Materialist conception of history -
In it, Marx makes a distinction between the bases and superstructures
Mode of production -
not the articles made, but how they are made, and with what instruments, that enables us to distinguish economic epochs.
many primitive cultures are called “primitive communism”, they are more egalitarian, there’s no well-defined private property
Durkheim thought we can learn much more about what society is if you look at the very different societies that exist.
There were modes of production that didn’t fit into the “evolutionary” line of modes of production (i.e. from primitive communism to slave mode of production to … to communism)
Marx was very interested in the Asiatic mode of production
Marx isn’t interested in societies in general - he’s interested in capitalist society specifically.
Marx said that other societies cannot be analyzed through the same lens we use to analyze capitalist society.
While population is generally growing in the world, the population in Europe has steadily been declining. Is that a capitalist process or something else?
How does the feudal mode of production relate to wartime communism?
Capitalism in eastern Europe and oligarchs
How does the EMH tie into the idea of the CMC/MCM inversion, especially in modern society, where economy is essentially a zero-sum game.
Unlike Feudalism, in capitalism the worker does not know how much of their product is being expropriated, how much of it is exchange-value-surplus.
Thus, to Marx, capitalism is like a machine that makes its constituents invisible,