Marxism
Marxism refers to the
philosophy and
social theory on one hand, and to the
political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand (namely, parts of the
First International during Marx's time,
communist parties and later
states).
Karl Marx, a 19th century
German,
Jewish,
socialist philosopher,
economist,
journalist, and
revolutionary, often in collaboration with
Friedrich Engels, drew on
G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy, the
political economy of
Adam Smith and
David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French
republicanism and socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his most famous work,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as
Das Kapital (1867). He believed that a revolution would be the catalyst in the transformation from capitalism to
socialism. Locating itself at the
far left, Marxism has been situated largely outside the Western
political mainstream since its inception and up to the present day, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes survive in most countries around the world, while the influences of Marx's philosophy may be found in many Marxist and non-Marxist works around the world.
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Marxism is based on the works of the nineteenth century philosopher, Karl Marx. |
Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing
bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and
communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency, later known as
social democracy, came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the
Second International and these parties supported their own governments in the First World War. This issue caused the communists to break away, forming their own parties which became members of the
Third International. The contemporary meanings of these terms was initially quite different:
Lenin, for example, was considered a social democrat until the mutation of the latter movement.
Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary
social movements and
political parties around the world, since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, very few countries have governments which describe themselves as Marxist. Although socialistic parties are in power in some Western nations, they long ago distanced themselves from their direct link to Marx and his ideas. As of 2005,
Laos,
Vietnam,
Cuba, and the
People's Republic of China had governments in power which describe themselves as
socialist in the Marxist sense -- to a certain extent, also
Venezuela. However, the
private sector comprised more than 50% of the
mainland Chinese economy by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially liberalised its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong control over the means of production.
To Marx, the notion of a socialist state would have seemed oxymoronical, as he defined socialism as the phase reached when class society and the state had already been abolished. Instead, Marx would have described such self-proclaimed "socialist" states as the Soviet Union or China as workers' states, a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. Once socialism had been established, society would develop new socialist relations over the course of several generations, reaching the stage known as communism when bourgeois relations had been abandoned. Such a development has yet to occur in any historical self-claimed Socialist state. Often it results in the creation of two distinct classes: those who are in government and therefore have power, and those who are not in government and do not have power â€" thus inspiring the term
State capitalism. These statist regimes have generally followed a
command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage.
North Korea is another contemporary socialist state, though the official ideology of the
Korean Workers' Party (originally led by
Kim Il-sung and currently chaired by his son,
Kim Jong-il),
Juche, does not follow doctrinaire
Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the leadership of the Soviet Union.
Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the Cold War. Colonel
Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes the state's official ideology as
Islamic socialism, and has labeled it a
third way between capitalism and communism.
Some
libertarian members of the
laissez-faire and
individualist schools of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist states or
big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels'
Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms have been implemented â€" not by Marxists but in the forms of
Keynesianism, the
welfare state,
new liberalism,
social democracy and other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist states.
To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view, many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism (without abolishing it) by coordinating economic actors and dealing with
market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state."
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G.W.F. Hegel was an important figure in the development of Marxism. |
Marx's rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy and its
philosophical conception of history, but later became mixed with very practical and material questions concerning the rising
workers' movement of the
19th century. Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as being derived from three sources: English
political economy, French
socialism, and
German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.
However,
Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx:
*
Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis,
Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, 1841) for his materialism and theory of
clinamen which opened up a realm of
liberty;
*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which came his idea of
egalitarian democracy;
*
Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of
property is
labour;
*and
Hegel.Although some have distinguished between Marx's works on the basis of a "
young Marx" and a "mature Marx", or by separating them into philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions,
Etienne Balibar (1991) has pointed out that Marx's works can't be divided into "economical works" (
Das Kapital, 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871
Civil War in France which concerned the
Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first "
dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.) Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his
critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the
workers' movement, such as the 1875
Critique of the Gotha Program or the
The Communist Manifesto, written with
Engels a year before the
Revolutions of 1848.
Hegel
Friedrich Hegel proposed a form of
idealism in which the
progress of
freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses through the development of ideas into their contraries. That is, material circumstances in the world are dictated by a series of conflicts and subsequent compromises between ideas. Hegel believed that for every thesis in the history of humanity there arises an antithesis to counter it. In the conflict that follows a synthesis is formed. For example, in France during the 18th century the divine right
absolutism of
King Louis XIV would be a thesis on government. The radical liberalism of
Robespierre would be an antithesis. Finally, the enlightened despotism of
Napoleon would be a synthesis of the two. This process,
dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of the previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as
Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, servants of a World Spirit (
Weltgeist) whose Freedom has been reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the .
The rupture with German Idealism and the Young Hegelians
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died he studied under one of Hegel's pupils,
Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of
Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the
Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus in 1841, the
young Marx progressively broke away with the
Prussian
university and its teachings impregnated by
German Idealism (
Kant,
Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel). Along with Engels, who observed the
Chartist movement in the
United Kingdom, he turned away from the environment in which he grew up and encountered the
proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and
The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also
Max Stirner's
The Ego and Its Own (1844), considered as one of the founding book of
individualist anarchism. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently
alienating, and that replacing God by the Humanity, as did
Ludwig Feuerbach in
The Essence of Christianity (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the
Nation, or even the
Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized
Proudhon, whom had became famous with his cry "
Property is theft!", in
The Poverty of Philosophy (1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one (through the proposition that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around). In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His
theory of alienation, developed in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the
objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "
human nature"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he
criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of
religion into the essence of man (
menschliche Wesen, human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual
subject, as did classic philosophy, including
contractualism (
Hobbes,
Locke and
Rousseau) but also
political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and everything that constitutes our human existence. He claimed that
individualism was essentially the result of
commodity fetishism or alienation. Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict
social determinism which destroyed the possibility of
free will, Marx's philosophy in no way can be
reduced to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear.
Criticisms of the "human rights"
In the same way, following
Babeuf (considered as one of the founder of communism during the
French Revolution), he criticized the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which
economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject". This asserts the preeminence of an individual and
universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized
Bentham's
utilitarianism.
Alongside
Freud and
Nietzsche, Marx thus takes a place amongst the trio of 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its
consciousness. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the
primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European
colonialism) and then through the
globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were symmetrical to the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his
labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts. These rights worked at the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the
industrial revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in
factories and in
cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing
homo economicus. Marx's critique of the ideology of human rights thus departs from the
counterrevolutionary critique by
Edmund Burke, who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the Englishman". However it is not grounded on an opposition to the
Enlightenment's
universalism and
humanist project on behalf of the right of
tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as
Etienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of "human rights", since this therefore appears
both as the language in which
exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle expresses itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a
stake".
[ Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 1993, p.74 original edition ] Das Kapital ironizes the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest
Magna Charta of a day work limited by law":
"The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo!" [ Karl Marx, ]Das Kapital'', chapter X, section 7
But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("
collectivism"
[ Louis Dumont argued that Marx represented exacerbated individualism instead of holism as the popular interpretation of Marxism as "collectivism" would have it ]), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers".
"Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production." [Karl Marx, Das Kapital, chapter XXXII, section 1]
Criticisms of Feuerbach
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's
humanism as excessively abstract, and therefore no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give
ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in
The German Ideology (1846):
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
Also, in his
Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between, firstly, various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with
Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and, secondly, the effective transformation of the world through
praxis, which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy;
Louis Althusser, founder of "
Structural Marxism" in the 1960s, would define it as "
class struggle in
theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the
workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "
young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this distinction poses problems. A year before the
Revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote
The Communist Manifesto, which was preparing for an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "
Proletarians of all countries, unite!". However, Marx's thought changed again following
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's
December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the
French Second Republic and created the
Second Empire which would last until the 1870
Franco-Prussian War. Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation described in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would latter arrive at his theory of
commodity fetishism, described in the first chapter of the first book of
Das Kapital (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed - several Marxist theorists, including
Marxist humanists such as the
Praxis School, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "
epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between the two, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated his
theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of
political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper
Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary
right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.
Historical materialism
Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as
historical materialism (although Engels was the one who coined this term and Marx himself never used it), in the 1859 preface to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social
superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from
feudalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from
capitalism.
The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of
orthodox Marxism, in particular in
dialectical materialism (
diamat, as it was
known in the Soviet Union). They also gave way to a
vulgar materialism as plain
economic determinism (or
economism), which has been criticized by various
Marxist theorists. "Vulgar materialism" was seen as little more than a variety of
economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the
ideological superstructure by the economical
infrastructure. However, this
positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "
scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as
Antonio Gramsci and Althusser.
Some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as
Grundrisse). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the
Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that
Hegel explicitly stated (often in a
racist,
Eurocentric manner, as in his
Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a
teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.
Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the
obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to
Vera Zasulich; the respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from
Algeria; and the sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the
Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to
Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").
Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists. Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control. This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of the classical economists
Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriate this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school [
1] [
2].) He developed this theory of exploitation in
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take.
Capital is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis and the critique of
commodity fetishism. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society. This investigation is commonly taken to commit Marx to a species of
labor theory of value as described above. This and other intrinsic theories of economic value are incompatible with modern, predictive economics in which the theory of value is that of marginalism: on one side, technical production coefficients; on the other, subjective preferences. To neoclassical economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory.
Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or
crisis theory, are other important elements of Marxist economics. Marx later made tentative movements towards
econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary
statistical techniques of
national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of
Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible.
Marx suggested that capitalist dynamics included the
tendential law of a falling rate of profit. The general tendency could be explained by the actions of individual capitalists. Competition forced them to cut costs by boosting labour productivity, yet this technical change through mechanisation caused a corresponding fall in the "productivity of capital" (the output-capital ratio). As such the average rate of profit fell over the economy as a whole. Certain Marxist economists, such as
Henryk Grossman and
Paul Mattick Sr, have used this theoretical edifice to construct a theory of capitalist "breakdown". Others have explained it as an aspect of capitalist crisis, and prone to counter-tendencies during economic booms.
Marx argues that capitalism is, in the words of
Ernest Mandel (an editor of Marx's
Capital), a "gigantic enterprise of dehumanization," described as much in his theory of alienation as in his theory of commodity fetishism. In
The Communist Manifesto, co-written with Engels and published in 1848, Marx and Engels describe the effects capitalism has on the individual and society: Capitalism "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation."
The liberal challenge
The
Austrian School were the first
liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the
Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the
Historical School; Marxist authors have decried the Austrian school as a "bourgeois" reaction to Marx. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes.
Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxistsâ€"including
Rudolf Hilferding, a member of the
Austromarxists â€"attended his seminar in 1905-06. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist
Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to alleged inconsistencies in Marxian theory. Later, neo-
Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labor theory of value.
From a
Marxian point of view, class identity is configured in the base of the relations with the mode of production, in other words, a class, in the works of Marx (as opposed to the more common-sense idea that class is determined by wealth alone, ie. high class, middle class, poor class) is a collective of individuals who have a similar relationship with the means of production.
Marxists describe several
social classes in capitalist societies, including primarily:
* the
working class or
proletariat, which Marx defined as "those individuals who sell their
labor power, (and therefore add value to the products), and who, in the capitalist mode of production, do not own the means of production" who, he stated, were the origin of all
social class. According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions for the
bourgeoisie to
exploit the proletariat due to the fact that the worker's
labor power generates an
added value greater than his
salary.
*the
bourgeoisie, who are those who "own the means of production" and buy
labor 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
petty bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petty 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 petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat. An example of this would be many small businesses giving way to fewer larger ones, without increasing the number of petty bourgeois bureaucrats required to administer each company.
From a Marxist perspective, the actually existing basic classes in today's advanced economies are the capitalist class, the new middle classes who engage in both labour and managerial responsibilities, self-employed proprietors, the working class and a lower "
lumpenised" stratum. Many modern Marxists would argue that due to the
modern global economy, most proletariats now exist almost entirely in the developing world; others argue that, although the imperial proletariat is relatively wealthy and widely incorporated into capitalist structures, this class remains of paramount importance in conflicts with the imperial bourgeoisie.
Marx's works founded "
Historical materialism" (although he himself never referred to the expression and talk about a "materialist conception of history") and most of Marx's work was aimed at the revolution of the economic system. Marx thought that "The philosophers have only
interpreted the world differently; the point is, to
change it." (
Theses on Feuerbach). Communism is an economic system in which the people are the sole beneficiaries of the fruits of their labour, following the revolutionary dissolution of economic classes.
Some of these ideas were shared by
anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as
Mikhail Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin argued that the state
per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity.
Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other
Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core.
It is common to speak of
Marxian rather than Marxist theory when referring to political study that draws from the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies.
Marx's views on the structure of communist society
Other than control by the working class, Karl Marx laid out no plans for the structuring of a communist society or of the society that the working class would build on the way to communism. He assumed the working class could do that for themselves and that it would be a productive society able to meet the needs of the people and much more. The political parties who adopted his theories followed Marx in his optimistic approach and detailed plans for the structuring of socialist society were not put forth or developed. With the success of the
October Revolution in Russia, a Marxist party (the
Bolsheviks) took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society.
The October Revolution and Communism
1917 October Revolution, led by
Vladimir Lenin, was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Many, both inside and outside the revolution, worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism. Consequently, the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to
Jonathan Wolff. Socialist revolution in
Germany and other western countries failed, leaving the
Soviet Union on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued,
war communism and the
New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and
Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of
industrialisation which, while successful, was executed at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation.
Modern followers of
Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the
USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution.
Following
World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the
People's Republic of China,
Vietnam,
Romania,
East Germany,
Albania,
Cambodia,
Ethiopia,
South Yemen,
Yugoslavia,
Cuba, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society.
Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled
People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around
Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of
world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed.
The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments since the death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (
New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in
Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after China's application to join the
WTO this does not seem to apply universally.
The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs. Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true Marxist party. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialismâ€"or, more commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism. Marxism has also had to engage with the rise in the
Environmental movement. A merging of Marxism,
socialism,
ecology and
environmentalism has been achieved, and is often referred to as
Eco-socialism.
There are various criticisms of Marxist theory.
Other articles about Marxism
*
Academic Marxism*
Analytical Marxism*
Antagonistic contradiction*
Austromarxism*
Communism*
Communist Philosophy of Nature*
Contributors to marxist theory*
Council communism*
Criticisms of communism*
Dialectical materialism *
Dictatorship of the proletariat *
Economic determinism*
False consciousness*
Historical materialism*
Legal Naturalism*
Liberalism*
Marxian economics*
Marxist film theory*
Marxist historiography*
Marxist humanism*
Marxist literary criticism*
Marxist philosophy*
Marx's theory of alienation*
Neo-Marxism*
Post-Marxism*
Western MarxismSee also
*
Anarchism*
Anarchism and Marxism*
Crisis theory*
Critical theory*
Communist state*
Communist party*
Communitarianism*
Eco-socialism*
Freiwirtschaft*
Historicism*
History of the Soviet Union*
History of the People's Republic of China*
Khmer Rouge*
Lao People's Revolutionary Party*
Lewis H. Morgan*
Labor theory of value*
Materialism*
Monthly Review*
Participatory Economics aka ParEcon
*
Political economy*
Political philosophy*
Polylogism*
Producerism*
Rethinking Marxism*
Social-conflict theory*
Social evolutionism*
Socialism* E. Screpanti & S. Zamagna (1993):
An Outline of the History of Economic Thought.
*
Marxists Internet Archive*
A Marxism FAQ - under construction*
Libertarian Communist Library Marxism archive*
Introductory article by Michael A. Lebowitz*
History of Economic Thought: Marxian School*
Modern Variants of Marxian political economy*
Rethinking Marxism: A journal of economics, society, and culture*
MRZine A project of Monthly Review Foundation*
Marxist.com In Defence of Marxism
*
Pathfinder Books, Marxist bookstore online*
Marxism Page*
Marxist.net Marxist Resources from the
Committee for a Workers' International*
Marxism FAQ*
The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy (Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath) critique by Karl Popper
*
Debating MarxismMichael Albert (ParEcon) vs. Alan Maass (Marxism)
*
Marx on India and the Colonial Question from the
Anti-Caste Information PageCriticisms
*
Exporting Marx Instead of Smith to Africa, by Christian Sandström
*
Liberalism, Marxism and The State, by Ralph Raico
*
A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories, by David Conway
*
Marx Lite, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
*
Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities, by Ralph Raico
*
Marxism, by David L. Prychitko
*
Museum of Communism*
Marxism As Pseudo-science, by Ernest Van Den Haag
