from Karl Marx (1818 - 1883), various writings,

Marx as the ultimate materialist:
                        material base --> jural-political structure --> ideological superstructure

Some key terms:
-means of production: tools, skills, knowledge, capital, land, etc. needed to make a living (to extract energy from nature); productive resources
-relations of production: the social relations that organize production
-mode of production: means of production + relations of production; a historically specific form of organizing labor and the given means of production; Marx suggested various modes of production (including primitive communism, the Asiatic mode, the slave mode, capitalism) but Eric Wolf has broken these down into three main modes: domestic mode of production (household organization of labor), tributary mode of production (the feudal system of lords and peasants), and capitalism (where labor is divorced from means of production)
        cf. Polanyi's reciprocity, redistribution, market exchange

The Rise of Capitalism
use value v. exchange value

barter, trade for use value:
C--C'            [C = commodity; C' = new commodity; M = money]
C--M--C'

mercantilism, trade for exchange value:
M--C--M'          M--M'
or capitalism where C=labor

capital: a productive resource, something used to make something else
capitalism: labor alienated from means of production; labor treated as a commodity

alienation:
    a. from means of production
    b. "free" to sell labor
    cotton cloth and the rise of capitalism

Industrial Capitalism
    Taylorism and Fordism
    alienation from the fruit of one's labour

World system/dependency theory

False Consciousness and Hegemony
-Marx wrote about false consciousness, such as peasants being duped to support their lords
-Antonio Gramsci used the term hegemony to described an ideology internalized by a subordinate group

Gramsci showed how states use the popular culture, mass media, education, and religion to reinforce an ideology which supports the position of dominant classes--putting words into people’s mouths. Importantly Gramsci showed how subtle the process of imposing hegemony worked, and that its effectiveness is in getting individuals to actively support a system which does not act in their own best interests.

Hegemony is “an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation” (G. Williams in Eley 1994: 320-21)

Much recent work has turned to counter-hegemony, examining ways in which individuals use the same symbolic resources of hegemonic domination to contest that domination. For example James Scott’s work on "weapons of the weak"
        urban legends and campus myths
        new technologies allow new ways to resist:
                Napster, Morpheus, open-sourse movement
                Microsoft, Linux, Netscape, Wordperfect

read "School Bells" by Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's Magazine August 2000, pp.7-9

A society is capitalist if most production is carried on by employees working with means of production (equipment and materials) belonging to their employer, producing commodities which belong to the employer. (Employees: those whose services are treated as commodities. 'Labour is a commodity like any other', 'an article of trade' - Edmund Burke, Thoughts on Scarcity, 1795.)

By a commodity Marx means something produced for the purpose of being exchanged. Things produced for the producer's use are sometimes later exchanged, but that does not make them commodities, since they were not produced precisely for that purpose. In modern society most production is of commodities.

When commodities are exchanged the ratio in which they exchange is their exchange value - e.g. one pear may exchange for two apples, and the exchange value of a pear in terms of apples is two. Exchange value is different from (yet related to) use value.  Some things which are very useful have no exchange value, and are normally free - e.g. the air we breathe. No one will give anything in exchange for it, despite its usefulness.  Other items have high exchange values and not much use value (e.g., gold plated nose-hair clippers).

On the average and in the long run, the various exchange values of commodities reflect, according to Marx, the various amounts of labour, measured in time, that their production and marketing requires. That is, commodities exchange in the ratio of the time taken to produce one item of each kind. One pear is worth two apples if producers have to work twice as many hours to bring a pear to the market. This is the true of average long term rates of exchange; there may be fluctuations due to seasonal factors, frost, etc.

More precisely: the exchange value of a commodity reflects the amount of 'socially necessary' labour, i.e. the labour needed if the producer works at the normal level of intensity, with normal skill, using normal methods - normal in that society, normal in relation to that market. Otherwise a thing made by an incompetent producer using obsolete methods would exchange for more because it took longer to make - which is obviously not true.

Value is not the same as price: it is one of the determinants of price, the cause responsible for the long-run average price. In the short term the price may be pushed above the value by shortage or exceptional demand. Also, the price of a commodity that requires more capital investment for its production is normally, even in the long term, above the level corresponding to its relative value.

Marx saw taking surplus value (profit) by charging more than the true labor value for a product as immoral, exploiting laborers.