Classical Marxism
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Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by
Karl Marx
As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked: "[T]here are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike".
Early influences
The early influences on Marx are often grouped into three categories, namely
German philosophy
Main influences include Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils,
English and Scottish political economy
Main influences include Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists.
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. He proposed a systematic correlation between labor values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is the value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labor 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 Smith and Ricardo.
French socialism
Main influences include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Louis Blanc.
Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property and is sometimes considered a forebear of modern socialism and communism, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings.
In 1833, France was experiencing a number of social problems arising out of the
Louis Blanc is perhaps best known for originating the social principle, later adopted by Marx, of how labor and income should be distributed: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".[4]
Other influences on Marx
Main influences includes Friedrich Engels, ancient Greek materialism, Giambattista Vico and Lewis H. Morgan.
Marx's revision of
Marx was influenced by Antique materialism, especially Epicurus (to whom Marx dedicated his thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty.
Marx drew on Lewis H. Morgan and his social evolution theory. He wrote a collection of notebooks from his reading of Lewis Morgan, but they are regarded as being quite obscure and only available in scholarly editions. (However Engels is much more noticeably influenced by Morgan than Marx).
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820, Wuppertal, Prussia – 5 August 1895, London) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. He developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx.
In 1842, his father sent the young Engels to England to help manage his cotton factory in Manchester. Shocked by the widespread
In July 1845, Engels went to England, where he met an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns (Crosby), with whom he lived until her death in 1863 (Carver 2003:19). Later, Engels lived with her sister Lizzie, marrying her the day before she died in 1877 (Carver 2003:42). These women may have introduced him to the Chartist movement, of whose leaders he met several, including George Harney.
Engels actively participated in the
Marx and Engels
Marx and Engels first met in person in September 1844. They discovered that they had similar views on
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. The contributions of Marx and Engels to the formation of Marxist theory have been described as inseparable.[8]
Main ideas
Marx's main ideas included:
- Gattungswesen, usually translated as "species-essence" or "species-being"). He believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[9]Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism—it is not necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated.
- dialectical one, ineffable in a sense except as it unfolds in its material reality in the actual historical process (which scientific socialismaims to explain and ultimately to guide).
- Class consciousness: class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possesses and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. However, other methods of revolutionary action have been developed, such as vanguardism.
- 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.
- 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).
- labor poweris needed for production to take place.
- Ideology: without offering a general definition for "ideology",[12] 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”.[13] 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”.[14] 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).
- Mode of production: the mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including human the means of production and labour power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials and improved land) 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).
- 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.
Marx's concept of class
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Marx believed that class identity was configured in the relations with the mode of production. In other words, a class is a collective of individuals who have a similar relationship with the means of production (as opposed to the more common idea that class is determined by wealth alone, i.e. high class, middle class and poor class).
Marx describes several social classes in capitalist societies, including primarily:
- The labor power generates an added value greater than his salary.
- The labor power from the proletariat, who are recompensed by a salary, thus exploitingthe proletariat.
The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the
Marx also describes the
Marx's theory of history
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.[17] In general, Marx and Engels identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.[18]
- Primitive communism
- Asiatic
- Ancient slave society
- Feudalism
- Modern bourgeois society
See also
References
- ^ Gluckstein, Donny (26 June 2014). "Classical Marxism and the question of reformism". International Socialism. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
- ^ The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism by Vladimir Lenin at the Marxists Internet Archive.
- ^ "MSN Encarta – France". Archived from the original on 2009-10-28.
- ^ "MSN Encarta – Communism". Archived from the original on 2009-10-28.
- ISBN 9781602060944.
- ^ "MSN Encarta - Giambattista Vico". Archived from the original on 2009-10-10.
- ^ The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.
- ^ For example see Franz Mehring: “The more their thought and their development became one, the more they each remained a separate entity and a man”, in Mehring: Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), Chapter 8 Marx and Engels 2. An Incomparable Alliance
- ^ A Dictionary of Sociology, Article: Alienation
- ^ See Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Preface, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas, and Engels: Anti-Dühring (1877), Introduction General
- ^ Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1957). xiii.
- ^ Joseph McCarney: Ideology and False Consciousness Archived 2013-05-09 at the Wayback Machine, April 2005
- ^ Engels: Letter to Franz Mehring, (London July 14, 1893), transl. by Donna Torr, in Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers 1968
- ^ Karl Marx, The German Ideology
- ^ The Communist Manifesto 80-87
- ^ N. Hunt, Richard (1984). Classical Marxism, 1850-1895.
- ^ See in particular Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
- ^ Marx makes no claim to have produced a master key to history. Historical materialism is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself". (Marx, Karl, Letter to editor of the Russian paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym, 1877) His ideas, he explains, are based on a concrete study of the actual conditions that pertained in Europe.