private property, capital accumulation (profit), creation of class-based society (bourgeoisie and proletariat) and sees it as a result of French Revolution and Industrial revolution. In this unequal society, bourgeoisie/capitalists are the people who own the means of production and proletariat who does not own any means of production and work under these capitalists as wage laborers. Marx says as capitalism is all about capital accumulation or profit, the capitalists have to make it come from somewhere and “it comes from the extra value – the surplus value – and hence the extra capital that is created by wage workers” (Dillon 2010: 49). If these laborers are made to work for 50 hours the capitalists will only pay them for 25 hours of work, thus creating a huge surplus for themselves. Marx saw this discrimination and wanted to make these wage workers aware about that. He believed that if all the workers from the world unite and revolt against these capitalists, the system could change.
Marx also talks about the commodification of labor. He says the workers themselves are commodities. They sell their labor to capitalists and capitalists buy it in a cheap price and convert it into their surplus value. Similarly, he talks about alienation in this process of commodity production. As the society becomes complex, jobs becomes more specialized. Marx reasons that “the commodification of labor such that workers are reduced to commodities (with exchange- and use-value) produces alienation or alienated labor” (Marx 1988[1844]: 71–81; as cited in Dillon 2010: 53). He has manifested the labor in four interrelated ways: 1) Alienation of workers from the products they produce; 2) Alienation of workers in the production process 3) Alienation of workers from their species being 4) Alienation of individuals from another (Dillon 2010). In other words, workers produce for others; both their product and their labor belongs to others. The product “exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him;…it becomes a power of its own confronting him: it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (Marx 1988[1844]: 72). He presents human beings as a “homofaber” or the species that produces. And due to this quality, he says, human beings are different from the animals. But in a capitalist society human beings have become machine-like. They produce but for others and as their job is specialized in any one field they lose their creativity.
Marx can be considered a social scientist because his theory talks about the (economic and political) social structure and how it has shaped all the other things in a society. Social structure is one of the crucial sociological concepts. “It refer to the fact that the social contexts of our lives do not consist of random assortments of events or actions; they are structured, or patterned in distinct ways” (Giddens 2009: 9). The birth of class due to capitalist social structure and the social inequality between these classes focus on a ground reality of daily life of human. In doing so he tries to see things beyond what they seem. C. Wright Mills’ famous concept of sociological imagination (Mills 1970) says we need to think sociologically, which means we need to think by “cultivating our imagination” (Giddens 2009: 6). Gidden further argues “[t]he sociological imagination requires us, above all, to ‘think ourselves away’ from the familiar routines of our daily lives in order to look at them anew” (2009: 6). He gives an example of “drinking a cup of coffee” and tells us about many sociological and scientific ways it can be studied: 1) symbolic value of day-to-day activity; 2) though it contains caffeine (a kind of drug), it is not restricted, why?; 3) coffee choice, class; 4) long process of social and economic development in an production process; 5) Colonialism and coffee, etc. Marx did the same thing. He saw social inequality and analyzed in, dissected the root causes and generated the theory of capitalism.
Generally, Marx is assumed as an economist and ignored as a sociologist. Like I have mentioned above, his theory gives much importance to the economic factors, social changes led by these factors and its impact in a society and social actors. However, If we emphasize this economic characteristic of his theory, we can also call him an economic sociologist. Economic sociologists focus on the economic features of the society. It looks at economy as a whole structure that can shape and reshape the society as its requirement. “Economic sociology is a broad field that covers many substantive economic phenomena. These include: all aspect of economic activities of individuals and groups; the sociology of organizations, markets and other economic institutions; consumption and leisure; macro issues such as the development of CAPITALISM, the comparative analysis of economic systems and the economic effects of different cultures and religions” (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 2006[1984]: 122; caps in original). Economic actors are always social entities. It talks about how a change in any industry or a factor (like a poultry farm) effect daily life of a household or an individual. This is where the concept of macro economic sociology and micro economic sociology emerges. Macro economic sociology specially focuses on the structure and large-scale social processes while micro economic sociology looks at the small-level social processes. In other words, macro looks at the entire productivity, whereas Micro looks at individual market items. Robert Gibbons in his short article, “What is Economic Sociology and Should Any Economists Care?,” writes “Like economics, sociology ranges from macro to micro, but in economic sociology, ‘macro’ emphasizes analyses of firms and markets, whereas ‘micro’ focuses on individuals and small groups”1 Marx’s whole theory is based on the economic structure. He talks more about the macro level economic structure and its impact on the micro levels, so when he is talking about the capitalism, capital flow, surplus values, etc. he is talking about macro and when he talks about its effect on wage laborers, their use-value and exchange-value, alienation, etc., he is talking about the micro level effects. In a way, we can also say macro and micro has a cause and effect relationship.
To conclude, Marx is a critical sociologist (and also political economist, social scientist, philosopher and analyst). His contribution to sociology laid the foundation for lots of other scholars to build up many other new ideas. Marxian methodology and substance affected many sociologists in development of new theories: Frankfurt School, World System Theory, Dependency Theory and Neo-Marxist theories (by Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, etc.), and many others. They took the basic idea of Marx about society, production, capitalism and class, and developed them further. They also amended some radical ideas of Marx and brought some changes to adopt Marxism in accordance with the pace of time. Along with his theory (which still has very strong influence on people), this too has helped established Marx as one of the classical sociological theorists.

References
Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner. 2006[1984]. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. Fifth Edition. London: Penguin Books.
Dillon, Michele. 2010. Karl Marx. In Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century, pp. 31–76. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Giddens, Anthony. 2009. Sociology. Sixth edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hands, Gill. 2007. Teach Yourself Marx. London: The McGraw Hill Companies.
Marx, Karl. 1988[1844]. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Marx, Karl and Frederich Engels. 2002[1888]. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Books.
Mills, C. Wright. 1970. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.