The political and economic philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in which the concept of class struggle plays a central role in understanding society's allegedly inevitable development from bourgeois oppression under capitalism to a socialist and ultimately classless society.
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Business Dictionary:
Marxism
Political, social, and economic theories of Karl Marx. Applied Marxism, in an economy, results in either a communist economy or a heavily socialist economy.
Geography Dictionary:
Marxism
A view of world events based on the work of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95). Marx saw man's history as a natural process rooted in his material needs. The historical evolution of mankind is seen as the outcome of the modes of production which finally determine the nature of each historical epoch, the specific forms of property prevailing in it, and its class structure. The struggle between the classes is limited by the mode of production which determines the social struggle. This struggle provides the impetus for change. All history is the history of the class struggle. Marx believed that the outcome of this struggle was revolution.
Capitalism fosters large-scale economic and social development but produces conditions which hamper its development (See Marxist geography). Through systematic impoverishment of the masses, it creates a proletariat of exploited industrial workers who sell their labour as a marketable commodity. It is suggested that the proletariat will eventually rebel to emancipate mankind as a whole. This rebellion will put an end to all class distinction and all forms of exploitation. The sense of depersonalization and powerlessness felt by the working class will cease as the means of production become common property.
Political Dictionary:
Marxism
It was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who formulated the original ideas, concepts, and theories which became the foundations of a doctrine which has since come to be known as Marxism, but which they themselves designated as ‘scientific socialism’. The relationship between Marxism and socialism is a problematical one, but there can be no doubt that Marx and Engels saw many of their contemporary socialists as ‘utopian’ in the sense of being insufficiently objective in their understanding of how capitalist society was actually developing. Marx and Engels devoted their lives to the analysis of historical forces which they considered to be moving inexorably towards the eventual collapse of the capitalist system and a revolutionary crisis which would bring about a socialist transition and (eventually) full communism. They gave particularly close attention to economic processes and structures, which they saw as the key ‘material’ factors in shaping social structure and class relations, and also the state and the distribution of political power.
Yet within the various schools of Marxist thought which have emerged in the last century or so there is no agreement as to how much weight should be attached to economic factors in explaining and predicting broader patterns of social and political change. Marx and Engels have been seen by some as economic determinists, but other interpretations have stressed the mutual interrelationships of economic and other socio-political factors. This dispute has become central to Marxism- Leninism, which has inevitably sought to analyse and explain the actual processes of revolutions which have occurred throughout the world (starting with the 1917 Russian Revolution) under the auspices of Marxist movements and political parties, and has become entangled in arguments over the importance of political leadership and the use of revolutionary state power in creating a socialist (and communist) society. Marx and Engels themselves did not produce any detailed analysis of such issues, and this is one of the reasons why twentieth-century Marxists such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro added their own distinctive perspectives to the development of Marxist revolutionary strategy. The fact that many self-proclaimed Marxist revolutions have in fact led to the strengthening of state power and (frequently) the rule of one-party dictatorial regimes, rather than a society based on human freedom and the ‘withering away’ of the state, has also stimulated much disagreement over the relative merits of different Marxist strategies. Some Marxists deny the claims of such dictatorial regimes to be Marxist, and this has led to a persistent search for more democratic and pluralist strategies of change, for example in Eurocommunism and also within some traditions of social democracy.
Marxism may also be seen as a distinctive approach to the analysis of society, especially in terms of historical processes of change, which has had a dramatic impact on numerous fields of study within the social sciences and the humanities. There is hardly any area of socio-economic, political, or cultural investigation which has not been scrutinized by the techniques of Marxist analysis. In particular this has involved historical materialist methodology rooted in the belief that the structure of society and human relations in all their forms are the product of material conditions and circumstances rather than of ideas, thought, or consciousness. This raises the problem of ‘determinism’ in Marxism, since an emphasis on material forces of economic production and the social relations of production (i.e. class relations) inevitably suggests that these are the key factors which have shaped, and which continue to shape, the process of historical change. In particular these systems of thought, including political belief systems and cultural ‘products’ such as art and literature, are basically expressions of the class interests and socio-economic world-views of certain distinctive groups in society. Thus Marxism's analysis of capitalist societies focuses attention on issues of power and domination from the perspective not only of overt political supremacy but also through the supremacy gained from domination in the class structure (which is seen to be linked to political position) and domination in the realms of ideas, values, and cultural norms.
The Marxist analysis of capitalism and the conditions under which capitalism enters periods of economic crisis that eventually lead to social and political revolution is exceedingly complex and is essentially economic in its orientation. As capitalism has continued to develop and change its character since the death of Marx and Engels, numerous Marxist thinkers, from Lenin onwards, have added important theoretical dimensions, relating Marxism, for example, to new conditions of global economic production, imperialism, and colonialism, and the changing position of the working class, or proletariat, which has always been seen by Marxists as the most severely exploited class of capitalist society, and as the main agent of the eventual overthrow of capitalism. In the last century the working class of capitalist societies has undergone such a profound transformation that the ‘classical Marxism’ of Marx and Engels cannot be applied without sweeping changes of emphasis. Equally, Marxism has often been politically successful in peasant-based less developed societies rather than in the more developed industrial societies of the West. It may be, as some Marxists have suggested, that the focus of class exploitation has merely shifted to the Third World, but if this is so, then critical shifts in emphasis in Marxist thought would seem to be necessary. Marxist thought in the Third World has focused on imperialism, colonialism, and post-colonialism.
The Marxist critique of capitalism places particular emphasis on the role of the institution of private property (of capital resources and land) as the basis of class exploitation and the dependency of employed workers on a privileged group of owners. And it follows that the vision of a future communist society embraces the idea of replacing private property by common ownership in the interests of all and exercised by some form of direct workers' control. Marx and Engels did not produce any detailed blueprints for the precise mode of organization of a future post-revolutionary society, and did indeed criticize all such blueprints as ‘utopian’. Marxist regimes have engaged in such a wide variety of practical experiments, and Marxist political parties have put forward so many different strategies, that it is impossible to identify one single agreed approach. In the end Marx and Engels believed that the tasks of socialist and communist construction must await the necessary conditions of historical change, and this raises the whole issue of how quickly or slowly capitalism would be transformed into socialism and communism, and also the question of whether such a transformation could be accomplished in individual countries or must become a genuinely worldwide movement. ‘socialism in one country’ has become the actual strategy pursued by many Marxist regimes (including the Soviet Union under Stalin), but if capitalism has become a system of global economic power, it is perhaps questionable whether a single country can ever achieve the goals indicated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The collapse of many Marxist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s—including the disintegration of the Soviet Union—has cast further doubt on the capability of such regimes to survive in an interdependent world dominated by capitalist countries. ‘Marxism is dead’ became a common slogan of political commentary during these years. But it seems almost certain, as capitalism continues to experience severe economic crises, and as environmental problems pose increasing threats for the very survival of the human race, that there will continue to be a significant measure of political space for Marxist ideas.
— Keith Taylor
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
Marxism
For more information on Marxism, visit Britannica.com.
Philosophy Dictionary:
Marxism
Theoretically, Marxism is an adherence to at least some of the central ideas of Marx. These will typically include perceiving the social world in terms of categories of class as defined by relationships to economic and productive processes, belief in the development of society beyond the capitalist phase towards a revolution of the proletariat, in economics the labour theory of value, and above all rejection of the exploitation inherent in private control of productive processes. Practically, Marxism is a commitment to the exploited and oppressed classes, and to the revolution that should better their position.
Archaeology Dictionary:
Marxism
[Th]
A body of thought deriving its main elements from Marx's political and economic theories, notably the idea that change in a society is seen as the result of contradictions arising between the forces of production (technology) and the relations of production (social organization). Such contradictions are seen to emerge as a struggle between distinct social classes. Using these theories Marx predicted the overthrow of capitalism and common ownership of the means of production in a classless society.
Russian History Encyclopedia:
Marxism
Karl Marx was born in Trier in Prussia in 1818, and he died in London in 1883. The general approach embodied in Marx's theoretical writings and his analysis of capitalism may be termed historical materialism, or the materialist interpretation of history. Indeed, that approach may well be considered the cornerstone of Marxism. Marx argued that the superstructure of society was conditioned decisively by the productive base of society, so that the superstructure must always be understood in relation to the base. The base consists of the mode of production, in which forces of production (land, raw materials, capital, and labor) are combined, and in which relations among people arise, determined by their relationship to the means of production. As Marx said in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, "The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general." Marx considered the superstructure to include the family, the culture, the state, philosophy, and religion.
In Marx's view, all the elements of the super-structure served the interests of the dominant class in a society. He saw the class division in any society beyond a primitive level of development as reflecting the distinction between those who owned and controlled the means of production, on the one hand, and those who lacked a share of ownership and therefore were compelled to labor in the process of production, on the other hand. That fundamental division had been reproduced in various forms in the stages of European history, from ancient slaveholding society through feudalism to capitalism. In capitalist society (which was the main subject of Marx's writings) the crucial axis of social conflict was between the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, and the industrial working class, or proletariat. Marx attempted to demonstrate that the antagonism between those classes would continue to intensify, until the workers' revolution would destroy capitalism and usher in communism.
The dialectical mode of interpretation found a new application in Marx's analysis of the development of the capitalist economy. Marx claimed to have detected three "laws of capitalist development": the constant accumulation of capital, the increasing concentration of capital, and the increasing misery of the proletariat. Those laws spelled the progressive polarization of society between an expanding number of impoverished and exploited workers and a decreasing number of wealthy capitalists. As the system became more technologically advanced and productive, the mass of the people in the system would become more destitute and more desperate. The common experience of exploitation would forge powerful solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat, who at the height of the final crisis of capitalism would rise in revolution and expropriate the property of the capitalist class.
Marx wrote far more about capitalism than about the society that would follow the proletarian revolution. He made it clear, however, that he expected the revolution of the working class to socialize the means of production and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. That dictatorship would be the workers' state, but its existence would be temporary, as society moved from the first, transitional phase of communism to the higher phase, in which the full potential of communism would be realized, so that class differences would have disappeared, the state would have died off, and each person would contribute to society according to personal ability and receive material benefits according to need.
Before the end of the nineteenth century Marx's theory and his revolutionary vision had been embraced by the leaders of socialist parties in a number of European countries. The spread of Marxism's influence was soon followed by schisms in international socialism, however. By the end of World War I, a fundamental split had taken place between Lenin's version of Marxism in the Soviet Union (which after Lenin's death became known as Marxism-Leninism) and the democratically oriented socialism of major Western socialist parties, which stemmed from the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. The legacy of that division was a rivalry between socialist and communist parties, which was to hamper the left-wing forces in continental European countries for several decades. Ironically, though Marx's theory suggested that proletarian revolutions would triumph in the most economically advanced capitalist nations, during the twentieth century successful revolutions under the banner of Marxism and in the name of the proletariat were carried off only in countries with mainly agrarian economies, in which industrialization was in its early stages and the working class was relatively small.
Bibliography
Avineri, Shlomo. (1971). Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Kolakowski, Leszek. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1974). Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism, tr. Ewald Osers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
—ALFRED B. EVANS> JR.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Marxism,
economic and political philosophy named for Karl Marx. It is also known as scientific (as opposed to utopian) socialism. Marxism has had a profound impact on contemporary culture; modern communism is based on it, and most modern socialist theories derive from it (see socialism). It has also had tremendous effect on academia, influencing disciplines from economics to philosophy and literary history.
Although no one treatise by Marx and his coworker Friedrich Engels covers all aspects of Marxism, the Communist Manifesto suggests many of its premises, and the monumental Das Kapital develops many of them most rigorously. Many elements of the Marxist system were drawn from earlier economic and historical thought, notably that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the comte de Saint-Simon, J. C. L. de Sismondi, David Ricardo, Charles Fourier, and Louis Blanc; but Marxist analysis as fully developed by Marx and Engels was unquestionably original.
Tenets of Marxism
Dialectical Materialism
The Marxist philosophical method is dialectical materialism, a reversal of the dialectical idealism of Hegel. Dialectical materialism presumes the primacy of economic determinants in history. Through dialectical materialism was developed the fundamental Marxist premise that the history of society is the inexorable “history of class struggle.” According to this premise, a specific class could rule only so long as it best represented the economically productive forces of society; when it became outmoded it would be destroyed and replaced. From this continuing dynamic process a classless society would eventually emerge. In modern capitalist society, the bourgeois (capitalist) class had destroyed and replaced the unproductive feudal nobility and had performed the economically creative task of establishing the new industrial order. The stage was thus set for the final struggle between the bourgeoisie, which had completed its historic role, and the proletariat, composed of the industrial workers, or makers of goods, which had become the true productive class.
Economic and Political Theories
Supporting Marxism's historical premises are its economic theories. Of central importance are the labor theory of value and the idea of surplus value. Marxism supposes that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor required for its manufacture. The value of the commodities purchasable by the worker's wages is less than the value of the commodities he produces; the difference, called surplus value, represents the profit of the capitalist. Thus the bourgeois class has flourished through exploitation of the proletariat.
The capitalist system and the bourgeoisie were seen as riven with weaknesses and contradictions, which would become increasingly severe as industrialization progressed and would manifest themselves in increasingly severe economic crises. According to the Communist Manifesto, it would be in a highly industrialized nation, where the crises of capitalism and the consciousness of the workers were far advanced, that the proletarian overthrow of bourgeois society would first succeed. Although this process was inevitable, Marxists were to speed it by bringing about the international union of workers, by supporting (for expediency) whatever political party favored “the momentary interests of the working class,” and by helping to prepare workers for their revolutionary role.
The proletariat, after becoming the ruling class, was “to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state” and to increase productive forces at a rapid rate. Once the bourgeoisie had been defeated, there would be no more class divisions, since the means of production would not be owned by any group. The coercive state, formerly a weapon of class oppression, would be replaced by a rational structure of economic and social cooperation and integration. Such bourgeois institutions as the family and religion, which had served to perpetuate bourgeois dominance, would vanish, and each individual would find true fulfillment. Thus social and economic utopia would be achieved, although its exact form could not be predicted.
Influence of Marxism
Political Influence
The first impact of Marxism was felt in continental Europe. By the late 19th cent., through the influence of the Internationals, it had permeated the European trade union movement, and the major socialist parties (see Socialist parties, in European history) were committed to it in theory if not in practice. A major division soon appeared, however, between those socialists who believed that violent revolution was inevitable and those, most notably Eduard Bernstein, who argued that socialism could be achieved by evolution; both groups could cite Marx as their authority because he was inconsistent in his writings on this question.
The success of the revolutionary socialists (hereafter called Communists) in the Russian Revolution and the establishment of an authoritarian Communist state in Russia split the movement irrevocably. In disassociating themselves from dictatorial Russian Communism, many of the democratic socialist parties also moved slowly away from Marxist theory. Communists, on the other hand, regarded Marxism as their official dogma, and it is chiefly under their aegis that it spread through the world, although its concepts of class struggle and exploitation have helped to determine alternative policies of welfare and development in many nations besides those adhering to Communism. However, although useful as a revolutionary ethic and also as a frame of reference and a cue to policy, Marxism has found far less practical application than is often presumed.
The Soviet, Chinese, and other Communist states were at most only partly structured along Marxist “classless” lines, and while such Communist leaders as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong staunchly claimed Marxist orthodoxy for their pronouncements, they in fact greatly stretched the doctrine in attempting to mold it to their own uses. The evolution of varied forms of welfare capitalism, the improved condition of workers in industrial societies, and the recent demise of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have tended to discredit Marx's dire and deterministic economic predictions. The Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes did not result in the disappearance of the state, but in the erection of huge, monolithic, and largely inefficient state structures.
In the Third World, a legacy of colonialism and anti-imperialist struggle have given Marxism popular support. In Africa, Marxism has had notable impact in such nations as Ethiopia, Benin, Angola, Kenya, and Senegal. In less stable societies Marxism's combination of materialist analysis with a militant sense of justice remains a powerful attraction. Its influence has significantly weakened, however, and seems likely to fade even more since the decline of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the fall of Communism has led many to predict a similar fate for Marxism. Much of Marxism, because of its close association with Communism, has already been popularly discredited.
Philosophical Influence
In recent years, many Western intellectuals have championed Marxism and repudiated Communism, objecting to the manner in which the two terms are often used interchangeably. A number have turned to Marx's other writings and explored the present-day value of such Marxist concepts as alienation. Among prominent Western Marxists were the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, both of whom viewed Marxism as a liberation from the rule of political economy and believed in its relationship to the social consciousness. Marxism's influence can be found in disciplines as diverse as economics, history, art, literary criticism, and sociology. German sociologist Max Weber, Frankfurt school theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, British economist Joan Robinson, German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, British literary critic Frederic Jameson, and the French historians of the Annales school have all produced work drawn from Marxist perspectives.
Bibliography
See S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1968); G. Lukàcs, History and Class Consciousness (tr. 1971); P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976); R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977); D. McLellan, ed., Marx: The First Hundred Years (1983); A. W. Wood, Karl Marx (1985); J. Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (1986); B. Mazlish, The Meaning of Karl Marx (1987); T. Carver, A Marx Dictionary (1987); see also bibliographies under Marx, Karl; communism; socialism.
Politics:
Marxism
The doctrines of Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels on economics, politics, and society. They include the notion of economic
Quotes About:
Marxism
Quotes:
"Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth."
- Harold Macmillan
Wikipedia:
Marxism
Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism; this includes different forms of politics and thought such as those of Communist Parties and Communist states, as well as academic research across many fields. And while there are many theoretical and practical differences among the various forms of Marxism, most forms of Marxism share:
- an attention to the material conditions of people's lives, and social relations among people
- a belief that people's consciousness of the conditions of their lives reflects these material conditions and relations
- an understanding of class in terms of differing economic relations of production, and as a particular position within such relations
- an understanding of material conditions and social relations as historically malleable
- a view of history according to which class struggle, the evolving conflict between classes with opposing interests, structures each historical period and drives historical change
- a sympathy for the working class or proletariat
- and a belief that the ultimate interests of workers best match those of humanity in general.
The main points of contention among Marxists are the degree to which they are committed to a workers'
Classical Marxism
-
For more details on this topic, see Classical Marxism.
Classical Marxism refers to the body of theory directly expounded by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. The term "Classical Marxism" is often used to distinguish between
"Marxism" as it is broadly understood and "what Marx believed", which is not necessarily the same thing. For example, shortly
before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde and
to his own son-in-law
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, then part of Prussian Rhineland – March 14, 1883,
London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and
Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820,
Wuppertal – August 5, 1895,
London) was a 19th century German political philosopher. He developed
The two first met in person in September 1844. They discovered that they had similar views on philosophy and on capitalism and decided to work together, producing a number of works including Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). After the French authorities deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than some other countries in Europe. Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee.
In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. By 1849, both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.
After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also contributed significantly to feminist theory, conceiving, for instance, the concept of monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the domination of men over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers. Engels died in London in 1895.
Early influences
-
For more details on this topic, see Influences on Karl Marx.
Classical Marxism was influenced by a number of different thinkers. These thinkers can be divided roughly into 3 groups:
- German Philosophers including: Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach
- English and Scottish Political Economists including: Adam Smith & David Ricardo
- French Social Theorists including: Jean-Jacques Rousseau;
Charles Fourier;
Henri de Saint-Simon ; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Flora Tristan; Louis Blanc
Other influences include:
- Antique materialism, e.g. Epicurus, Lucretius
- Giambattista Vico
- Lewis Morgan
Main ideas
The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels' collective works include:
- means of production: The means of production are a combination of the
means of labor and the subject of labor used by
workers to make products. The means of labor include machines, tools, equipment, infrastructure, and "all those things
with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it".[2] The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of
production by themselves produce nothing --
labor power is needed for production to take place. - mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including the means of production and labour power) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law; cooperative work relations and forms of association; relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
- base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” metaphor to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[3] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base-structure metaphor.[citation needed] The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between actual entities "in the world".[citation needed]
- class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around them, that a social class possesses, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on said awareness.
- ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology[4], Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[5] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[6] Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).[citation needed]
- historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
- political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity.
- exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labor, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
- alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" (Gattungswesen, usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated. He believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism.
Class
Marx believed that the identity of a social class is derived from its relationship to the means of production (as opposed to the notion that class is determined by wealth alone, i.e., lower class, middle class, upper class).
Marx describes several social classes in capitalist societies, including primarily:
- the proletariat: "those individuals who sell their labour power, (and therefore add value to the products), and who, in the capitalist mode of production, do not own the means of production". According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat due to the fact that the worker's labour power generates an added value greater than the worker's salary.
- the bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the proletariat, who are recompensed by a salary, thus exploiting the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie. The petit bourgeoisie are those who employ labour, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petit bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petit bourgeoisie to the proletariat.
Marx also identified various other classes such as the
- the lumpenproletariat:, criminals, vagabonds, beggars, etc. People that have no stake in the economic system and will sell themselves to the highest bidder.
- the Landlords:, as a class of people that were historically important, of which several still retain some of their wealth and power.
- the Peasantry and Farmers:, this class he saw as disorganized and incapable of carrying out change. He also believed that this class would disappear, with most becoming proletariat but some becoming landowners.
Marx's theory of history
-
For more details on this topic, see Historical materialism.
The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time - this means the relationships which people enter into with one another in order to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and their families. [7]. In general Marx and Engels identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.[8]
The First Stage may be called Primitive Communism, and refers in general to the hunter-gatherer societies in which there are many individual possessions but no private property in the Marxist sense of the term. Many things, such as land, living quarters, food and other means of existence, may be shared (commonly owned) in various ways.
The primitive communism stage begins with the dawn of humanity and ends with the development of private property, such as cattle and slaves, and the rising of city-states.
Private property in the terminology of Marx's time, for Marx himself, and for Marxists today, does not mean the simple possessions of a person, but the ownership of productive property or property which produces a profit for the owner, such as corporate ownership, share ownership, land ownership, and, in the case of slave society, slave ownership, since the slaves worked the land, mines and other means of producing the material means of existence.
The Second Stage may be called Slave Society, considered to be the beginning of "class society" where private property appears.
The slave-owning class "own" the land and slaves, which are the main means of producing wealth, whilst the vast majority have very little or nothing. The propertyless were the slave class, slaves who work for no money, and in most cases women, who were also dispossessed during this period. Slave society collapsed when it exhausted itself. The need to keep conquering more slaves created huge problems, such as maintaining the vast empire that resulted. The Roman Empire, for example, was eventually overrun by what it called "barbarians".
The Third Stage may be called Feudalism, where there are many classes such as kings, lords, and serfs, some little more than slaves. A merchant class develops. Out of the merchants' riches a capitalist class emerges within this feudal society. However, the old feudal kings and lords cannot accept the new technological changes the capitalists want. The capitalists are driven by the profit motive but are prevented from developing further profits by the nature of feudal society where, for instance, the serfs are tied to the land and cannot become industrial workers and wage earners. Marx says, Then begins an epoch of social revolution (The French Revolution of 1789, Cromwell in Britain, etc) since the social and political organization of feudal society (or the property relations of feudalism) is preventing the development of the capitalists' productive forces. [9]
Marx paid special attention to the next stage. The bulk of his work is devoted to exploring the mechanisms of capitalism, which in western society classically arose "red in tooth and claw" from feudal society in a revolutionary movement.
Capitalism
Capitalism may be considered the Fourth Stage in this schema. It appears after the bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrow the feudal system. Capitalism is categorized by the following:
- Free Market economy: in capitalism the entire economy is guided by market forces. Supporters of Laissez-faire economics argue that there should be little or no intervention from the government under capitalism. Marxists, however, such as Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, argue that the capitalist government is a powerful instrument for the furtherance of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state, particularly in the conquest of markets abroad.
- Private property: the means of production are no longer in the hands of the monarchy and its nobles, but rather they are controlled by the capitalists. The capitalists control the means of production through commercial enterprises (such as corporations) which aim to maximize profit.
- Parliamentary democracy: the capitalists tend to govern through an elected centralized parliament or congress, rather than under an autocracy. Capitalist (bourgeois) democracy, although it may be extended to the whole population, does not necessarily lead to universal suffrage. Historically it has excluded (by force, segregation, legislation or other means) sections of the population such as women, slaves, ex-slaves, people of color or those on low income. The government acts on behalf of, and is controlled by, the capitalists through various methods.
- Wages: in capitalism, workers are rewarded according to their contract with their employer. However their hours or rate of work are often subject to increase outside their immediate control, and their wage is, in any case, but a fraction of the true value produced by their labor. The unpaid labor of the working class is the essential component of the profit for the capitalist, because the worker is not paid the true value of his labor: he is exploited
- Warfare: capitalism spreads from the wealthiest countries to the poorest as capitalists seek to expand their influence and raise their profits. This is done directly through war, the threat of war, or the export of capital. The capitalist's control over the state can thus play an essential part in the development of capitalism, to the extent the state directs the warfare or other foreign intervention.
- Monopolistic tendencies: the natural, unrestrained market forces will create monopolies from the most successful and/or vicious commercial entities.
In capitalism, the profit motive rules and people, freed from serfdom, work for the capitalists for wages. The capitalist class are free to spread their laissez-faire practices around the world. In the capitalist-controlled parliament laws are made to protect wealth and the wealthy.
But, according to Marx, capitalism, like slave society and feudalism, also has critical failings - inner contradictions which will lead to its downfall. The working class, to which the capitalist class gave birth in order to produce commodities and profits, is the "grave digger" of capitalism. The worker is not paid the full value of what he or she produces. The rest is surplus value - the capitalist's profit, which Marx calls the "unpaid labour of the working class." The capitalists are forced by competition to attempt to drive down the wages of the working class to increase their profits, and this creates conflict between the classes, and gives rise to the development of class consciousness in the working class. The working class, through trade union and other struggles, becomes conscious of itself as an exploited class.
In the view of classical Marxism, the struggles of the working class against the attacks of the capitalist class lead the working class to struggle to establish its own collective control over production - the basis of socialist society. Marx believed that capitalism always leads to monopolies and leads the people to poverty; yet the fewer the restrictions on the free market, (e.g. from the state and trade unions) the sooner it finds itself in crisis.
Socialism
After the working class gains class consciousness and mounts a revolution against the capitalists,
Lenin divided the period following the overthrow of capitalism into two stages: first socialism, and then later, once the last vestiges of the old capitalist ways have withered away, communism (Lenin: The State and Revolution). Lenin based his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, on a thorough study of the writings of Marx and Engels. Marx uses the terms the "first phase" of communism and the "higher phase" of communism, but Lenin points to later remarks of Engels which suggest that what people commonly think of as socialism equates to Marx's "first phase" of communism.
Socialism may be categorized by the following:
- Decentralized planned economy: without the market, production will be directed by the workers themselves through communes or workers' elected councils.
Common property : the means of production are taken from the hands of a few capitalists and put in the hands of the workers. This translates into the democratic communes controlling the means of production.- Council democracy: Marx, basing himself on a thorough study of Paris Commune, believed that the workers would govern themselves though system of communes. He called this the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, overthrowing the dictatorship (governance) of capital, would democratically plan production and the resources of the planet.
- Labor vouchers: Marx explained that, since socialism emerges from capitalism, it would be "stamped with its birthmarks." Economically this translates into the individual worker being awarded according to the amount of labor he contributes to society. Each worker would be given a certificate verifiying his contribution which he could then exchange for goods.
Marx explains that socialist society, having risen from a self conscious movement of the vast majority, makes such a society one of the vast majority governing over their own lives:
| “ | The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. [10] | ” |
Now the productive forces are truly free to develop, but in a democratically planned way, without the vast waste of anarchic capitalist society, its wars and destruction of the planet. One of the primary tasks of the workers in the socialist society, after placing the means of production into collective ownership, is to destroy the "old state machinery.” Hence the bourgeoisie's parliamentary democracy ceases to exist, and fiat and credit money are abolished. In Marx's view, instead of a dictatorship of capital, in which rulers are elected only once every few years at best, the state is ruled through the dictatorship of the proletariat with the democratically elected workers' commune to replace the parliament:
| “ | The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class.... The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves.... Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests.... The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence... they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.[11] | ” |
The commune, in Marx and Engels' view, modeled after the Paris Commune, has a completely different political character from the parliament. Marx explains that it holds legislative-executive power and is subservient only to the workers themselves:
| “ | The Commune, was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time...Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent and repress [ver- and zertreten] the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants for his business. [12] | ” |
Marx explained that, since the first stage of socialism would be "in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges", each worker would naturally expect to be awarded according to the amount of labor he contributes, despite the fact that each worker's ability and family circumstances would differ, so that the results would still be unequal at this stage, although fully supported by social provision.
Fiat money and credit whose values were determined by anarchic market forces are abolished. Instead, in his Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx speculated schematically that from the "total social product" there would be deductions for the requirements of production and "the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc" which latter deduction "grows in proportion as the new society develops", and, of course, deductions "for those unable to work, etc". After these deductions the workers could divide up the wealth produced by their labor and everyone could be simply given a "certificate from society", which could then be exchanged for products. This schematically introduces a means of exchange ("the same principle" i.e. money) in socialist society but with the speculative element removed.
In this way, each worker is paid according to the amount of labor contributed to society, in other words according to the agreed difficulty, length of time, and intensity of his labor. All goods (such, for instance, as housing) are priced in a greater degree according the amount of labor required to produce them, which the individual worker can buy with his labor voucher.
| “ | What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social
working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part
of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished
such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the
social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to
society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form. [13] |
” |
Only if this new socialist society manages to end the destructiveness of capitalism and leads to a higher quality of life for all will socialist society be successful. As socialism raises everyone's quality of life above the precarious existence they knew hitherto, providing decent health care, housing, child care, and other social provision for all without exception, the new socialist society begins to break down the old inevitably pecuniary habits, the need for a state apparatus will wither away, and the communist organization of society will begin to emerge. Socialism, in the view of Marxists, will succeed in raising the quality of life for all by ending the destructive contradictions which arise in capitalism through conflicts between competing capitalists and competing capitalist nations, and ending the need for imperialist conquest for the possession of commodities and markets.
Communism
Some time after socialism is established society leaps forward, and everyone has plenty of personal possessions, but no one can exploit another person for private gain through the ownership of vast monopolies, and so forth. Classes are thus abolished, and class society ended. Eventually the state will "wither away" and become obsolete, as people administer their own lives without the need for governments. Thus, communism is established, which has the following features:
- Statelessness: there is no government or nations any more.
- Classlessness: all social classes disappear, everyone works for everyone else.
- Moneylessness: there is no money, all goods are free to be consumed by anyone that needs them.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx describes communism as:
| “ | When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away b |