1. When government power is concentrated in different variations, the role of citizens in government differs with each variation. In a unitary system, a large majority of power is concentrated in the central government. Because of this, citizens engagement with the government is through voting for the all-powerful government officials with broad scope over policies. In a confederate system, central government power is weak and most power lies with the states and localities of a country. Because decision making is left to local powers, citizens engage mostly only engage with the state or local government. A federalist system is a combination of both systems, as citizens engage with both their central, state, and local governments. This is due to power being divided in a manner amount the different levels of government that makes it the citizens best interest to engage with those levels.
2. To my understanding, the division of power is what allows our government structure to have the checks and balances that we do. Not only are responsibilities divided between congress, the judicial, and executive branches, but they are also divided between the federal, state, and local levels of those branches. Control is not as concentrated as it would be in a unitary system, yet each level has significant power to make changes within their scope of authority.
3. The federal government can shape the acts of state and local governments through funding. During the pandemic, states and local governments needed extra support to fund unemployment programs, social services, and sanitation services. In 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, which sent out 1.9 trillion dollars from the Treasury Department to states to assist with funding. New York State initially received 12.75 billion dollars in 2021 for housing assistance, support for small businesses, and other pandemic recovery efforts. The public schools in New York also received 9 billion dollars to assist in reopening safely. This funding came from the federal level, and helped states run per usual while dealing with the economic uncertainty that the pandemic brought.

1. The word faction is another way to refer to class in a society. When referenced in Federalist Paper #10, a faction could be a majority or a minority of the nation as a whole.
2. According to James Madison in the Federalist Papers #10, the source of wealth is from an individual with the faculties, which are their abilities and interests, that are sufficient to produce such wealth. Because people have different faculties, we are unable to all have the same interests. It is because of this that the protection of property was sought for, as many would maybe not have the interest of protecting the property of the filthy rich.
3. I don’t fully agree with this idea that wealth and property is attained simply through an individual’s faculties. Wealth is something that is more than likely handed down, rather than solely attained through an individual’s interest. I’m sure many hardworking Americans have it in their interest to be a millionaire one day, yet there are millions who live paycheck to paycheck and may take their entire lifetime to even make that much money.
4. The core mission of the government, based off of the Federalist Papers #10, is to protect the different interests and abilities of the people. The reason these faculties are made important is because the owning class needs their faculties protected the most. Yet, they need a government that tries to appease the majorities interests at the same time or at least try to seem to do so. I think this structure is spot on to our society today. Our attention is focused toward culture wars that are made to feel like they are never ending while the institutions that are built to uphold the marginalized and the needy are put at risk, companies are bailed out with taxpayer dollars, and the rich get tax cuts while the wages of the working class stay idle.
5. I am not surprised that Federalist Paper #10 is in support of a republic rather than a pure democracy. As James Madison wrote, the faculties of all must be protected. This includes the wealthy, and he knew that the owning class’s interests would not be upheld if the majority/working class made the decisions when it came to government. Now, in protecting the faculties of the owning class as much as the majority class, the owning class is left with the most power as they have access to more wealth and resources than the majority class.

1. Based on our readings, it was made clear that the owning class made up the Convention that wrote the Constitution. These people were the wealthy merchants, slaveholders, and manufacturers that owned much of the land and means of production in the early United States. The class that was excluded from this process was the majority/working class. This was mostly made up of propertyless men, women, indentured servants, and slaves. If you weren’t a White man who owned property, you were basically excluded from reaping the benefits of the Constitution.
2. I personally agree that the social classes are shockingly similar from the early U.S. to the present day. Although the majority class no longer includes slaves and indentured servants, as these ideas have long been abolished, there is still a working class that makes up the majority, and a wealthy owning class. I will say that today there is a stronger appeal by politicians to be favored by the majority, much of their work and policies can be found to benefit the people with wealth in this nation.
3. The people who wrote the Constitution were afraid of a pure democracy because they thought the majority were too ill-minded to decide for themselves. They viewed the propertyless as ignorant savages. The majority class would not think in the best interest of the owning class and therefore could hinder how much the wealthy makes and owned by distributing resources in a manner that benefited the majority class.

1. The statistic on the U.S wealth disparity that I found the most shocking was “The top 1 percent own between 40 and 50 percent of the nation’s total wealth… more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent” (Parenti 29). I found it shocking as the top 1 percent are capitalists, who don’t actually work for their wealth. A majority of their wealth is created by the bottom 90 percent of workers in the U.S. And it’s not as if this hard work that the working class puts in to generate the growing wealth of the capitalist is paying off. Later in the reading Parenti states another shocking statistic that backs my previous statement, “The real income earned by the bottom 90 percent fell by 7 percent [in the last three decades]” (Parenti 31).
2. An implication that can come from a society that has such large disparities in the wealth is rising prices that are more easily manipulatable. If a majority of society owns less and less wealth, their buying power is stunted, which corporations still need to remain competitive in their industries. If a companies’ sales drop, the capitalist won’t lower prices but rather raise them in order to compensate for the loss. As productivity and profits rise, as they have in the U.S, wages and salaries have not raised at the same rate. This is an example of how we see the wealth disparity affect our society today.

How does the capitalist maintain and increase their wealth?

In Pierre Jalee’s book, How Capitalism Works, we are introduced with two ways in how money is transacted in society. There is small-scale commodity production, or CMC, and Jalee’s description of it is “both peasant and artisan were selling in order to buy.” Both classes would sell their own produced goods for money in order to buy other goods/necessities that they maybe couldn’t produce themselves. The capitalist does not participate in this commodity production. The capitalist is a capitalist because they already own capital and therefore have money. But, in order to continue having that capital, they must use that money to buy labor and/or capital in order to make a surplus value in their production of goods and services, which would then be known as a profit. This sequence of transactions is called the general formula of capital, or MCM’, where M’ equals M plus the surplus value (m) that is created during production. This surplus value is created from the labor of the capitalist’s workers. Because the workers are paid a fixed value for the time they exchange for their labor, the value of their production is worth more than the cost that the capitalist spend on their labor. The capitalist must pay their workers a wage/salary that is less than the value of their production in order to maintain and increase their wealth, or else there would be no surplus value for them to make a profit from.

1. The means of production, as I understand it, are in most cases privately owned under a capitalism. Farm equipment like a tractor is a means of production that can be owned by the owner of the farm, or it can even be owned by a leasing company that the employer pays. Labor is what give value to production and products. If you had a bunch of canvases, paint, and stencils, and just let them sit around, they would be only as worth as they labor to produce them. But, if you used those factors to make a nice piece of art, the labor you put in to make the art would be the value of it. Its price would be how much you, as the artist, would set it at.
2. Karl Marx views value as not just a price, but the cost of how much labor was expended to produce a product. Something becomes valuable when labor is used to produce it. As stated in the video, a piece of wood is only wood unless you use labor to alter it into, say, a lamp stand. It now has the value of how much labor you put into producing the lamp stand.
3. The relationship between labor and value is that labor produces value. The products that firms sell are only valuable because labor was used to create them. If there is no labor, firms would have no products to sell, and therefore, would have no valuable products to exchange for money to then make a profit.
4. A person’s labor power is the value of labor they put into their job equal to what that person gets out from contributing their labor. The labor one puts into a job may exceed their labor power; this is especially so under capitalism. One’s labor power may be about 3 hours’ worth of one’s full workday. Whereas the labor they actually put into a full workday is 8 hours. They then create 5 more hours of their own excess value for the company.
5. Surplus value is then the excess value of labor that one provides which is kept by the company. Taking into consideration the example I offered in answer #4, when a person provides an additional 5 hours of labor, that is surplus value being created. This surplus is then used by the company to help generate a profit.

1. The distinction that Michael Parenti makes in his article, “Wealth and Wants in the United States,” between the owner and the worker is based on how each of them make their income. The owner makes a living off of investments like stocks, bonds, and rents. The worker makes their incomes from wages and salaries. The owner usually does not give their labor for their income, it is produced by the value the workers produce. But the worker must give their time in order to make an income. This mostly is based on who owns the means of production, and once you do, you become and owner/capitalist.
2. I understand Adam Smith’s quote, on page 28, to mean that labor is what constitutes the price of commodities. This, to me, sets up the two interests between the capitalist and the worker that we learn about in Reading 4.4. The capitalist is interested in maximizing profits, while the worker is interested in keeping their position and advancing. If capitalists are profit driven, they may undermine the workers interests, for example, by cutting wages or through layoffs in order to lower overall costs.
3. At first, I found myself conflicted between these two views of class being considered an identity or not. But when hearing more about the socialist view of the why class is more than just an identity, I couldn’t help but to agree with this ideology. Class does represent more of a structure in our society rather than an identity. It is because of the capitalistic structure that society is divided into two classes that can base their interest and their actions on whether they are a worker or a capitalist.
4. The close form of dependency around the class structure is the interchangeable dependency between the worker and the capitalist. The worker depends on the capitalist or firm as a means to afford living. The capitalist depends on exploiting the labor of the worker in order to maintain and advance their position in the market. An example of this would be students that are working to pay for school alongside living expenses. These students may be dependent on a wage or salary to continue affording school. Luckily, there are grants and scholarships that students can take advantage of nowadays. But, depending on the cost of the college or university, this can only go so far. If the company the student works for chooses to lower their costs through laying them off, the force of that dependency would show through the student having to now cut costs.

1. The similarity that was most prominent between how both articles discussed social class was income, how income is distributed, and the inequalities in how it is distributed. The Gallup article looked into how people of different incomes viewed their social class from lower to upper, and the New Yorker article looking into the different incomes that range between specific subway lines in NYC. While both purposes are similar in how they incorporate the view of income in social classes are made up, I also think they are different in the way social class is viewed. The Gallup article focuses more on the subjective view of social class. This being how people assign themselves to social classes based on their socioeconomic factors. While the New Yorker gives a more objective view of social class in NYC based on different physical locations.
2. Unfortunately, the infographic on the New Yorker article is currently down, but based on the into video for 4.1, I was able to see the stop I am closest to, which is Jamaica 179th St off the F-Line. I was not too surprised by the median income based on the video, and I also had an idea as to why the income drops from 179th to 169th at a significant portion. I think it may be because of Jamaica Estates, a more upper middle-class neighborhood, being not very far from the 179th street station.
3. I do notice a pattern while riding the F-Line into the city on my commute to and from work. When starting at 179th and riding between Roosevelt Ave, I notice a higher number of blue-collar workers, nurses, and security guards. There is a spike in white-collar workers at Forest Hills – 71st Ave, and it tends to be more mixed when riding through Roosevelt Ave and Queensbridge. Right when you cross into Manhattan, the first stop being Roosevelt Island, there is a noticeable difference in how much higher the number of white-collar workers getting on or off the subways cart.

1. What is the Repressive State Apparatus?

The repressive state apparatus is a part of the capitalist ideological system and plays a key role in keeping society from straying from or revolting against the capitalistic system. It is represented by the police force, the court system, and the prison system. If society were to revolt against the system and not give in to the illusion of choice we are given, the repressive state would put try and put us back in line by enforcing the police to intimidate or arrest the part of society revolting, and the courts could imprison them.

2. What is the Ideological State Apparatus?

The ideological state apparatus is another part of the capitalist ideological system that does most of the heavy lifting in keeping the wheel turning in a capitalist society. It is the apparatus that structures our thoughts and makes us believe we are choosing how the system is working, while distracting us from wanting to change the system. This is represented by our schools, politics, and the media. Politics is what gives use the illusion of choice and basically force us to choose from two candidates who will, in turn, still support the capitalist structure of society. The media gives us other ideologies to identify with, like favorite sports teams, to keep us occupied while the system runs as its meant to. School is how discipline and respect towards authority is in instilled in our society before we even thought we had a choice in adhering to the general authority of our societal structure.

3. How are the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses different from each other?

The repressive and ideological state apparatuses are mainly different from each other because of the function they serve. The repressive apparatus is meant to function as a correcting tool, to keep revolutions from forming. The ideological apparatus is meant to function is a guide to keep society turning the wheel that supports a capitalistic societal structure.

4. Post an example of ideology.

An example of ideology that I find fascinating is this image of a Columbian protester, known online as Captain Columbia, who used a homemade shield to block a stream from a water cannon shooting at him from an armored police truck.

This is a great example of the repressive state apparatus at work. In 2021, Columbians took to the streets to protest a rise in corruption, higher taxes, and changes in health care made by their government. Captain Columbia was a citizen whose thoughts broke from how the Columbian government wanted to structure policies in their society. Instead of going along with it, he took to the streets with the protesters to revolt and is pictured here fighting back against a very violent form of the repressive state apparatus.

1. What is Ideology?

Ideology, to me, is how a person thinks of themselves and others, and the physical and social environment that they live in, and how those aspects shape their views. A person is subject to being shaped by how they view their environment, just as much as how they view the people around them. If they like the people around them, they are more than likely to adopt and share views with them. The opposite is true if they dislike the people or environment around them.

An example of this would be how children shape their views as they grow up. If they are fond of their parents and have respect for them, and their parents agree with conservative views, the child is likely to adopt those views. If a child does not respect their conservative minded parents, they may choose to have different or even opposite views.

I also understand ideology as a way for people to express themselves and their beliefs. As the second video states, ideology is one whole and, in our case, a means for society to keep in line with how capitalism functions. So, when we adopt certain ideologies, it is a way for people in society to express how they think by structuring their thoughts within the different ideologies accepted in our society (left, right, center). Although, some people in society can structure their thoughts around ideologies that would be deemed unacceptable in a capitalist society, like communism.

2. How are conservative and liberal ideologies different?

Conservative and liberal ideologies are mainly different by how they believe the size of our federal government should be and their outreach. Conservatives think that the government will obstruct an individual’s liberty and get in the way of the free market performing to its maximum capabilities in order to provide the best opportunities to individuals. They then believe the federal government should be small and the majority of government should be run by the state and local governments. They would prefer decisions on public education, health care, environmental protections be left up to smaller government structures or even left to the private sector. Liberals see the federal government as a way to helps solve issues in the public and private sectors. They believe the government can keep firms in check and protect society from firms abusing their power that they have attain through production and capital by enforcing regulations. This stems from the idea that the free market will not be fair to everyone. Liberals also advocate for a more progressive tax system, and that enough tax dollars are spent on National Defense. They would prefer that more tax dollars flow into subsidizing public education, healthcare, and housing.

3. How do you understand Althusser’s definition of ideology?

I understand Althusser’s definition of ideology as it being a means to get society in line with how it is supposed to function based on its type of economy, (capitalist, communist, socialist, etc.). Ideology is said, by Althusser, to be a whole system, with both the repressive and ideological apparatus in play to give you the illusion of choice or face the consequences. The consequences would be enacted through forced restrictions by the police, courts, and prisons, in order to keep society from revolting.