AMD 3

For AMD 3 I continued reading Karl Marx’s German Ideology. The subsections that I read were “Relation of State and Law to Property”, “Natural and Civilized Instruments of Production and Forms of Property”, and “Intercourse and Productive Power”. Marx chronicles the succession of forces that transforms ‘tribal property’ into private property. This rise of private property he describes as the dissolution of the natural community and claims it inevitably produces civil law. Furthermore, he makes the argument that the purpose of civil law is to justify the existing property relationships by rooting them in the general will. Marx makes the implication that a division of labor is really a division of the conditions of labor and explains the consequences of this. Most importantly, this causes a large portion of the population to rely on production to preserve their very own existence rather than merely self-activity. Revolutions fail to drastically change society because they merely change the distribution of forces in society rather than altering the fundamental forces themselves. Sam Engel