Karl Marx(Marxism)

Harriet Hearn

• Marxism and Capitalism are basically the same, whereas capitalism is an economic system in which most of production and distribution (like land, factories, communications, and transportation systems) are privately owned and are operated in a relatively competitive environment.

• Marxism however is an interpretation of political practices developed, by Karl Marx and his co-worker Friedrich Engels, and all of their followers.

• ‘”He believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy”

The proletariat and the bourgeois

PROLETARIAT: "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour.“

This means the working class those who must sell their labour to the bourgeoisie in order to produce the goods needed by society.

BOURGEOIS: “In Marxist theory, a member of the property-owning class; a capitalist.”

This means the middle class whose attitudes and behaviour are marked by conformity to the standards and conventions of the middle class. And being of the property-owning class and exploitive of the working class.

• Marxism states that there are two classes the PROLETARIAT and the BOURGEOIS:

Relating media to Marxism • The mass media are, in classical Marxist terms, a 'means of production' which in capitalist society are in the

ownership of the ruling class. According to the classical Marxist position, the mass media simply publicize the ideas and world views of the ruling class, and deny or defuse alternative ideas.

• We can interpret the Marxism view into many media texts, for example instead of thinking of the proletariat and bourgeois we can think of the term producers and consumers. (Producers being the bourgeois and the consumers being the proletariat.)

• The X-Factor would be a good example of this with us, the viewing public being the ‘consumers’ and the producers of the show being the ‘producers’. A scam showed that the X-Factor were told by record labels to pick certain contestants to go through to the finals. This typically shows that the producers, (bourgeois) have control over the consumers, (proletariat). And influence the consumers choices and decisions unknowingly. So in other words media tell you what to believe.