1. From the readings, the Constitution was written by the wealthy, propertied class: merchants, bankers, creditors, land speculators, manufacturers, and slaveholders, the “gentlemen” the French chargé d’affaires described. Beard notes that many delegates held their wealth in personal property like money lent at interest, public securities, and shipping, and that they had more in common with each other than with their debt-burdened neighbors. Those excluded were slaves, indentured servants, women, American Indians, and white men without enough property to vote. In twelve of the thirteen states, only property-owning white men could vote, probably no more than 10% of the adult population, and holding office required even more (e.g. a South Carolina state senator needed an estate worth at least £7000). Even without those rules, ordinary working people couldn’t take four months off to go to Philadelphia and help write a constitution. It lines up with he owners vs. employees distinction from Reading 4.3: the delegates largely lived off property income, while the excluded majority, like the Delaware farm families who pulled their own plows, lived off their own labor, often in debt to the very class writing the Constitution.

2. I would say the core of the class structure is the same, but the form has changed. In early America, a small group owned most of the wealth (by 1700, fewer than a dozen people owned three-fourths of the land in New York), while most people were small farmers, artisans, and laborers, many were buried in debt at 25% to 40% interest. The legal barriers are gone now: there are no property requirements to vote, and slavery has been abolished. But, the divide between those who own and those who have to work for a living is still there, with the top 1% holding around 32% of the nation’s wealth. Even the debtor class looks familiar; people in 1787 were jailed for unpaid debts, and Parenti describes today’s student borrowers as living in a “debtor’s prison without walls.” The difference is that instead of being limited to property owners by law, political power now comes through money, like the $205 million spent to pass Prop 22.

3. In class terms, democracy meant rule by the majority, and the majority was poor, propertyless, or in debt. Hamilton said it outright: every community divides into “the few and the many,” the rich and wellborn vs. the mass of the people. If the many actually held power, they could push for the “wicked” projects Madison warned about: paper money, the abolition of debts, and an equal division of property. That fear wasn’t just theoretical, since armed crowds had been blocking foreclosures and freeing debtors from jail, and Shays’s Rebellion broke out only months before the convention. So, as Parenti puts it, the goal was to keep the “form” of popular government with only a minimum of the substance. The federal government was even given the power to “suppress Insurrections,” which is basically Althusser’s RSA written into the Constitution, and a century later the Army was used to break strikes by miners and railroad and factory workers.

1. Faction reminds me of social class. Madison defines a faction as a group of citizens united by a common interest that goes against the rights of others, and he says the most common and durable source of faction is the unequal distribution of property, between those two hold it and those who don’t. That’s close to Marx’s two-class view, and to Heideman’s point that class positions come with common interests that put the two sides directly at odds.

2. According to Madison, property comes from the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Faculties here means a person’s natural abilities: their talents, skills, and mental and physical capacities. Since those abilities are unequal, some people are better at acquiring property than others, and different amounts of property “immediately” result. So in his view, what separates the wealthy from the poor is individual ability, or as Parenti sums it up, government is there to make sure those with “a talent for getting rich” aren’t held back by those who might be made poor in the process.

3. I partly agree. Ability can make a difference in what someone earns; a skilled machinist will usually make more than an unskilled worker, same for a baseball player. But it doesn’t explain who owns wealth. Parenti shows that most people die in the class they’re born into, the superrich mostly inherit their fortunes, and the poor tend to stay poor no matter how hard they work. Even the framers’ wealth didn’t come from talent alone, since many of them bought up nearly worthless paper scrip from poor holders and cashed it in at face value under the new Constitution. It’s also ironic, Marx defined labor power as the mental and physical capabilities in a person, basically Madison’s faculties, and as we saw with surplus value, those faculties do create wealth, just not for the people who have them.

4. Madison says the “first object” of government is protecting the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, which in practice means protecting property and the inequality that comes with it. Given what’s been covered this semester, this doesn’t surprise me. Article I, Section 8, which covers commerce, taxes, debts, and currency, was adopted within a few days with little debate, and Parenti describes all of it as being of primary concern to investors, merchants, and creditors. It does sound different from what society tell us, though. In school, the government’s mission is usually presented as protecting freedom and serving “We the People, “ not protecting property, which feels like Althusser’s ISA at work: the founding gets taught as a story about liberty, while the property side rarely comes up.

5. No, it doesn’t suprise me. If property comes form unequal faculties, and the first object of government is protecting that inequality, then the biggest threat is the propertyless majority, who could directly vote for debt relief or redistribution in a pure democracy where citizens govern in person. A republic solves that problem for the properties class in two ways. First, the public’s views get passed “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,” so the majority’s demands are filtered before they become policy, and the Constitution added even more filters, like senators being chosen by state legislatures instead of voters. Second, a larger republic makes it harder for the majority to unite, so a “rage for paper money” in one state is less likely to spread to the whole Union. It reminds me of Althusser’s Democratic Apparatus: people get the form of choice, while the substance stays protected. 

1. The means of production are the tools, property, and/or resources needed to produce something, as opposed to labor itself. For instance, a painter’s means of production are basic tools like brushes, an easel, and canvases, but can also include less obvious things: a gallery to host their work, or a paid website to showcase them. Labor is the actual work that goes into making something, i.e. the expertise, time, and difficulty required to reach the finished product. This is why a handmade knit blanket, which takes hours of painstaking, skilled work to create, feels categorically different from a factory-made blanket assembled in bulk in a fraction of the time. The labor itself, not just the materials, is what gives the handmade version its added value.

2. From the video, value is measured by how much labor (measured in hours and minutes) it takes to produce a product under normal circumstances. Meaning, what gives something value isn’t supply (or lack thereof), demand, or usefulness, to the potential buyer, but strictly the amount of human labor that went into it.

3. According to the video, labor is the actual source and measure of value. As answered in question two, a product’s value comes directly from the amount of labor time that went into producing it under normal circumstances.

4. Labor power is the ability to work; it’s what a person sells/rents out to an employer for a period of time. Found only in people, it’s a unique commodity because applying it is what actually increases the value of whatever it’s applied to. It is the potential to produce. By contrast, labor is the actual activity of working itself. It is that potential being performed.

5. Surplus value is the value produced by a worker/employee’s labor beyond what it costs to sustain that worker: the extra value created on top of what it took to get them there (food, shelter, clothing, etc.). This surplus goes to the employer, not the employee. This surplus value is what creates and sustains the division between classes. Marx believed this exploitation of the workers/working class was how capitalism works; the owners generate their wealth by paying workers less than the value those workers produce.

A machinist spends their day making forged pistons. Over the course of the day, they’ve made 12 forged pistons that sell for a total of $2500. At the same time, the machinist themself only made $25/hour, for a total of $200. The surplus value of $2300 is kept by the factory owner as profit as opposed to the machinist who created it.

From the reading, before capitalism, small producers followed the C-M-C pattern. A weaver would sell cloth for money, then use that money for food and other necessities. The value at the end would be the same as the start, and since a weaver couldn’t sell more cloth than they’d already made, there was a natural limit. The general formula of capital, M-C-M’, reverses this. The capitalist buys a commodity specifically to resell it for more money than what they spent. M’ equals M plus a surplus, called surplus value.
Labor power is the one commodity that produces more value than it costs, and that value is created inside the production process itself, not at the moment of sale. Part of the working day is necessary labor, the time it takes a worker to produce value equal to their own wage. Everything after that is surplus labor, unpaid, and its output is surplus value. In the reading’s example, a worker paid 60 units for an 8-hour day needs about four hours to cover their own wage. The other four hours go unpaid, a 100% rate of exploitation. Unlike the C-M-C pattern, M-C-M’ has no natural limit, capitalists reinvest the M’ as new capital and repeat the cycle on a larger scale each time. The actual mechanism behind staying wealthy means no personal production, but buying labor power for less than the value it creates and reinvesting the surplus. Extracting surplus value isn’t a personal choice, it’s built into the system itself. This is why the reading argues there’s no such thing as a good capitalist, only more or less bad ones.
Take a furniture manufacturer with $10000; they then spend it on lumber, machinery, time on the machine, and a day of labor. By the end of that day, the workers have produced furniture worth $14000, the $4000 difference is the surplus value, created during the labor hours beyond what it took to cover the workers’ wages, and it becomes next day’s/month’s larger starting capital.

1. The statistic that stood out most to me is that the top 1% owns between 40 and 50% of the nation’s total wealth (although new data discussed in the video: Wealth Inequality in America Updated: 2026 says 32%), more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90%. This contradicts the old idea of the strong middle class the U.S. was once known and envied for. Now, 90% of families, once debts and mortgages are factored in, have little to no assets at all. This isn’t just a gap between the rich and poor, but a sign of a deeper issue.
2. This extreme wealth concentration turns into political power. The reading describes the DuPonts as some of the largest contributors to Republican presidential campaigns, and the Rockefellers had family members and close associates occupy positions from the presidency to the Federal Reserve Board to the CIA. When that much wealth translates into that much direct access to the government, one begins to question whether the policy gets shaped by public need or by whoever can afford the most influence.
   Worker productivity has risen by about 75% over the past few decades, while taking into account inflation, wages for the majority have stayed flat or fallen. If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be over $14/hr instead of $7.25. An hour of labor produces more value than it used to, but workers aren’t the ones seeing it in their paycheck, instead it’s going back to that small few.

1. From the reading, owners and employees are distinguished based on the source of their income, as opposed to how much they make. The owners’ sources are stocks, bonds, rents, mineral royalties, and/or other property income. On the other hand, the employees’ sources are wages, salaries, and/or fees paid earned through their labor.

An outside shareholder (that is, a shareholder that owns shares, but has no other relation to the company) that has enough of a stake in the corporation that they can live off the dividends and stock appreciation, without doing any labor for the company itself, would be an example of an owner. An example of an employee could be a diamond grader. These individuals earn their salary from the labor of grading the dozens of diamonds they must get through each day, not from owning or selling the diamonds or reports themselves.

2. Adam Smith’s quote about money being the nominal price, while labor is the “real price” is arguing that labor is the real measure of something’s value, not money. An item’s worth is the effort of transforming a raw material into the end product — the building, the planning, the assembling, etc. I believe Parenti included this quote to illustrate the idea that if labor is the source of value, then wages should reflect the value labor creates; and that this does not happen in practice.

3. I agree with Heideman, but I would argue that his point isn’t simply, “class is not identity.” In the reading, he concedes that class can, in fact, function as identity: that class can be a basis for identities every bit as salient as race or gender. He continues that a core part of the socialist project is actually encouraging workers to identify with their class politically. What he is arguing is that class is not a shared status, but a structural position. Someone’s identity shapes how they are treated regardless of their actions, e.g. an antiracist and a racist can both still be white. By contrast, class doesn’t work that way: being a worker isn’t just a label, it’s a subordinate relationship to an employer for survival: a conflict of interest between the employer’s profit motive vs the value of the worker’s labor. This structural conflict, not shared income or status, is what makes class distinct.

4. The close dependency is what makes the worker-employer relationship structural rather than just a matter of status: the worker’s survival is tied to one specific employer and the employer’s wealth is tied to that same relationship continuing. The diamond grader’s paycheck depends directly on their employer continuing to need graders and choosing to keep them employed. If people stop buying diamonds and the employer’s business fails or the role gets automated, the grader’s income disappears. At the same time, the employer depends on skilled graders working quickly and accurately each day to keep the business running and profitable. In contrast, the outside shareholder’s dependency is diffuse, tied to company performance rather than any worker specifically. 

1. From the readings, ideology is a system of values and beliefs that shape how people understand their own sociopolitical landscape. This system, for the individual, is foundationally  established early in life (but can grow and change throughout their life), and tends to justify and maintain the status quo.

Gender roles is an example we’ve all personally experienced. During childhood, many of us are taught things like, “boys don’t cry”, “girls play with tea sets and dolls, boys play sports and with action figures”, and “women are better with children”. Although there has been a push for change in recent years in many of these respects, for the majority, it is the natural and expected outcome for men to work in specific career fields, while their wives are steered toward more nurturing fields (assuming they work outside the home at all).

Marx used Western feudalism to explain how we internalize the ruling ideology. The King was King because God ordained it; the serfs were serfs because they believed in the same divine order. For generations, a child saw their father go to work, and their mother take care of the house; their mother sit for tea and their father go hunting. For them, this was the natural order, the ideology is ingrained and there was no reason to question or change the status quo.

2. In the initial “Crash Course” video, the difference between conservative and liberal ideology is very binary in small vs big government and liberty vs equality. In the reading, “Democracy for the Few,” we see that in practice, the trend tends to be more profit and moral driven interference vs equality of protection. Liberals want government intervention to address the economic and social imbalances. On the other hand, conservatives want minimal government intervention in successful business ventures and profits, as well as for many social programs, but will support intervention if those social programs go counter to their morals.

You can see this in action in a more liberal state like New York that has the one of the highest statewide minimum wages, Medicaid spending, and funding for abortion providers and reproductive health; while in the more conservative state Texas, the statewide minimum wage is the federal minimum wage, there is no corporate income tax, as well as tax breaks depending on sector, and is one of 13 total-ban (with exceptions) abortion states.

3. Althusser believed Ideology, or more specifically the capitalist ideology, operates through total interpellation before one is conscious or capable of questioning. Between school, media, family and politics individuals are behaviorally reinforced to recognize their specific role and act accordingly. Reinforcing the totality, even so-called rebellion occurs only through the approved channels, helping maintain the status quo.

In school, students are taught to defer to and obey the authority of the teacher. That authority teaches individuals when and how to do assignments, when to arrive and leave, becoming habits of obedience that will be carried into the workforce.

1. The RSAs are the police, courts, prisons and other institutions of the state that maintain order through the threat of force or force itself. Hobbes believed the fear of this violence was what kept order; Althusser specifically considered this apparatus “repressive” because through this method the individual’s corporeal freedom is restricted: there is no convincing, just compliance.

A student who repeatedly ignores class rules or breaks them in an extreme way and has broken the social order, will have the school’s RSA respond by forcing compliance through suspension, arrest or imprisonment.

2. The ISAs are the school, media, family, politics, and other institutions that maintain order through internalized control, giving the impression of natural order. Althusser described several of these: the Democratic Apparatus (politics maintains status quo by providing illusion of choice through predetermined parties/candidates), the Consumer Apparatus (illusion of choice between near indistinguishable products), the Entertainment Apparatus (artificial allegiances, like sports fandoms, that divorce one from natural class allegiance), and Schools (discipline and obedience creates compliant workers and citizens).

3. RSA maintains order through the restriction of corporeal freedom by force or the threat thereof. ISA maintains order through internalized control, giving the individual the willingness to comply through the impression of natural order rather than coercion. RSA is also centralized and directly run by the state, while ISA often appears separate. ISA is meant to be so natural, indispensable, and accepted that it becomes the primary mode of control, making RSA only rarely needed. 

4.

This Mercedes-Benz ad is a media-based Ideological Apparatus. This is an example of what Marx describes as ideology masking class relations, by making the unequal economic positions of the car owner and mechanic seem natural, while obscuring the underlying class and labor relationship.