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In this essay we will discuss about the political theory of Marxism.

“Marxist philosophy is like great poetry – after it no one else can write without taking it into account. “— T. S. Eliot

Karl Marx’s political thought called Marxism is the most vital political philosophy of nineteenth century world. It not only topsy-turvicd the conservative world but created a practical way of politico-econnomic life of Russia and China and served as the model for the toiling mass of the third world, who took it as an way to end poverty, injustice and exploitation of all types. For them, Marxism stood as a symbol of progress and advancement.

According to V. I. Lenin:

“Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action. Marxism continued and completed the main ideological currents of the nineteenth century belonging to the three most advanced countries of mankind.”

There are four corner-stones which build up the structure of Marxism. We shall study these four ingredients of Marxism one-by-one:

1. Dialectical Materialism:

The entire political thought of Karl Marx is based on what is called dialectical materialism. Literally dialectic means “union of opposites”. The expression is rooted in the Greek word dialego which means to debate or discuss with a view to arrive at the truth by admitting the contradictions in the arguments of the opponents.

Although Marx got the idea of dialect, from Friedrich Hegel, he differed from Hegel in many respects and he developed it in his own way. While Hegel believed that human evolution was in a straight line, for Marx it moved in a zig-zag course. Both said that “contradiction was the moving spirit of the world.”

But Marx differed from Hegel from the point of view of approach. For Hegel, human idea was an ultimate reality. But Marx was resolute in his view that it was matter rather than human idea or opinion which was the real thing. In other words, while the Hegelian conception was that the world changes by the force of human thinking, Marx was firm in his conviction that it was matter which was the ultimate reality and the human idea must take a back seat in the social evolution.

For Marx, human idea was nothing but a reflex of the material condition of the society at a particular point of history. Ideas actually emanate from the material condition of the society. He had no doubt that all thinking’s pertaining to religion, politics, philosophy, etc. are the products of actions and reactions of material conditions of society. Dialectics is nothing but actions and reactions (called contradictions).

The onward march of history is actuated by the contradictions between the opposite elements. According to Marx, there are two opposite classes at every stage of social evolution. In the slave system the two classes are the slaves and the slave owners. It takes the form of serfs and feudal lords in the feudal system. In the capitalist system we find the working classes and the industrialists.

Whatever the name of the two classes, one is the exploited and the other is the exploiter. One is the thesis, the other is antithesis. Their actions result in the creation of a new force called the synthesis.

The synthesis does not work unopposed and in the result comes again the tussle between thesis and antithesis. With the creation of synthesis begins a new era. Thus we find the slave system, feudalism, capitalism and finally socialism. When fire is thesis, water is its antithesis and the resultant gas is the synthesis.

This type of action and reaction are found invariably in every stage of history. The last phase of such contradiction is capitalism and working class. The class struggle will come to an end with the emergence of socialism, which will establish a classless society. Marx underlined that it is the dialectics which give us the real insight into the history of human civilisation. This will take us to the materialistic conception of history, which we are going to study at the moment.

2 . Materialistic Conception of History:

According to Karl Marx, the application of dialectical materialism to the study of historical evolution is historical materialism or materialistic conception of history. For Marx, history is a continuous evolutionary process from the lowest or earliest stage to the highest or the most modern state. The change is not effected by any outside agency or transcendental factor. It is rather a self-regulated process in accordance with the laws of dialectical materialism.

Marx underlined the mode of production in material life as the determining factor in the general character of social, political and spiritual process of the world. It is the process of production which is the key factor of social evolution. The productive system and production relation among the men is the foundation of the superstructure of the society. Any change in the mode of production is bound to have a corresponding effect on social relations.

Thus all political institutions, laws and traditions, art and philosophy, religion and morality hinge on the nature of a particular method of production and the nature of relations that obtains between the owners of means of production and the workers engaged in such production.

Marx mentions five stages of human history, namely, the primitive communal system, the slave system, the feudal system, the capitalist system, and socialist system. Except the last one, all these systems came and went yielding place to new ones. Needless to say that the gradual process was on the progressive lines of man-power.

In the case of the first one there was no class exploitation, because the produce could maintain the bare subsistence of the people, there being no surplus which is root factor of exploitation. It applies equally to the last stage, namely socialism, because there the surplus was not in the hands of the few at the head but was distributed among the people!

In the period of slave system, the means of production were rude and primitive and there was a need for a change for better means. So came better methods of agriculture and with it came the feudal system which replaced the slave system. Thus feudalism brought in its trail new laws, new religion and new philosophy.

But the mode of production in the feudal system proved outmoded with the emergence of the Commercial Revolution and Industrial Revolution, which brought in the capitalist system where the industrial workers were engaged in the production for the benefit of the capitalist few who won the industries and factories.

Like the feudal system, the capitalist system too proved unworkable and this was replaced by the workers themselves in a violent revolution in Russia in 1917, whereupon the workers themselves came to own the industries and factories. This socialism is the swan-song of Marx’s materialist conception of history.

Socialism is bound to remain permanent because it is better than any other system, because here the wealth will go to the state, not to any group. In Marx’s diction, the material basis of life in society-is determined by the mode of production. Other factors like geography and population play a minor role in history.

Criticism of Marx’s Materialist Conception of History:

Critics hurl searching attacks on Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism because he kept his eyes closed on the forces other than the economic factors. Economic factor may be just one of the factors, but never the sole or only factor. The material factors loomed so large before him that he made a too simplistic solution of a very complicated problem. We know that the Ramayana war did not relate to economic factor. It arose and ended over Sita. Here Marx must prove a false prophet.

But in defence of Marx we may say that he did not totally ignore the other factors germane to the historical process. He only gave importance to the economic factors. So there is nothing wrong in Marx’s theory.

3 . Class Struggle:

Marxism is a five-dimensioned philosophy, namely dialectical materialism, historical materialism, class-struggle, surplus value and theory of revolution. We have studied the first two. Here we shall take up the third one, namely the class-struggle. There was a group consciousness-or class in every stage of history and its concomitant opposite class.

These two classes conflicted and clashed in all ages in different forms. To say in the words of Karl Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class-struggles…. Each time ended whether in a revolutionary reconstruction of the society at large or in the common run of the contending classes.”

The alignment was on the lines of haves and have-nots which Marx described: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in one word, oppressor and the oppressed, standing constantly in opposition to each other, carried on an interrupted warfare, now open, now concealed.”

We get a very clear definition of class from V. I. Lenin: “Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it”

The earliest stage of man’s history was the hunting stage where the implements for hunting and the hunted animals were taken as the common wealth of the community and it partook the nature of primitive communism. That society had no class conflict, because there was no surplus wealth to appropriate or exploit with. So there was no class-struggle in the primitive stage of human civilisation.

With the coming of the pastoral stage the society got divided on the basis of the owning the herds of cattle and the opposite side without these. The apple of discord was the private property of the cattle. This was the beginning of the class war. As man settled with agriculture on an improved scale, the land became the property and the class conflict veered round the possession of land.

The land-owners and the landless population got polarised. The land-owners became the exploiting class and the landless the exploited ones. The inventions and improvement in technology created the feudal age where the barons exploited the serfs.

But this would not continue forever. The exploited class will rise against the exploiters and they would establish more equitable relations among the people. Thus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the ‘ feudalism was replaced by the capitalist system. That too was not permanent. The all wall-washing French Revolution of 1789 overthrew feudalism. It took some more years for other countries to follow suit.

The emergence of big machines as a fruit of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to big and heavy industries which made the mode of production simple and profits immense so that the factory lords let loose the steam-roller of oppression on the factory workers. Now we find the capitalists and the working classes. Marx called them bourgeoisie and proletariats.

This stage saw the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few who reduced the working class in abject poverty. To say in the words of Marx: “Our epoch, the epoch of bourgeoisie, has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

It is a period of exploitation of wage-labour by capital. But Marx was confident that the proletariats would one day rise in arms to terminate with the capitalist system. This would be the final revolution, because at the end of the revolution the proletariats will come to power and there would be no oppressed class.

In this way, history will reach the stage of socialism which actually took place in Russia and China. In other countries of the world socialism has not come and these countries are still witnessing the conflict between the capitalist and the working class. Socialism cannot be halted anywhere. It is bound to materialize all over the world.

The state, which is an instrument of class-antagonism, will wither away with the oncoming of socialism where public ownership takes the place of private ownership and need-based distribution will operate in place of distribution according to work. When communism will pervade all human relationship, there will be no need for the state, which will wither away without the necessity of being killed.

Criticism of Marxist Class-Struggle:

Marx’s theory of class-struggle has evoked scathing criticism. It is difficult to believe that history of all societies was worked by dispute and distrust of different classes. On the other hand, there was a spirit of fellow-feeling and cooperation among the various interests in the society. The real and universal feeling was class-cooperation. And class-antagonism was few and far between.

The second attack on Marxist class-struggle is that Marx magnified only the economic dispute and did not mention of religious, linguistic and ethnic ones which are present in all societies and as true as the sun and the moon. Revolution took place and wars were fought on other issues than economic. How could one shut his eyes to all such antagonism? So Marx did not give the correct picture in class struggle.

In support of the Marxist class struggle we may conclude that Marx was not blind to the other issues omitted by him. He only emphasised on the economic front, since the bread and butter question is more vital than religion, fine arts or music. So we have to justify the Marxist doctrine of class-struggle.

4 . The Theory of Surplus Value:

The whole philosophy of Marxism is based on the theory of surplus value. In this matter Karl Marx took a leaf out of the book of the classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who are the acknowledged authorities of the theory of value. That theory says that labour is the source of the value of a commodity.

In other words, the value of a commodity is determined by how much labour and time are spent on it. Although the value of a commodity is sometimes influenced by the forces of demand and supply, there is no denying the fact that in the long run the amount of man-power spent on the production of the commodity is the key factor to fix the price of the commodity. Marx called labour concealed labour and the value as crystallised labour. So in the Marxist doctrine labour is also a commodity.

In the capitalist system all the means of production are in the hands of the private factory lords called the capitalists. The worker sells his labour in the manufacture of the commodity for the capitalist owner in the machinery and with the raw material supplied by the capitalist factory owner. It was a sad truism that the wage paid to the workers was much below the price of the things sold in the market.

As a matter of fact, there was a roaring gulf between the two, which enabled the capitalists to pocket a huge difference called the surplus. The surplus amount is worked as the difference between the earning of the workers and the sale price of the produced thing. As a result, the capitalists exploit the surplus for his own private gains. The capitalists rolled in wealth and the workers were to be content with bare subsistence.

About the unfair appropriation of the surplus value by the capitalists, Marx said: “Capitalists are not interested introducing those goods that are useful and needed by society but in extracting as much surplus value as possible.” This is open deprivation of the legitimate dues by the capitalists. This system continues until the workers rise in uprising and overthrow the capitalist order by a classless society called socialism. Thus Marx encourages a revolution of the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Communist Revolution in China in 1949.

Criticism of Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value:

The theory of surplus value comes under heavy criticism on the ground that Karl Marx distorted the relation that exist between the rich ruling class and the working class. The industrialists actually work for the benefit of the workers and launch several welfare schemes. Even effective legislations are enacted to reach the maximum benefits to the toiling and depressed classes.

In the past and the present there existed goodwill and cooperation among all sections of the people in the society. Exploitations and oppressions were few and far between. The revolutions that took place in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949 were not because of economic exploitations but because of the evil effects of the First World War in Russia and the evil effects of the Second World War in China. If economic factor was the real cause, there could have been similar events in England, France, Germany or the USA. So Marx’s theory of surplus value is to be discarded.

All the same, the theory of surplus value had some welcome aspects. It was the inculcation of the doctrine of surplus value that made the work­ing class conscious of their legitimate rights. His teachings opened the eyes of the capitalists also in the sense that they softened their rigour of oppression and evolved a policy of ameliorating the condition of the work­ers. So Karl Marx did not prove a false prophet. This is the bright side of the theory of surplus value.

5 . Theory of Revolution:

The fifth dimension of Marxism is the theory of revolution. We have got a glimpse of Karl Marx’s teachings of revolution as a weapon of the working class to terminate the oppressive regime of the capitalists. Now we shall make a detailed study of it.

The Marxian theory of revolution is the direct outcome of historical materialism, according to which all progress in the society go on the economic lines and on the modes of production. This would ultimately give rise to social revolution. To say in the words of Karl Marx from his Communist Manifesto- “At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From the forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.”

The ratio of dialectical materialism, historical materialism and class- struggle is that in different stages of human history there is conflict between two forces, be it slavery, feudalism or capitalist system. Marx explained- “Free men and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeymen, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another” .

This class struggle is marked by the fights between the exploiters and the exploited. In the seventeenth century, feudalism was replaced by capitalism. The revolution of France in 1789 overthrew the feudalist order and created capitalism. This became the established system all over the world until 1917 when the working class people overthrew the capitalists and captured power in Russia. This was repeated in China in 1949.

Both Russia and China set up socialism, which is the most perfect and the final stage in the evolution of human history. Socialism will come in the world in a bloody way as it did in Russia and China. Thus Marx not only preached socialism but revolution also. Since there is no private property or private gain, there will be no surplus value.

So the Marxian revolution will terminate for ever private enterprise and enthrone public undertaking and everything public. The final stage in Russia and China was achieved by violence. But Marx felt that revolution could be either violent or non-violent Marxist class-struggle reaches its finale in the revolution by the oppressed and exploited class.

The other countries of the world are now passing through the capitalist system where a class-struggle is going on between the capitalists and the working class. All these states will switch over to socialism by effecting a revolution. Marx thus poses as the most outstanding prophet of the twenty-first century.

Criticism of Marxian Theory of Revolution:

The Marxist theory of revolution could not go unchallenged. Marx would have us believe that, in order to break down the capitalist society, revolution will take place in the most industrially advanced countries like England and Germany. This has not yet taken place. On the other hand, revolution took place and socialism was created in industrially backward countries like Russia and China.

In the second place, the critics felt that big changes are possible not by a revolution by the masses but by a change-over effected by the key politicians alone. In recent years socialism was overthrown from Russia in 1991 and Russia became what she had been before socialism. If socialism could be reversed by a slow game, there is no reason why it cannot be brought in by a similar slow dose. Force cannot hold a state together. What holds the state together is the common good of the people.

Lastly, what happened in Russia in 1991 is against the dream of V. I. Lenin. The USSR once again became Russia. Communism has been thrown in the wind, and socialism went on the reverse gear. Thus Marxism suffered a major setback before our very eyes. Now the only big communist country in the world remains to be China. If China also goes on the way of Russia that will be a bad day for communism.

Lenin’s Contribution to Marxism:

V. I. Lenin was the greatest political figure after Napoleon the Great to deflect the political course of world history.

He was a disciple and follower of Karl Marx, but not a blind follower. While Marx was a theoretician, Lenin gave a practical application of Marxism. In so doing, it is but natural that he would deviate from his preceptor in many respects.

He was not only a great interpreter of Marx but he, at the same time, extended the scope of Marxism with changes where necessary. This difference rather constitutes Lenin’s contribution to Marxism.

In the first place, Marx believed that there are two stages of communism. The first stage consists of the overthrow of the capitalists and the establishment instead of the rule of the proletariat class. In this stage the class-struggle subsists and is remarkable for the dictatorship of the proletariats.

In the final stage, socialism comes to stay when everybody gets his share “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” But according to Lenin, the first stage of Marxist communism is really socialism because at that stage the aims of socialism is achieved with the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange of commodities. So Lenin is more precise and less dogmatic than Marx.

In the second place, Lenin simplified Marx’s theory of revolution. According to Marx, a revolution may be violent in its method or it may be peaceful too. Differing from Marx, Lenin was volatile in his approach to revolution holding that a revolution must essentially be violent as it actually had been with regard to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. All these events were marked by violence and bloodshed.

In the third place, Lenin was a great organiser and he gave all emphasis on the communist to act as the vanguard of communisms. Marx appeared to be rather loose in his organisational side. He wanted that the mass people and the working class will lead the communistic state.

The more practical Lenin was of the view that the guidance must come from above, i.e., the party organisation. As a matter of fact, Lenin buttressed the party organisation and kept it as disciplined a body as the army.

In the fourth place, Lenin gave prominence to the peasantry of Russia in the national mainstream. But Marx relied on the working class alone for the working and success of communism. Lenin, on the other hand, was convinced that no revolution was possible without the support of the Russian peasantry.

His slogan was “Land to the peasants”. Lenin wanted to strengthen the communist base in Russia instead of spreading it outside. He believed that if communism was weak in Russia herself, it would crumble in the face of the capitalist strongholds all around Russia. That Russia did not collapse in the capitalist surrounding was a personal achievement of Lenin.

In the fifth place, Lenin made a big advancement in Marxism by his theory of imperialism. Capitalism in its final stage will take the form of imperialism which in its tum will lead to imperialist war. The First World War was an imperialist war. Both imperialism and imperialist wars were welcome.

This will internationalise the class-struggle. That being so, the bourgeoisie will internationalise its stance of capitalism and start a world-wide exploitation. In this case the proletariats will find it easier to locate the citadel of oppression and spike the guns accordingly. There will be a world-wide revolution. Lenin was the first to call world revolution.

This will be the global socialist revolution. Thus we find-that Lenin’s idea of communism was the most dynamic one. Lenin was more tactful and strategist than his master. He was more practical a thinker. It was his achievement to bring communism from aerial height to mundane reality.

Thus we find that Lenin made several spectacular marvels in the domain of Marxism, particularly in the field of strategy and tactics of revolution, role of the party and its strategy and tactics, retelling the philosophy of dialectical materialism.

He stands head and shoulder above all in his theory of dictatorship of the proletariat. In the book Marxism- The View from America the author Clinton Rossiter wrote- “Lenin took four steps towards Bolshevism” .

These were:

(i) Lenin prepared the ground for a proletarian party with narrow membership, oriented organisation, high level discipline; and with party’s relation with the masses as parents and children;

(ii) Lenin revamped the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat;

(iii) Lenin completely identified the communist party with the dictatorship of the proletariat and

(iv) Lenin won and carried on power by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Joseph Stalin paid rich tributes to Lenin:

“Lenin assumed the task of bringing Marx up-to-date, of restating the faith and rescuing the true revolutionary Marxism which had been buried by the opportunists and revisionists.”

This does not and cannot minimise the conception of Karl Marx. Lenin was not an original thinker. He developed on Marx’s thesis and only supplemented his master. If Marx was the cloud, Lenin was the rain. The latter owed his existence to the former.

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Karl Marx: ten things to read if you want to understand him

conclusion on marxism essay

Lecturer in Political Science, University of Exeter

conclusion on marxism essay

Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University

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James Muldoon is a member of the British Labour Party.

Robert Jackson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Manchester Metropolitan University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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As the world reflects on 200 years since the birth of Karl Marx, his writings are being sampled by more and more people. If you’re new to the work of one of the greatest social scientists of all time, here’s where to start.

Marx’s own writing

James Muldoon, University of Exeter

The long history of brutal, totalitarian “Marxist” regimes around the world has left many people with the impression that Marx was an authoritarian thinker. But readers who dive into his work for the first time are often surprised to discover an Enlightenment humanist and a philosopher of emancipation, one who envisaged well-rounded human beings living rich, varied and fulfilling lives in a post-capitalist society. Marx’s writings don’t just propose a revolutionary political project; they offer a moral critique of the alienation of individuals living in capitalist societies.

1. An Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ( Available here )

Originally published in 1844 in a radical Parisian newspaper, this fascinating short essay captures many of Marx’s early criticisms of modern society and his radical vision of emancipation. It also introduces several of the key themes that would shape his later writings.

Marx claims that the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century may have benefited a wealthy and educated class, but did not challenge private forms of domination in the factory, home and field. Marx theorises the revolutionary subject of the working class, and proposes its historic task: to abolish private property and achieve self-emancipation.

2. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ( Available here )

Not published within his lifetime, and only released in 1932 by officials in the Soviet Union, these notes written by Marx are an important source for his theory of capitalist alienation. They reveal the essential outline of what “Marxism” is, and provide the philosophical basis for humanist readings of Marx.

In these manuscripts, Marx analyses the harmful effects of the organisation of labour in modern industrial societies. Modern workers, he argues, have become estranged from the goods they produced, from their own labour activity, and from their fellow workers. Rather than achieving a sense of satisfaction and self-actualisation in their labour, workers are left exhausted and spiritually depleted. For Marx, the antidote to modern alienation is a humanist conception of communism based on free and cooperative production.

3. The Communist Manifesto ( Available here )

conclusion on marxism essay

Opening with the famous line, “a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”, the Communist Manifesto has become one of the most influential political documents ever written. Co-authored with Friedrich Engels, this pamphlet was commissioned by London’s Communist League and published on the cusp of the various revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848.

The manifesto presents Marx’s materialist conception of history and his theory of class struggle. It outlines the growing tensions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat under capitalist relations of production, and predicts the triumph of the workers.

4. The German Ideology ( Available here )

For anyone seeking to understand Marxism’s deeper philosophical and historical underpinnings, this is one of his most important texts. Written in around 1846, again with Engels, The German Ideology provides the full development of the two men’s methodology, historical materialism , which seeks to understand the history of humankind based on the development of its modes of production.

Marx and Engels argue that individuals’ social consciousness depends on the material conditions in which they live. He traces the development of different historical modes of production and argues that the present capitalist one will be replaced by communism. Some interpreters view this text as the point where Marx’s thought began to emerge in its mature form.

5. Capital (Volume 1) ( Available here )

Published in 1867, Capital is Marx’s critical diagnosis of the capitalist mode of production. In it, he details the ultimate source of wealth under capitalism: the exploited labour of workers. Workers are free to sell their labour to any capitalist, but since they must sell their labour in order to survive, they are dominated by the class of capitalists as a whole. And through their labour, workers reproduce and reinforce both the economic conditions of their existence and also the social and ideological structure of their society.

conclusion on marxism essay

In Capital, Marx outlines a number of capitalism’s internal contradictions, such as a declining rate of profit and the tendency for the formation of capitalist monopolies. While certain aspects of the text have been questioned , Marx’s analysis informs economic debate to this day. For anyone trying to understand why capitalism keeps falling into crisis, it’s still hugely relevant.

On Marx and Marxism

Robert Jackson, Manchester Metropolitan University

1. A Companion to Marx’s Capital – David Harvey

From social movements to student reading groups, from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to articles in the Financial Times , Marx’s economic writings are at the centre of debate once again. And one of the figures most associated with these discussions is the geographer David Harvey.

Based on his popular online lecture series, Reading Capital with David Harvey , this book makes Marx’s Capital accessible to a broader audience. Guiding readers through Marx’s challenging (but rewarding) study of the “laws of motion” of capitalism, Harvey provides an open and critical reading. He draws out the connections between this world-changing text and today’s society – a society which, after all, is still shaped by the economic crisis of 2008.

2. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life – Jonathan Sperber

For Jonathan Sperber , a historian of modern Germany, Marx is “more a figure from the past than a prophet of the present”. And, as its title suggests, this biography places Marx’s life in the context of the 19th century. It’s an accessible introduction to the history of his political thought, particularly as a critic of his contemporaries. Sperber discusses Marx in his many roles – a son, a student, a journalist and political activist – and introduces the multitude of characters connected with him. While Francis Wheen’s well-known Karl Marx: A Life is a more freewheeling account, Sperber’s writing is both highly readable and more deeply rooted in historical scholarship.

3. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Writing about the US just over 150 years ago, Marx noted that: “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” And the influence of his ideas about the relationship between race and class is visible in debates right up to the present day.

Penned by academic and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor , who came to popular prominence in the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement, this is a timely read for those interested in the various ways Marx’s thought is being rebooted for the 21st century. A penetrating book, it connects the origins of racism to the structures of economic inequality. With plenty of Marxist ideas (among others) in her toolbox, Taylor critically examines the notion of a “colour-blind” society and the US’s post-Obama order to great effect.

4. Why Marx was Right – Terry Eagleton

A call to reconsider the widely accepted notion that Marx is a “dead dog” from renowned literary theorist Terry Eagleton . In this provocative and highly readable book, Eagleton questions the plausibility of ten of the most common objections to Marx’s thought – among them, that Marx’s ideas are outdated in post-industrial societies, that Marxism always leads to tyranny in practice, that Marx’s theory is deterministic and undermines human freedom. Always witty and passionate, Eagleton peppers his spirited defence (with some reservations) of Marx’s ideas with his own literary and cultural insights.

5. Jacobin magazine – edited by Bhaskar Sunkara (available online )

In the era of the Occupy movement , “ taking a knee ” and #MeToo , the discussion of Marx’s ideas has gained an increasing presence on the internet. One of the most notable examples is the socialist magazine and online platform Jacobin, edited by Bhaskar Sunkara , which currently reaches around 1m viewers a month .

Covering topics from international politics and environmental movements to the recent education strikes in Oklahoma and West Virginia and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, it’s a lively source for anyone who wants to see an analysis of contemporary politics that’s influenced by Marx’s thought.

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Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List

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14 Conclusion

  • Published: November 1993
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The ideas of Marx and List impacted on the revolutionary period in Russia. The events of that period marked a turning point in the history of socialism, Marxism, and the international labor movement. They were all equally important to Russia, Russia nationalism, and nationalism everywhere. However Marxism or Marxism-Leninism is a variant of nationalism. Thus, Marixm-Leninism became a doctrine of national liberation. Marxism won in Russia but it only did if it transformed to nationalism. This new nationalism had three components: Marxism, Listianism, and Russian political tradition. The truth is Nationalism cannot be contained in a pigeonhole of capitalism or communism. Nationalism has established itself, in the Third World, as the third force. It can be an ally or a rival of capitalism and communism. The history of the world was transformed by Marxism and nationalism but the world is continuously changing due to the impact of science.

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Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism pp 207–215 Cite as

  • Igor Shoikhedbrod 4  
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Part of the Marx, Engels, and Marxisms book series (MAENMA)

This concluding chapter recapitulates the central arguments and theses presented in Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism with an eye on relevant research issues that extend beyond the book’s scope. These issues include rethinking the idea of the state in a globalized political economy, critiques of “moral” and “political progress” as they pertain to considerations of justice, legality, and rights, as well as renewed attempts at reconceptualizing the relationship between political theory and political economy in the twenty-first century.

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Shoikhedbrod, I. (2019). Conclusion. In: Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30195-8_7

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

The Marxist Perspective on Society

A summary of some of the key Ideas of Karl Marx, including Bourgeoisie/ Proletariat, exploitation, false consciousness, ideological control, and revolution.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 2, 2023 by Karl Thompson

In order to fully understand Marxism, you need to understand the work of Karl Marx, who produced most of his writing between 1840 and 1870, and in this post I summarise eight of his key ideas.

NB this is a simplified version of Marxist Theory designed for second year A level students, and I have ‘A-levelled’ it!

Although simplified you might like to read this even simpler version written for first year sociology students: Marx: Key Ideas .

The Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

Under Capitalism there are two basic classes- The Bourgeois and The Proletariat, and their relationship to private property defines them.

The Bourgeoisie own Capital – resources such as land, factories and money which can be used to make a profit, their principle source of income.

The proletariat own no capital – just their labour power and must sell it the Bourgeoisie.

NB when Marx talked about ‘private property’ he was talking about privately owned capital (spare ‘property’ for investing for profit), not someone owning their own tools or even one house in which they lived.

The Bourgeoisie exploit the Proletariat

The amount of money the employer pays the worker is less than the total value of goods that worker produces. The difference between the two is called surplus value. Marx thus says that the capitalist extracts surplus value from the worker. To Marx, Profit is basically the accumulated exploitation of workers in capitalist society.

Control of the Economic Base means control of the superstructure

According to Marx those who have economic power control all other institutions. During Marx’s day there was some evidence to suggest this was true – Voting was restricted to men with property; Press Barons used their papers to spread propaganda; and only the children of the wealthy could get to university.

Ideological Control

The Bourgeois use their control of institutions to keep the masses ignorant of their exploitation.

This is known as ideological control. According to Marx this was mainly done through the Mass Media and Religion. Ideological control results in False Consciousness – individuals not being aware (conscious) of their true class position or their exploitation by the ruling class. They are in a state of illusion.

Capitalism causes alienation

Under Capitalism the worker becomes alienated from the process of production, from the people he works with and from the products they produce. This is because he lacks control over his work and becomes a ‘machine’, and thus work appears as ‘alien’ to him.

Marx’s ideas on Capitalism and social change – Competition leads to increasing levels of exploitation – Marx argued that the Capitalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction – it would eventually create the social conditions that would lead to its downfall. In order to stay competitive, Capitalists would have to sell goods at lower prices, which would mean reduced profit.

This would then encourage Capitalists to seek to reduce wages and increase efficiency– making the working conditions of the proletariat ever worse. Marx theorised that increasing numbers of increasingly exploited proletarians crammed into ever expanding cities (where factories were based) would eventually lead to a violent revolution – in which the proletariat would throw off their oppressors.

Revolution and Communism

Marx argued that following the overthrow of the Bourgeois – society would eventually organise itself along Communist lines – where the means of production are collectively owned (no private property) and everyone has equal wealth.

Marx was vague about exactly what the Communist society would look like but argued that in this society ‘each would give according to their ability and take according to their needs’ and that there would be a lot more free time for all.

The point of ‘Social Research’

Marx spent the last decade of his life sitting in the British Library analysing how Capitalism worked and discovered that over time, the degree of exploitation of workers increased. He thus theorised that Capitalism would gradually lead to an increasing amount human misery and exploitation and that it must, one day come to an end.

As far as Marx was concerned, he had realised the truth, and he believed that political action was necessary to ‘wake up’ the proletariat and bring them to revolutionary class consciousness. He spent much of the middle and later parts of his life engaged in efforts to bring about revolutionary change.

Sign Posting – Other Relevant Posts for second year sociology

The Marxist Perspective on Society is usually taught as part of the compulsory Theory and Methods module in the second year of study.

After reading this post you should also read:

Eight Ways in Which Marxism is Still Relevant Today

Eight Criticisms of Traditional Marxism

Related Posts from other Topics Within Sociology

One way to approach Marxist Theory in second year Sociology is to look at what Marxists say about specific areas of society such as the family and education:

  • The Marxist Perspective on The Family
  • The Marxist Perspective on Education
  • Dependency Theory
  • World Systems Theory

Find out more about Marxism – Good external sites

The Marx and Engels Archive – This is a comprehensive site which provides access to Marx’s major works, as well as biographies and articles about Marx, and a picture gallery!

The Communist Manifesto – Published in 1848 this is Marx’s most famous work – the one which contains the classic line ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’.

Marxism 2016 – Ideas for Revolution – This is the homepage of the latest Marxism festival, which is held in London every year over several days, where you can go to hear contemporary Marxists speak and argue amongst themselves.

The Victorian Slum is a BBC recreation of slum life from the 1860s, which was one of the decades when Marx was writing and conveys some of the privations working class slum dwellers had to endure – basically wages just about covered lodging and food. NB – According to this article , the level of squalor was almost certainly worse than in the video. There’s a good level of sociological commentary running through this.

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14 thoughts on “The Marxist Perspective on Society”

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Well if you’re on the A-level path you just have to grind on through I’m afraid. Don’t expect working like to be any more interesting!

Still, only another 50 years ’til you can retire and can do what you like all the time!

Sorry but I can’t help but get bored.

yes, of course 🙂 i’m not an anarchical capitalist – that leads to crony capitalism which results in exploitation

Depends how ‘free’ you allow the free market to be I think!

capitalism has benefited more people than it has exploited. capitalism is the only economic system that can make the poor richer – communism makes everybody equally poor.

capitalism has benefit far more people than it has exploitated. capitalism is the only economic system in which the poor can get rich. communism leads to everyone becoming equally poor. when you are the type of person to believe human nature is inherently good, you support communism – if you believe human nature is flawed, capitalism makes sense.

The primary problem of Marxism is it fails to take into consideration social recognition processes whereby people are motivated to gain recognition for competences.

  • Pingback: What is Alienation? | ReviseSociology

On paper the communist society is fair but when we leave up to men to be implemented they use it for their own selfish ideas and it becomes evil. I am aware that communist feel the need for an army to defend itself against an attack by capitalist, but when does building an army take precedence over human lives. The “have nots” in society need to wake up and change their future through a solid Education.

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21st-century Marx

Each era of modernity has reinvented marx to fit its needs. how can his analysis of capitalism help us today.

by Terrell Carver   + BIO

The 21st century has already welcomed back Karl Marx (1818-1883), rather on the assumption that he had faded away and has now returned to haunt us. After the financial crashes of 2008, his leonine face appeared on international news magazine covers, feature articles in quality broadsheets, TV documentaries and blogposts. The questions Why now? and Why Marx? are easily answered: capitalism suddenly appeared unstable, unmanageable, dangerously fragile and anxiously threatening. It was possibly in an unstoppable downward spiral, pushing individuals, families, whole nations into penury and subsistence. It also appeared hugely unfair and internally contradictory in very dramatic ways: banks ‘too big to fail’ would get taxpayer bail-outs, recklessness and fraud would go unpunished, the super-rich beneficiaries of oligarchical stitch-ups would maintain their ‘high net worth’. Invocations of risk, competition, ‘free’ markets and rising living standards for all no longer seemed credible. So what were we all to think?

As the most stringently systematic critic to date of capitalism, author of a weighty treatise on the subject, and iconic revolutionary intellectual and ‘grand old man’, Marx seemed a likely candidate to enlighten readers of the Financial Times , Der Spiegel , even Time and Newsweek . As an established figure in the liberal arts curriculum, and way more colourful than any number of drily theoretical economists (even including the very charming John Maynard Keynes), the very familiar bushy-bearded communist would guarantee us an alternative view, and secure a lively public debate.

Dim and distant echoes of the Cold War, West vs East, freedom-loving peoples vs enslaved subjects of Iron Curtain tyrannies, etc – all this mid-20th-century fame actually did Marx some good, having made him indelibly historical without (perhaps surprisingly) totally demonising his thought or discrediting his intellect. Any number of biographies, commentaries, philosophical critiques and political polemics attempted to do him down, particularly from the early 1950s through later decades and well into the 1980s, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But a counter-movement had also swelled up in the 1960s, and eventually it overtook the ‘Stalinist Terror’ anti-communist, anti-Soviet, anti-‘Red China’, anti-Marx bluster.

Two short books of the later 1930s had already laid the groundwork: Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx (1936), written and published in the United States, and Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1939), written and published in the United Kingdom. While not uncritical of Marx, and not disconnected from the authors’ own political views, these two books established an important genre: in these works Marx was elevated for the first time to the highest ranks of European philosophy by academic writers who – though writing then as quite young men – soon became notable scholars of repute and made their careers at the highest levels of academia (New York University, and All Souls College, Oxford, respectively). Though writing in English, both were fluent in German and – at least by the standards of the time – well-informed researchers using primary sources. Whatever the vicissitudes of their personal opinions and political positions over the years, these tomes survived, unblemished by anything other than scholarly controversy.

That scholarly and loosely philosophical approach was widely taken up when a ‘humanist Marx’ hit the headlines in the 1960s and caught a wave of student protest, religious activism, ‘Third World’ rebellion and wars of national liberation. The Stalin or Mao version of Marx, and the hermetic East-facing debates that they engendered, looked decidedly stale in Latin America, at the Second Vatican Council, on the anti-war student barricades in the US and France, and anywhere else that the arrogant practice of Great Power politics had caused offence or disaster.

The ‘humanist Marx’ was a world-class intellectual up for debate, rather than a communist icon to be adored or defamed. He was youthful – just in his mid-20s, his texts were hitherto little-known, and moreover they were sketchy, puzzling and sympatico . His editorially titled ‘economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844’, though published in 1932 for German scholars, were circulating among French intellectuals only from the later 1940s, and hit the Anglophone world in translation at the very end of the 1950s. Several bestselling English versions appeared, but neither communist nor anti-communist Cold Warriors had much to say about them, since the concepts therein – famously ‘alienation’ and ‘species-being’ – had featured nowhere in the orthodoxies through which Marxists and anti-Marxists alike had operated ideologically. Most people could spot Marx’s image and register him as a big-browed intellectual. Many would assume – given the Cold Warrior echoes – that he was Russian (which he wasn’t), but then on discovering that he was German, many Anglophones found him just about as alien, yet still appealing.

B oth Stalin and Mao had helpfully provided ‘official’ accounts of Marx’s thought – with due acknowledgement to his very influential friend Friedrich Engels – and there were committed intellectuals on both sides who were more than fluent in the relevant arcana of ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical’ materialism. However, the new ‘humanist Marx’ was quite insulated from all this, since his 1844 manuscript thoughts were ‘Hegelian’ (without anyone’s ‘dialectics’) and ‘historical’ (without anyone’s ‘materialism’). In their own way, they appeared to be quite original, so the youthful Marx could be taken on his own terms, predating any Marxisms at all, and thus any Cold War battlelines, whether intellectual or geographical. One of David McLellan’s first and most influential and successful paperback books was simply titled Marx Before Marxism (1970).

Significantly, the ‘humanist Marx’ had raised the question of economics, though not in the way that 20th-century economists had made familiar, whether they were conventional micro- or macro-economists, or Marxist economists in Moscow or Cambridge. The former ‘mainstream’ economists overwhelmingly ignored Marx and dismissed Marxist economics as politically biased and lacking in rigour; meanwhile, scholars and apparatchiks well-versed in Marxist economics despised ‘mainstream’ economists as uncritical proponents of capitalism. But both sides shared many presumptions and concepts nonetheless in theorising capitalism.

Refreshingly, the ‘humanist Marx’ had set the stage for an examination of capitalist society in ways that bypassed all these efforts in economics, of whichever opposing camp. ‘Alienation’ was neither economics nor Marxist, so it suited the New Left of the 1960s. It functioned as a political critique that required relatively little study, given the brevity of Marx’s early manuscript notes-to-self. In particular, the ‘humanist Marx’ needed no study at all in conventional economics textbooks, based as they were (and still are) on rather abstractly asocial and ahistorical presumptions, and on evidential reasoning that is easily converted to mathematics.

The early Marx’s theory of alienation, however, was rather less vague than it sounds, given that the word refers to feelings of ‘otherness’ or ‘separation’ or ‘estrangement’. In these manuscripts – now canonical as a widely translated text and ubiquitously excerpted for university reading lists – Marx was talking about capitalism as workers experience it, though in terms that were rather more psychological than sociological, but still historically specific, referring to mechanised production, wage-labour employment, and real or metaphorical assembly-line conditions.

The new ‘humanist Marx’ was on-side with visionary intellectuals, uncontaminated with Stalinist political terror

The ‘alienations’ detailed in Marx’s ruminations were of workers from products, workers from processes, workers from each other, and workers from their ‘species-being’. The first three could be easily visualised (even without, as was true of many student readers, much experience of such grinding conditions), whereas the last term was intriguingly philosophical and pointed towards something systemically ‘out of whack’ with ‘the human condition’ – quoting the title of another widely read and self-evidently Germanic book of the times by Hannah Arendt, published in 1958. Any number of deeply felt, loosely organised and generally inchoate critiques of industrial modernity could then adopt Marx, extending even to the Catholic liberation theology and Latin American peasant-farmer activisms.

Thus the ‘humanist Marx’ could evidently stretch way beyond the author’s self-declared and relentlessly argued atheism, and triumph over the still-extant anti-religious persecutions conducted by communist militants in self-styled Marxist regimes. Philosophers, such as John Plamenatz, István Mészáros, Allen W Wood, Bertell Ollman, Kostas Axelos and David Leopold, forgave the rather simple moralising about factory or factory-like working conditions, which had overtones of industrial sociology and ‘pop’ psychology, since ‘species-being’ offered a suitable puzzle that connected with a familiar concern: what is it to be human? And to be ‘realised’ as such, ‘as a species’? What makes humans different from (other) animals exactly? And how should society be organised so as to fulfil this ‘essence’?

Marx’s sketches provided some interesting if incomplete answers, unburdened with references and footnotes (which scholars in philosophy very ably provided over the years). He wrote that humans raise ideas creatively and therefore make history, as opposed to animals whose nature is repetitiously instinctive and narrowly species-delimited. His view was that humans can produce their social lives in the manner of any species, and can indeed remake themselves – even physically and sensuously, as well as morally and culturally – as they do so. If modern industrial production could be redeemed from the everyday numbness (or worse) of this four-fold crisis of alienation, then ultimately humans could flourish in a wholly transformed social setting. Such decidedly non-capitalistic relations of production, distribution, consumption and exchange would then permit individual fulfilment within a community worthy of the species potential.

Thus, the new ‘humanist Marx’ was on-side with visionary, even religious intellectuals, and evidently uncontaminated with Stalinist political terror and Maoist cultural revolution. He was compatible with the quotidian miseries and angst of both factory work and chronic unemployment, with both the commodified sterility of bourgeois consumerism and the banality of mass-produced commercial culture. One-Dimensional Man (1964) by Herbert Marcuse was an update and re-visioning of Marx’s youthful manuscripts, which its author had been reading in the 1930s in Germany. As the ebullience of the 1960s faded into defeat, co-optation, disillusionment and ‘burn out’, so the ‘humanist Marx’ faded into the kind of manageable disputation that excites undergraduates in coursework essays and seminar debates. The end point of this process was a popular, prize-winning biography by the journalist Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (1999), reducing ‘humanism’ to the ‘humane’ in a highly readable character study.

After the financial crashes of the 21st century, Marx would have to be renewed again to become relevant. What would do the trick?

M arx’s magnum opus , the famously unreadable and unread Das Kapital (1867), was clearly waiting for rediscovery. Again, the ground had been well-prepared, in the usual posthumous way, by further ‘unknown’ manuscripts (this time from Marx’s middle age). This much larger compilation of (yet more) notebook materials had the editorially given and highly Germanic title Grundrisse , or ‘Foundations’ of a critique of political economy. Originally published in two volumes (1939 to 1941), it surfaced in a post-War German paperback reprint, followed by translations in the early 1970s.

In popular excerpts and academic discussion, the Grundrisse was very much stage-two for students of the ‘humanist Marx’. Here was something intriguingly rough-draft, quite rambling, good discussion material, and often quite historical. But it was clearly focused on capitalism as a unique historical phenomenon and systematic social formation. While evidently less philosophical, and far more economic, than the earlier thinking, the writing was nonetheless pleasing for its lack of rigour, compared with the more closely argued opening chapters of Capital , volume 1 (which was often as far as many readers got before deciding they’d had enough).

In short, the first volume of Capital was a predictable stage-three in regenerating Marx (perhaps somewhat in the manner of Doctor Who). It had long ago been dismissed by ‘mainstream’ economists, and its leaden and arcane ruminations on value – beloved by many Marxist study groups up until the 1960s – had had little contact with, or relevance to, the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese communist regimes and headline Great Power issues. However, the new interest in Capital , sparked by financial op-eds in the 2000s, wasn’t a case of back to the future, reviving interest in the orthodoxies of the ‘labour theory of value’, ‘theory of surplus value’, ‘organic composition of capital’, or even ‘the falling rate of profit’. Rather, the humanist-philosophising Marx became the sit-in Marx of economics-minded anti-globalisation activists and Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Protest movements, like revolutions, are often summed into history as failures since hopes and dreams are never fully realised. The fiery leaders of today often disappear into regression and obscurity, or suffer the recriminations due to those who take power and thus make concessions or engineer reversals. It is important to remember now that the spontaneously generated Occupy movement was actually quite large in terms of numbers and quite wide in terms of geographical spread: estimates suggest nearly 1,000 cities in approximately 80 countries, with many hundreds of thousands of people involved, starting in late 2011 and running strong for about a year. The globalised interlocking activities of mega-rich corporations, financial institutions and governmental agencies (including defence and security establishments) were pilloried in manifestos, statements and press releases as exploitative, anti-democratic and unjust.

Generally, ‘neo-liberalism’ performed a signifying function in these critiques, referencing the winding down of welfare states and the ratcheting up of inequalities, between nations and economies, as well as between individuals and income-groups. Any number of striking statistical representations would tell you that a tiny group of people (overwhelmingly male) owned as much as the poorest 50 per cent of humanity, or that any one mega-billionaire was worth more than so-many national economies put together. Many politicians, business people, governmental regulators and ‘Lefty’ celebrities hastened to get on-side, or at least to make sympathetic noises.

Das Kapital is now the book that portrays capitalists as vampires, sucking the blood of child labourers

Marx was certainly present in this, though as a spectral éminence grise rather than a banner-high icon (too reminiscent of former, Cold War scenarios). But then the ideas of his activist days – particularly in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848 ) – have worked their way through CliffsNotes and similar ‘cheat sheets’ into popular consciousness to the point where citational reference isn’t needed, and wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The Manifesto had been published anonymously, and Marx – though publicity-seeking for the socialist movement – didn’t construct himself then or later as a guru-author or cult leader (quite the opposite). The Communist Party, of the Manifesto ’s title, was an aspiration generated by a tiny international committee, and even in the revolutions of 1848 it disbanded such organisation as it had, merging with the anti-authoritarian fray of broadly democratic crowds and political groups. By 2011, Marx and Engels’s ideas were freely circulating online in the animation compilation Communist Manifestoon (which is excellent, and a must-watch, by the way).

The Marx-of-the-moment, though, isn’t exclusively the property of Occupy, but readily appears in thoughtful reporting and comment with rather more specific points of reference. Here a Marx-of-the-metaphor arises from Capital , vol 1, where reporters and commentators, in tune with the times, are looking for catchy critical ‘takes’ on capitalism. Style triumphs over content, and trope over proposition, making Marx’s very divergence from the dry logics of econometrics an advantage. Capital is now the book in which Marx portrays capitalists as vampires, sucking the blood of child labourers; as werewolves, howling and hungry for worker-prey; of ‘magic caps’ worn by economists to make the realities of capitalist exploitation disappear.

The sarcastic Marx of the ‘send-up’ gets a look-in here, too, portraying economists as the bumbling numbskulls Seacole and Dogberry (from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing ), and then scoffing at their very evident yet hypocritical self-satisfactions. In sum, Marx’s critical edge, sharpened in successive reworkings of his one truly major published book, has come to the fore in presenting a critical yet readable ‘take’ on capitalism. Underlying this ‘take’ is a notion that capitalism is in fact a system, with essential properties that can, in principle, be specified. Marx is arguing passionately that ‘mainstream’ economists, contrary to the self-serving claims that there is no alternative, have simply got the wrong principles. Or at least his writing is helping to generate economic principles that offer a more realistic ethics, a more developed commitment to democracy, and a more thorough exploration of the relationship between markets and freedoms.

This is not to say that Marx provides all this, in Capital , vol 1, or elsewhere. He doesn’t. But then we don’t solve our problems ‘by the book’, anyway. Metaphors are potent in conveying meaning, indeed metaphors are meanings as we make them. They don’t have to be a substitute for, or a ‘way in’, to more rigorous theories of proposition, syllogism and conclusion. They actually make Marx’s argument for his readers, alongside, and just as much as, his formal explication. This must be so, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. Essentially, Marx is saying (albeit in my own words here):

Dear Reader, just as you don’t believe in witches, goblins and fairies, or in vampires, werewolves and magic, you should have as little faith in the concepts and theories of an economics that takes capitalism for granted, and constructs an ‘economic man’ in its image. Our social experience of capitalism is a historical product, a human construct, not a necessary or eternal truth following from human nature, God’s will, or the progress of history. You know that social systems have been radically otherwise in the past, that money is a relatively recent historical invention, and that the ever-expanding spiral of capitalist aggrandisement benefiting a tiny minority (and concomitant ‘austerities’ for the 99 per cent, as in the Occupy slogan) is a product of the past few decades. If the institutions of democracy and the laws of property are more than ever on the side of the 1 per cent (or lately, the 0.01 per cent, in some comments), then it’s time to struggle and ‘take back control’!

Marx also warned that those with advantages will fight (or more usually hire poorer people to fight for them) to maintain the system from which they benefit. He also counselled that neither he nor anyone else can reasonably pretend that social change in opposition to it is all very simple and easy to implement.

One of Marx’s powerful and ubiquitous metaphors from Capital , vol 1, is ‘the fetishism of commodities’, most often wrongly taken in a neo-Freudian sense to refer to an undue preoccupation with consumer products and advertisers’ values. That’s not what he meant. ‘Social relations between things, and thingly relations between people’ is rather more like it, as a summary of what’s really wrong. Or in other words, we have created a world of markets and prices (‘social relations between things’) that we experience as an everyday and often brutal reality (‘ thingly relations between people’). Indeed, many of us become the kind of people who merge with economic realities and thus become inured to, or unconscious of, any brutality in the normality at all. Marx’s ‘take’ on capitalism is that the social world could be otherwise, less brutal and less destructive, if we organise to make it otherwise. But it won’t, if we don’t.

Black-and-white photo of a man and a woman, seen from behind, on the deck of a boat, looking out to shore

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Essay On Marxism

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conclusion on marxism essay

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In the work of both Hegel and Marx the nature of scientific cognition is defined by the dialectics of the historical and the logical. The relationship between these two aspects constitutes an integral part of dialectical logic. However, while Hegel was the initiator of this approach, his understanding was marred by his philosophy. It was left to Marx to develop the historical and logical on a qualitatively different, i.e. scientific basis.

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This paper initially intended to address discussions regarding the importance and scope of an alleged break between the early, philosophical articles of Marx and his later, mature historical-materialist socioeconomic investigations. But, because Marx in his early years dealt predominantly with Hegel the investigation of this 'break' morphed into a search for the proper locus of an idealism-naturalism transition within the field of the larger and more complex subject matter of the 'Hegel-Marx transition', which should also include Feuerbach and Engels. My provisional strategy to tackle the problematic is to 'complexify' the field by posing several probing questions and proposing a metaphor to see the Hegel-(Feuerbach)-Marx-(Engels) sequence as a more or less continuous bundle of ideas, some of which strands, intentionally or not, get silently dropped or explicitly refuted, and others silently or explicitly appropriated or transformed. I conclude that there are three major strands: A) ontology, B) methodology, and C) content, and that different commentators locate 'breaches' at different places in this uneven, bundled continuum of strands.

In his recent work The Myth of Dialectics John Rosenthal presents a forceful polemic against Hegel and Marxists sympathetic to the Hegelian legacy. The methodology Hegel employed, his metaphysical assertions, his rejection of the principles of formal logic, and the political implications of his standpoint, are all fundamentally incompatible with Marx’s perspective, according to Rosenthal. While Rosenthal grants that Marx did make use of Hegelian motifs in his theory of value, even this is not to Hegel’s credit: the very perversity of Hegel’s thought made it useful for the comprehension of the perversity of capital. In this paper I argue that a close and reasonably charitable reading of Hegel’s Logic reveals a quite different picture of his methodology and ontological commitments from that presented by Rosenthal. While there are profound substantive differences between the Hegelian and Marxian perspectives on capitalist society, it is not the case that Hegel’s Logic is homologous with capital. The Logic provides helpful conceptual resources for a critique of capital. In the final section of the paper five areas are briefly sketched in which Hegelian dialectical logic remains of contemporary interest.

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It was the struggle between the negative (Hegelian) and positive philosophy (Post-Hegelian) that gave birth to the discourse of social theory in Europe. On the contrary, in some context especially the context of misinterpretation of Hegelian philosophy gave rise to fascism and Nazism in Europe. Moreover, it was Fascism that created a rift between the philosophers, some of whom sided with Hegel while others went against him.

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This book examines Hegel’s place in contemporary critical thinking, particularly in relation to Marx and Marxist theories. It makes the case for a double movement from Marx to Hegel and back, in order to provide a basis for contemporary social critique by uniting Marx’s social and economic critique with the ethical foundations of Hegel’s philosophy. The introductory chapter provides a tripartite overview of the most influential interpretations of the relation between Hegel and Marx in terms of ‘progressive’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘reverse’ readings: Progressive readings assume a significant development from Hegel to Marx where Marx ‘sublates’ Hegelian insights; disruptive readings start from the idea of a break between Hegel and Marx; and reverse readings argue for a return from Marx back to Hegel. It is suggested that parts of these readings can be subsumed under an interpretive spectrum called ‘helical’. This approach pursues an interpretive movement that follows a spiral course—‘from Marx to Hegel and back’. Elaborating on a helical approach, it is examined where parts of Hegel’s or Marx’s arguments can be revised by relying on arguments of the counterpart; at what points Hegel and Marx must be brought into a systematic confrontation; and in what ways the two thinkers can be read as complementing or reinforcing one another.

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Marxism in Tim Burton's "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory"

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conclusion on marxism essay

English Summary

Introduction to Marxism

Back to: Literary Theory in English Literature

Marxism is a political and social movement as well as a critique of capitalism. It presents an analysis of society, its problems and a solution. Its works were written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels .

Let us understand how do Marx and Engels interpret literature. Marx’s major contribution was to the development of its ideas. Engels, on the other hand, contributed ideas and popularized Marxism. Marx and Engels announced a system in Communist Manifesto as Communism based on their ideas. They opposed the domination of one class over another and imagined a classless society.

The Marxist theory originated in the mid-nineteenth century and its development and systematization became possible in the 1920s after the October Revolution of 1917.

In the consequence of the revolution, the ‘ socialist realism ’ emerged as a literary tradition which focuses on the struggle of the socio-economic condition of the working class in relation to the suppressive power structure.

Marxism’s influence is not limited to the socialist realism of Soviet Russia only, it also glimpses in the works of eminent writers such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir , and Bertolt Brecht.

Marxism analyzes society in terms of class struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, “ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ” Marx’s Communist Manifesto explains the historical background that led to the development of modern capitalist society wherein the bourgeois (ruling class) exploits the proletariat (working class).

Marx gives the solution to social problems as a classless society whose development is theoretically based on the development of each individual. Marxism aims at achieving this goal through the revolutionary process, through the annihilation of the capitalist system.

Marxist literary criticism holds the view that a writer’s work is shaped by social institutions and prevailing discourse of his time. It does not regard writers as autonomous individuals. Marxist approach interprets a work of art by putting it into its historical context and analyses conflicts of historical forces and social classes.

The Marxist approach is based on ‘ dialectical materialism ’. The term was coined by German Marxist Joseph Dietzgen in 1887 . This concept focuses on the material conditions of society. It emphasizes matter as the fundamental basis of nature. It, thus emphasizes that consciousness is determined by social existence.

Marx viewed that material conditions have contradictions. These contradictions are what Marxism resolves. The concept is inspired by Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s dialectics differs from Hegel’s in a way that Marx’s focus is on material while Hegel sees contradictions in ideas. Hegel holds the view that consciousness determines social existence.

Home / Essay Samples / Government / Marxism / Marxism Vs Functionalism

Marxism Vs Functionalism

  • Category: Philosophy , Government , Science
  • Topic: Functionalism , Marxism , Theory

Pages: 3 (1430 words)

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