Alienation

This is the emotional non-investment of workers in their repetitive industrial tasks—like Time Warner Cable customer service operators. They seem to not give a fuck about whatever it is they actually do, thus, they are alienated.

Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie are the profiteering social middle class, whom Karl Marx identified as certainly making more money than the working class, but never quite enough to be less miserable.

Capitalism

Capitalism is a system of social organization based on class relationships subordinate to production, profit, and trade.

Das Kapital

As Marx’s major work, Das Kapital is a comprehensive analysis and critique of the economics of capitalism. It’s called Capital in English but its German title has more of a doom-and-gloom ring to it that’s indicative of its contents.

Exploitation

Marx’s key realization about capitalism was that a company hiring you to do a job that made them more money than it made you was exploitation. Like me, writing this.

Fred

Marx’s revolutionary activity against capitalism condemned him to a life of exile and poverty. Fortunately, his work was financially supported by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who had plenty of money because he was the son of a rich capitalist.

God

The belief in the existence of God is considered to be immoral and anti-human and moreover, religion is yet another tool of the ruling class to control the masses and maintain the status quo.

Hegelianism

Hegel’s complex, theoretical work not only informed Marx’s structural comprehension of economics, but is a good alternative to Horlicks if you struggle to sleep.

Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution (1760-1840) was a period of rapid technological change where the use of innovative machines upended labor-hire models, destroyed traditional industries, and eroded job security centuries before the Internet was even invented.

Jargon

Marxism is an outsider ideology on today’s capitalist planet, with adherents who identify themselves with rebel terminology. If you hear someone advocating the necessity of “controlling the means of production,” “collectivization of resources” and “redistribution of wealth,” that person is a Marxist and proposing the economic reorganization demanded by the reality of climate change.

Knowledge

Marx was a material boy living in a material world in that he derived his ideas about society by observing the material conditions that people actually lived in.

Labor/Leisure

Overlooked in Das Kapital‘s pages devoted to explaining theories of surplus value and capital flow is Marx’s conclusion that if industry is making so much stuff, perhaps we should just leave the machines to do as much of the work as possible and all enjoy a good lie in.

Marx, Karl

Marxism is the interpretation of Karl Marx’s ideas in theory and practice, about which Marx once himself said, “One things is certain: I am no Marxist.”

Nuance

Nuance exists in the details amassed by more than a century and a half of cross-cultural economic and political analysis of Marxist philosophy, but you’re not going to get much of it in an A-Z guide.

Objectification

Objectification is the manifestation of human activity into a material form. Ideally, the product of a worker’s labor expresses his/her personality, but alienation (see above) makes it so that the product of a worker’s labor becomes foreign to him/her.

Property

The only means by which full social equality can be achieved is if full economic equality could also be realized. To do this, Marx proposed abolishing the notion of private property, and collectivizing all wealth for redistribution by a state. This is why the Marxist conviction of many young persons lasts until precisely the point they inherit a house from a dead relative.

Quality/Quantity

Hegel presented the relation between the two as the critical limit between the finite and the infinite.

Revolution

Marxism concludes that social change will occur because capitalism allows the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat, leading to a proletariat revolution.

Struggle

It is real.

Theorists

Marxists, like a box of chocolate, come in a variety of flavors. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized notions of the how capitalism restructured social systems around its core values. The Frankfurt School philosophers talked about how capitalism affected psychology, and even libido. Herbert Marcuse took to the stage at Woodstock to congratulate the kids for rejecting consumer society, while Theodor Adorno got really weird about jazz. Marxism may be based in economics, but with Marxists analyzing everything from cinema studies to feminism, arguably, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Unions

An organizations of laborers that deals collectively with employers and is typically demonized as Marxist by said employers.

Value

The Theory of Surplus Value explains the difference between the cost to produce and the willingness to pay. In a perfect economic model, there is no surplus value because people pay what it costs to produce things and the market is efficient. But capitalism relies on the willingness to pay being significantly higher than the cost to produce, and the capitalist retaining this “surplus value” as profit.

Working Class

Known by Marx as “the proletariat,” these are the workers whose humiliating, dehumanizing, underpaid labor creates the profit that fails to make the bourgeoisie less miserable.

XX

Women are particularly oppressed through capitalism, according to Marxist feminism, because much of women’s labor (housework, childrearing, etc.) is unpaid. The subordination of women is not due to biological shortcomings but rather, social relations—specifically men’s desire to control women’s work and sexuality, the paradigm of which became institutionalized in the nuclear family.

Young Hegelians

The Young Hegelians were a group of German intellectuals who reacted to, wrote about, and built upon the late philosopher’s work and legacy. Marx and Engels were both part of the Young Hegelians, but eventually broke away after concluding that ownership of capital—and not organized religion—is the basis of the establishment’s power.

Zizek, Slavoj

Once upon a time, the political science departments of universities across the west heaved with a bearded, corduroy-jacket-wearing army of Marxist lecturers, who explained capitalism to undergraduates alternating slurps on a bold shiraz with renditions of Leonard Cohen on acoustic guitar. The remnants of this generation, disproportionately afflicted by coronary problems, have morphed into Slavoj Zizek, a smoking, drinking, bearded Omni-Marxist, who writes books, spews out columns, fights conservatives on panel shows and proclaims “communism will win” with such warm conviction, it may pay to retain this handy guide for a while yet.