Marxism

Marxism The first consistent theory of Communism developed by Karl Marx (b. 1818, d. 1883) with his associate Friedrich Engels (b. 1820, d. 1895). The basis of their ideas was a belief in the materialist dialectic, according to which nature develops in constant circles, and matter is transformed from one state to the other (e.g. from water to steam, back to water). This imbued Marx and Engels with a fundamental belief in historical progress. History developed from an original, ‘communist’ state, in which there was common ownership. Societies became marked, first, by feudalism, in which control was exercised through the nobility. After a revolution (such as the French Revolution 1789) power was exercised through property (capitalism). Ultimately, the repressed would rise again and establish the original, Communist state characterized by common ownership of production and full economic and social equality. Communism was thus seen as ‘inevitable’, the original and final stage of history. In Marx's main work, Das Kapital, he argued that in the industrialized, capitalist society, which he observed in England, the main objective of the owners of production was to maximize their profits. This would be done by increasing mechanization and by paying workers as little as possible. The former led to an alienation of the workplace as traditional skills were replaced by machines, while the latter meant that workers could not even maintain a minimal standard of living. This created a homogeneous proletarian class, defined as not owning the means of production, which became impoverished and alienated until its members had ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. At this point, there would be an inevitable revolution as the proletariat rose to introduce a non-exploitative, Communist society.

Marx's analysis of industrial society was innovative and brilliant, yet it contained substantial flaws. Among the most important was that his definition of class, with the basic distinction between those who owned the means to production and those who did not, was too crude to be of any value. Furthermore, the idea that all members of a social ‘class’ increasingly develop a common culture and identity beyond very narrow and clearly defined concerns has been consistently disproven in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, Marx's conception of history was fundamentally flawed, as Communism never gained any ground in England or the USA, the most industrialized countries at the time.

Marxism-Leninism; Maoism; Trotskyism; Gramsci