Marxist Concepts: Understanding Key Terms

Key Marxist Concepts

• Consciousness: The realm of ideas, symbols, values, and norms of interpretation through which individuals understand themselves. According to Marx, consciousness is shaped by the social reality of each historical moment.
• Material Conditions of Existence: The conditions necessary to ensure the continuity of human life on the planet, according to Marx.
• Bourgeois Economics: The capitalist mode of production.
• Political Economy: The study of the laws governing the free market and the distribution of national product among labor, capital, and land.
• Engels: A self-taught German philosopher, politician, and revolutionary. A close collaborator with Marx, assisting in the development of some of his key works.
• Economic Structure: The foundation of any production process, constituted by the sum of productive forces and the relations of production.
• Ideological Forms: Ideas that individuals hold about themselves, often products of ideological alienation and therefore false.
• Productive Forces: The objects, tools, and techniques used in the production of material life. Marx refers to these as the means of production, combined with the human activity (workforce) employed in this process.
• Hegel: A German philosopher and a leading figure in idealism, achieving a degree of absolute idealism in his thought.
• Mode of Production: The specific way in which people in a particular historical period produce their material and social life.
• Social Production of Existence: According to Marx, humans must produce the elements necessary to meet their basic needs and sustain their material lives. This is what Marx calls the production of material life.
• Relations of Production: In the production of material life, people do not work in isolation but by sharing and assigning specific tasks, establishing relationships among themselves. Marx refers to these as relations of production.
• Civil Society: The set of socioeconomic relations and productive forces that emerge when the state becomes independent.
• Superstructure: The set of beliefs, customs, laws, and other elements that shape human consciousness.