III Give nouns and adjectives to the following verbs

verb	noun	adjective
to apply
to transmit
to remain
to acquire
to modify
to survive
to inherit
to contribute

IV Translate from Russian into English

1. Герберт Спенсер был автором теории, основанной на уподоблении общества биологическим организмом.

2. Он перенес природный принцип естественного отбора на общество.

3. По Спенсеру человеческих обществ является движения от простого к сложному.

4. Спенсер считал, что приобретенные характеристики наследуются и биологически передаются следующим поколениям.

5. Борьба за выживание среди людей, как и среди животных ведет общество к более высокому уровню развития.

Text 3

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Both Herbert Spenser and Emile Durkheim stressed the natural, evolutionary development of society. Both used imagery drawn from biology. Present social arrangements are the outcome of natural processes. More than any other social philosopher of his day, Karl Marx (1818-1883) analyzed society from the vantage point of the poor. He believed that social scientists should work for a better society, and his personal goal was to liberate workers from poverty. Both his writings and his political activity helped make the nineteenth century become the century of socialism in Europe. Labour unions and their struggles rose in prominence and many utopian communities formed to look for better ways to organize social relationships.

Marx rejected any ideas that saw urban poverty as natural. To Marx, workers were being exploited; the surplus value of their labor was used by capitalists to create more capital and to sustain the various social and cultural arrangements that supported the current economic system. In the new factory work system, the worker sold labor for money, which could be used to buy the commodities needed. The worker had no security, and frequently the entire family, including young children, worked to help the family survive. The work setting of early capitalism included no welfare benefits, no health insurance, no vacation, no safety regulations, no retirement, and no child labour laws. In order to compete, the owner of a factory could lower wages to, or even below, the subsistence level. Marx saw this situation as immoral. Many humans were being harmed and even killed to enrich the few who owned the means of production. To Marx, the ethical person could not ignore this human suffering when the means to change conditions might be at hand.

The poverty of workers was caused by something social – a new way of organizing labour. Marx thought that workers would come together and organize themselves to overthrow their capitalist exploiters. He thought capitalism contained contradictions. Competition between capitalists would lower wages to the point that workers would recognize the sources of their suffering, organize themselves, and overthrow their oppressors. Socialism would result; workers would own the means of production, and there would be a more fair distribution of wealth. Marx worked tirelessly throughout his life to bring into existence his vision of a more just society. He lived the latter decades of his life and died in the industrial slums of London. The USSR, the first socialist society built on ideas partially borrowed from Marx, did not emerge until thirty-four years after his death.

However, Marx introduced some major ideas into the history of social thought that are still important today. Unlike Spenser and Durkheim, Marx focused on conflict and saw the struggle over the means of production to be at the heart of social change. For Marx, reality did not exist in the ideals, but in the material struggle for existence. The most basic struggle is for food, clothing and shelter. At a society level, this struggle had different forms in previous eras. For example, feudalism was supplanted by capitalism, which produced new conditions under which people struggled for the material necessities of life – but people had the capacity to influence their situation. As class-consciousness developed, workers could create labor unions and work toward a new social order. Marx stressed the economic arena as the most basic influence in society. Religion, popular culture, political and military arrangements are all epiphenomenal; they exist within the overriding arrangement of economic domination.

Marx and his collaborator and friend, Friedrich Engels, were not economic determinists. They did not reduce everything to an economic explanation. Marx and Engles did not think that technical and economic factors determined everything. While stressing the importance of the struggle over the means of production, Engels and Marx were aware of the complexity of social life and the wide array of social and cultural events that could influence historical outcomes.

For Marx, conflict was natural and inevitable. Conflict is rooted in the struggle for existence as groups contend for control of the means of production. Like the two previous functionalist approaches, Marx viewed society as a whole. However, his view of the sources of social change was diametrically opposite to the functionalists’ approaches.

Marx’s ideas influenced modern societies and current sociology in several different ways. He focused our attention on the importance of the economic arena. Second, he made central the idea of human values; if you understand the source of human exploitation and care about its consequences, you have an obligation to try to change things. Third, later generations of Marxists incorporated modified versions of his ideas into political revolutions, the largest of these being the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution culminating in 1949 in the founding of the People’s Republic in China. He focused our attention on capitalism as the driving force of modern societies. Finally, the legacy of his thought evolved into a critical tradition within sociology that analyzes social class, gender, and ethnic relations in terms of economically based social domination.

I Vocabulary