Example research essay topic: Karl Marx Marxist Theory - 1,678 words

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Policy Formulations Pluralists, such as Weber, believe that direct democracy is impractical in modern, complex societies and that representative democracy is the best way to ensure all interest are represented. Pluralism defines two key factors that ensure representation of all interest groups as competing political parties providing a choice of government policies and pressure groups influencing political decisions. Pluralists view the state as necessary to maintain democracy by promoting political liberty. For example, freedom of speech and holding regular free elections provides everyone in society with the opportunity to express their opinion on political issues.

Hence Britain, from this perspective can be categorized as a pluralist society as it conforms to all of the above criteria. Pluralism in its purest form would consist of all of the different interest of society being equally represented by political parties and pressure groups involved in decision making. Pluralists, such as Dahl, view those making or influencing decisions as having power, therefore pluralism in its purest form would mean that power is divided amongst several groups rather than being monopolized by one. There are however several criticisms of pluralism. By simply viewing power as held by those making decisions, as in Lukes first face of power, pluralism ignores the importance of the other faces of power; setting the agenda and manipulating the views of others. For example, it is argued that only government have power as they set the agenda and thus choose which issues are to be decided on so it is irrelevant who is then involved in the decision making.

Also it can be argued that voters dont really have any power as those truly in power manipulate their views, shaping their decision. It is clear that not all interests are represented equally. This may be due to unequal resources. For example, a campaign for an upper class pressure group will have greater funding than one for homeless people and thus have more representation. In addition, some interest groups are not represented at all as they are hidden from society such as domestic violence, which has only recently become an issue. Extremist views are also often ignored, as they are considered subversive, such as the militant pressure group UK Life.

Marxist theory criticises the pluralist view that power is distributed between several groups as they agree with elitism that power lies in the hands of a minority. However, Marxists see the structure of society as determined by its relations of production and thus it is the owners of the means of production that create the ruling class. The ruling class form the infrastructure of society and it is they who control and exploit the superstructure or working classes. The state is viewed by classical Marxists as being used by the ruling classes to legitimize their position. Therefore Marx and Engels reject the pluralist view that democracy gives power to every citizen, as it isnt government but businesses that are truly in power. It is argued however that in modern societies a ruling class no longer exist as ownership and control are disconnected and therefore, neo-Marxist, Coates has reapplied the Marxist theory to modern society.

Coates argues that whilst power is held by many different sections of society he doesnt believe it is widespread. Instead he argues that different groups for example trade unions have become part of the infrastructure yet only to be utilised by the ruling class to maintain power. For example, which groups are included in the infrastructure changes depending on those needed at the time. A central idea of economic liberalism has always been that a market society organized on the basis of individual self-interest is the natural state of humankind, and that such a society is bound to prosper - through an almost providential invisible hand - provided that no external barriers stand in its way. In this view all of human history is nothing more than the gradual freeing up of market relations - the release of the universal and rational forms of society only waiting to be let loose. State interference in the market, when this did not directly serve the interests of capital itself, has always been regarded by economic liberals as the chief obstacle to the smooth working of the system.

But other elements in the natural and social environment of capital, such as the existence of traditional, non-commodity economies; the growth of monopoly (or oligopoly) as a barrier to free competition; the persistence of national boundaries, customs and markets; limits to the commodification of labor power, whether as a result of cultural norms or trade union organization; and the existence of a planetary realm, in external nature, that stands outside the regime of the market - have also been viewed as temporary barriers to be dissolved or surmounted by an expanding capitalist market society. No one understood this inexorable tendency toward the universalization of capitalism that lay at the base of classical liberalism better than Marx. The brief panegyric to the bourgeoisie in the first part of The Communist Manifesto placed so much emphasis on this inner tendency toward the universalization of capitalism through which national boundaries were extinguished, nature subjected, and "all that is solid melts into air" that this is often seen as embodying Marx's own view of human progress - a "Promethean" universalism to which the revolutionary proletariat would also be compelled to adhere. Nevertheless, Marx was always acutely aware of the contradictions associated with the universalizing tendency of capitalism, and the conception of progress and civilization that this represented, and stressed the absolute limits to, as well as internal contradictions of, this kind of development. The early classical-liberal political economists, such as Smith, Malthus and Ricardo, saw only "the positive essence of capital" in this limitless drive for commodification. Distinguishing his position from these views, Marx argued that this process of the universalization of capitalism had, to a certain extent, to run its course - though at a certain point its contradictions (both internal and external) would result in its revolutionary overthrow.

Hence, Marx rejected the views of economic romantics like Sismondi who operated under the illusion that the false universalism of capitalist market society could be countered simply through the erection, as Marx was to put it, of" barriers to production, from the outside, through custom, law etc. , which of course, as merely external and artificial barriers, would necessarily be abolished by capital. " (3) The contradictions of capitalism were all too real and all artificial restrictions introduced to save the system from itself would simply be swept aside by the development of the system. Capitalism thus tended toward an extreme universalism that undercut the conditions of its own existence. All middle roads, all proposals for the rational regulation of the system were bound to fail in the end. In this respect, Marx's views were thus very close to those of the economic liberals - who failed however to perceive the transitory nature of capitalism that this entailed. Aside from some academics and members of the business community, the term neoliberalism is largely unknown and unused by the public at large, especially in the United States.

There, to the contrary, neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic, and parasitic government, which can never do good even when well intentioned, which it rarely is. A generation of corporate-financed public relations efforts has given these terms and ideas a near-sacred aura. As a result, these phrases and the claims they imply rarely require empirical defense, and are invoked to rationalize anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling public education and social welfare programs. Indeed, any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect because it would impede the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair, and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. Neoliberalism, therefore, is contrary to the democracy as itself and in the very core of social inequalities and suppression of middle class by upper class pressure group.

In the present situation we have to acknowledge the extreme nature of capitalism and of the choices that it forces upon us if we are to preserve the bases of human sociability and ecological sustainability. What we are facing today is not so much a "great rupture" in the history of capitalism, but capitalism at its most basic. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has written, "The contradictions of capitalism are manifesting themselves in new and aggravated ways precisely because the old ways of pulling out of crisis are, as Marx said they would be, less and less available, in other words, precisely because capitalism is so universal. " (1) The new, higher functional unity promised in neoliberal conceptions of globalization has proven to be a mirage and what we are now confronted with is a capitalism stripped of all pretensions of humanity, with no way to go but out. Indeed, there is no genuine alternative to capitalism, but one - the society of associated producers. Bibliography: 1. Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism?" in Robert W.

McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, ed. , Capitalism and the Information Age. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998, p. 30. 2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1977, p. 496. 3. Karl Marx, Grundriss e, New York: Vintage, 1973, pp. 409 - 10. 4. Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981, pp. 17 - 23, 46, 53. 5.

Kari Polanyi-Levitt and Marguerite Mendel, The Origins of Market Fetishism, Monthly Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (June 1989), p. 23. 6. Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. , 1937), pp. 236 - 37.

Research essay sample on Karl Marx Marxist Theory