Marxism
relates to a sequence of doctrines about capitalism and communism based on the
work of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, journalist, and revolutionary.
Marx doctrines are based on Hegel's philosophy, Ricardian economics, and 19th
century French socialism to develop a study of his own society that he claimed
was both scientific and revolutionary. "Marxism" therefore, represents this
critique both as a systematized whole and as a theory of persisting germaneness.
Hegel designed a form of idealism in which ideas progressively developed in
history. Marx retained Hegel's accentuation on history, but based his theories
on Hegel’s in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas. Marx material
theory of history, known as historical materialism, is given in his A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of
their being, men ultimately enter into certain relations, who are autonomous of
their will, specifically relations of production apropos to a given level in the
development of their material forces of production. The entirety of these
relations of production establishes the economic structure of society, the true
base, on which originates a legal and political super system and to which
conform to certain forms of social consciousness. The method of production of
material life circumstances the common process of social, political and
intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that decide their being,
but their social being that decide their consciousness. Marx accentuated that
the growth of material life will come into conflict with the superstructure.
These dissensions, he noticed, were the mercurial force of history. Marx
depicted his ideas most eminently by the growth of capitalism from feudalism,
and by the growth of socialism from capitalism.
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Political economy is fundamental to this concept, and Marx constructed on and
criticized the British classical economists. Marx pursued Adam Smith and David
Ricardo in noting that the origin of profits under capitalism is value added by
workers not paid out in wages. He refined this theory of exploitation of the
lower class with a display of the labor theory of value in the first volume of
Capital, while remaining apprised that the labor theory of value was not a sound
theory of relative prices. He criticized Smith and Ricardo, conversely, for not
being responsive of their economic concepts that reflect capitalist
institutions, not intrinsic natural properties of mankind, and could not be
exercised invariably to all societies. Other important elements of Marxist
economics are the Marx's theories of business cycles; of economic growth and
development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of
profit.
Marxists concluded that capitalist society is divided into two social classes:
the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals
who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he held were
liable for creating the wealth of a society; buildings, bridges etc are
physically built by members of this class. The proletariat may be subsequently
subdivided into the common proletariat and the lumped proletariat, those who are
radically poor and cannot find legal work on a routine basis. These may be
prostitutes, beggars, or homeless people and the bourgeoisie: those who "own the
means of production” and employ the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be
subsequently subdivided into the very rich bourgeoisie and the trivial
bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but also work themselves. These may be
small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx refined
these ideas to brace his advocacy of socialism and communism:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to
change it. Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been
ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the ‘fruits of
their labor’”.
Socialists oftentimes do not identify an individual right to private property.
Anyhow, socialist philosophers have debated that there is not a particular right
to private property, although it might be in the better interest of society in
general for specific individuals to have sole control over certain goods, so
long as this control does not lead to the class divisions and exploitation of
the working class they try to exterminate. Marx points out that because
individuals are not rewarded more on the basis of supply and demand, there is
less incentive for individual achievement, improving technology, and other
factors that result in a higher standard of living. Socialist suggested that the
working class should take over the existing capitalist state, veering it into a
workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures,
essential, and then "wither away". On the revolutionary side people such as
Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin debate that the state per se was the dilemma
and that destroying it should be the goal of any revolutionary activity.
Myriad governments, political parties, social movements, and scholastic
theorists have demanded to be instituted on Marxist principles. Social
democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other eastern
countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in countrified developing countries are
illustrations. These endeavors have supplemented new ideas to Marx and
differently transfigured Marxism so much that it is hard to stipulate its
essence. In reality, Marxism is not’sociology’. It just surfaces from the point
of view of every other individual section of the intellectual division of
labor-philosophy, economics, history, history of ideas, etc. Marxism goes yonder
their pointed subject-matter, asserting that the genuine content of each of them
is to be discovered in the paradoxical entirety of social economic relations
from which rill the forms of activity and belief to which the individual codes
address themselves. Marx's manipulation of political economy takes to their
limitation the paradoxical developments of classical political economy.
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For Marx class is grounded in social relations of production, and cannot be
designated in the first place to relations of distribution and consumption or
their ideological reflections. In inasmuch as the class consciousness of the
proletariat, Marxists are consequently not moved with the arguments of
individual workers about their position in society so much as with the
succeeding order of classes: accounts of production that may be the sale of
labor-power, exploitation; conflict of workers and employers on this basis like
economic struggles, trade unions, elementary political battles for economic
ends; conflict at the level of class such as economic struggles which merge into
the conflict between classes, which is organized through the political parties
and the struggle for state power; the theoretical and practical struggle to
build revolutionary parties of the working class, in conflict with
non-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies in the class and their
reflection inside the revolutionary party.
Hence, for instance, a worker in the motorcar industry will progress via his
elemental experience to a comprehension of the gap between his own standard of
life, income and conditions of work, and the magnitude of wealth to whose
production he endows. He will identify interest, on this ground, with other
wageworkers. 'Combinations' or trade unions are the commensurate exposition of
this level of consciousness. This 'trade union consciousness' may accord other
theoretic, captious views on various aspects of capitalist society. Also
'sophisticated' socialist beliefs of class-consciousness oft concern to a
process of more or less impromptu political ripening through a series of
economic struggles, which take on larger extent, ultimately posing demands,
which the system cannot meet. In the 19th century, Marx and Engels during their
analysis of the working class elaborated their theory of socialism. The theory
is permanently the fundamental part of the process by which the working class
becomes a class 'for itself'. As a conjecture, it had first to pervade below the
routine exceptional form of capitalist society to the social relations of
production. It established that production under capitalism proceeds, and
society develops, not by way of any conscious plan, but via the force to produce
surplus value, resultant on the decrease of labor-power to a commodity, to units
of 'abstract labor'. This is the essential quality of the worker’s exploitation,
rather than the fact. What he yields is basically surplus value, the increment
of that same capital which overwhelms him.
Out of these fundamental relationships, Marx established the reality of the
history of capitalism, the way in which private ownership came to a
revolutionary collision with the more development of the forces of production.
It is observed that even though the mass of workers experience capitalist
exploitation, it is essential for a struggle to take place between their present
consciousness and conversely with Marxism. The revolutionary Marxist party
conducts this struggle, as part of the struggle of material forces. The
socialist revolution engages an entire eon. Its result is determined by a series
of conflicts in every country, driving the developed strategy and tactics of
revolutionary parties and a revolutionary international whose whole perspective
and experience is guided by the ideational groundwork laid by Marx.
Marx says that through the socialist revolution, men will enter 'the realm of
freedom'. Resulting from the product's domination over the producer
consciousness will then not be the distorted ideology of oppressive social
relations, but will be the expression of the scientifically-orientated will of
the collective producers, of 'socialized humanity'. 'The free development of
each will be the condition of the free development of all.' Even now the
struggle of the working class contra capitalism boost this essential question of
the relation between subject and object, thus introducing Marx to say that
philosophy can conceive itself only via the proletariat. Capitalism asserts the
question in general from for the whole class in its relation to the rest of
society, and thus demands nothing less than a revolutionary solution: ' . . .
the labor employed on the products appears here as the value of those products,
au a material quality possessed by them.' (Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha
Programme') This 'reification' in which a social relation among men in their all
but basic activity is metamorphosed into a 'thing' standing outside and against
men, is particular to the way in which the capitalist system proceeds the
subjugation of man by man. This 'topsy-turvy world' becomes in sociology a world
of 'social facts', of 'roles', painstakingly attended to as the necessary
framework of experience.
Evenhanded as the working class in its struggle must cast-off this divide
between subject and object as a danger to its very humanity, so should Marxist
theory pierce below it and point the way to its interior dissension and
historical nemesis. For Marxists working-class consciousness is cognizant in
struggle of the process through which the proletariat develops from its identity
as formed by capitalism to the working class arranged as a revolutionary force
for the taking of power and the building of socialism. This process must be
clutched argumentatively, to say as a conflict of adversaries, a real conflict
between the classes as it is and as the Marxist movement fights for it to be, on
the bedrock of analyzing the objective developments in society.
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It is the neglect to identify and to start from this conflict, which restricts,
as an example, the work of Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness
(1923-1924). Lukacs cannot get outside the notion of 'adjudged' or 'adequate'
consciousness, which is bemused by the analyst according to his scientific
estimation of the needs of the class historically. Lukacs' own succeeding
submission to Stalinism was fixed in this stationary and au fond idealist
conception of class-consciousness, imported from neo-Kantian philosophy. It
assisted him in a very unrefined way to embrace and become an apologist for
Stalinist acquiescence in the communist movement. Lukacs contended that the main
concept of dialectics is 'totality'; and here below he displays the incompetence
of his perspective for a theory of class-consciousness. To Marx, the struggle,
the unity and the interpenetrating of opposites is the core of dialectics, and
this dialectic is materialist, so that for Marxists the assumption of entirety
must have a definition unlike given by Lukacs. Engels wrote, 'The unity of the
world consists in its materiality'. It is idiosyncrasy of Lukacs' skepticism on
the question of the objective nature of the external world as presented in the
History and Class Consciousness, that he must take 'totality' and the
proletariat's grip of this entirety as an idea. Just a belief of the 'unity' or
'totality' of the objective world of nature and society which sees this unity as
beginning all the time from a changing conflict of material fronting can form
the basis of 'revolutionary practice', the requirement of Marx's theory of
knowledge.
In his The Sociology of Marx, 1968, Henri Lefebvre has criticized Lukacs for his
stress on 'totality' and has argued that 'the conflict of opposites' is in fact
the core of dialectics. Nonetheless, in Lefebvre's work this legitimate
criticism remains entirely theoretical, and leads him in time to Utopianism. He
begins from the theory of a struggle of opposites, but leaves it at the stage of
the very widespread theories of praxis and estrangement. Taken from Marx's early
work these terms enable Lefebvre to make often-penetrating anecdotes of
capitalist culture, but they remain altogether too abstract for a revolutionary
theory of class-consciousness. Aloof from practice, i.e., from the activity of
the class and the fight for a working-class leadership on a Marxist basis, t he
theory remains purely critical.
Lefebvre criticizes, to cite an instance, Lucien Goldmann, since the latter,
bursting forth the work of Lukacs, over-emphasizes the circumstance of
'reification' so much that his contention amounts to a practical agreement,
rather than a criticism, of the forms of objectivity ordained on mindfulness by
capitalist society. However this criticism is incommensurate, and needs in the
end to be turned against Lefebvre him. Goldmann, in the epoch between 1957 and
his death in 1973, obstinate radical skepticism about the revolutionary role of
the working classes under prevalent capitalism. Besides certain economic and
political changes in the capitalist system he did so on the grounds that, such
as the part played by state intervention in the economy, the ability of
capitalism to supply an ever-increasing amount of consumer goods had eroded
working class consciousness. This recommends at once that Goldmann's primeval
reasons for taking in the revolutionary character of the proletariat were
impaired, from the Marxist standpoint (this comment is presented in his articles
in Les Temps Modernes for 1957 and 1958, reprinted in Recherches Dialectiques,
Paris, 1959). Goldmann thinks up of ideas and doctrines as mental
interpretations of economic and social patterns, rather than as the outcome of
the struggles of the class at all levels of social reality (Les Temps Modernes
for 1957 and 1958, chapter VI). Also this has presented a thoroughfare for him
to embrace the fashionable 'structuralist' school of philosophy in France. The
categorical paradoxical process of the struggle for revolutionary consciousness,
the conflicts between theory and practice, within party and class and,
particularly, the struggle of tendencies within the labor movement and on the
inside of the revolutionary party, and the class bases of these struggles.
Citing Marx, "Modern bourgeois society”, with its relations of production, of
exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of
production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to
control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For
many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of
the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that is the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that,
by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on
its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only
of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces,
are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that,
in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of
over-production.
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Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply
of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And
why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too
much industry too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois
property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions,
by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they
bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these
crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces;
on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more
extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby
crises are prevented.
For the working class to develop as a class 'for itself' requires not merely the
preoccupation of the experience of capitalist society, but the captious struggle
against this perceived by a party armed with the whole theory of Marxism. Party
and class are two interpenetrating contrasting at one level that is the class
'for itself' and the class 'in itself'. These two beams at the same time develop
a whole of the working class which itself is one pole as against its opposite
that is the capitalist class in another paradoxical whole of the capitalist
society. Society challenges nature, as it’s 'opposite'. The working class ought
to comprehend itself, over against capitalism, comprising all the classical
gains for humanity made by capitalism at the same time as conquering it. This it
can do however when the perspective, strategy and tactics of a Marxist party
preponderate in the actions of the class as a class, in radical struggles. A
comparable process is indispensable on the inside of the party. On the inside of
the Marxist party, once again we have a struggle of paradox, a struggle for the
outgrowth of Marxist theory and its employment to the struggles of the
proletariat, in unchanging struggle against every manner of becoming suited to
the existing position of the working class, its antagonism, fragmentation, else,
those miens of its status which prearrange it towards agreement of its
oppression. Then theory itself must also be carefully thought about as a
struggle of opposites.
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