MARXISM

Karl Marx was born in Trier in Prussia in 1818, and he died in London in 1883. The general approach embodied in Marx's theoretical writings and his analysis of capitalism may be termed historical materialism, or the materialist interpretation of history. Indeed, that approach may well be considered the cornerstone of Marxism. Marx argued that the superstructure of society was conditioned decisively by the productive base of society, so that the superstructure must always be understood in relation to the base. The base consists of the mode of production, in which forces of production (land, raw materials, capital, and labor) are combined, and in which relations among people arise, determined by their relationship to the means of production. As Marx said in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, "The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general." Marx considered the superstructure to include the family, the culture, the state, philosophy, and religion.

In Marx's view, all the elements of the super-structure served the interests of the dominant class in a society. He saw the class division in any society beyond a primitive level of development as reflecting the distinction between those who owned and controlled the means of production, on the one hand, and those who lacked a share of ownership and therefore were compelled to labor in the process of production, on the other hand. That fundamental division had been reproduced in various forms in the stages of European history, from ancient slaveholding society through feudalism to capitalism. In capitalist society (which was the main subject of Marx's writings) the crucial axis of social conflict was between the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, and the industrial working class, or proletariat. Marx attempted to demonstrate that the antagonism between those classes would continue to intensify, until the workers' revolution would destroy capitalism and usher in communism.

The dialectical mode of interpretation found a new application in Marx's analysis of the development of the capitalist economy. Marx claimed to have detected three "laws of capitalist development": the constant accumulation of capital, the increasing concentration of capital, and the increasing misery of the proletariat. Those laws spelled the progressive polarization of society between an expanding number of impoverished and exploited workers and a decreasing number of wealthy capitalists. As the system became more technologically advanced and productive, the mass of the people in the system would become more destitute and more desperate. The common experience of exploitation would forge powerful solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat, who at the height of the final crisis of capitalism would rise in revolution and expropriate the property of the capitalist class.

Marx wrote far more about capitalism than about the society that would follow the proletarian revolution. He made it clear, however, that he expected the revolution of the working class to socialize the means of production and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. That dictatorship would be the workers' state, but its existence would be temporary, as society moved from the first, transitional phase of communism to the higher phase, in which the full potential of communism would be realized, so that class differences would have disappeared, the state would have died off, and each person would contribute to society according to personal ability and receive material benefits according to need.

Before the end of the nineteenth century Marx's theory and his revolutionary vision had been embraced by the leaders of socialist parties in a number of European countries. The spread of Marxism's influence was soon followed by schisms in international socialism, however. By the end of World War I, a fundamental split had taken place between Lenin's version of Marxism in the Soviet Union (which after Lenin's death became known as Marxism-Leninism) and the democratically oriented socialism of major Western socialist parties, which stemmed from the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. The legacy of that division was a rivalry between socialist and communist parties, which was to hamper the left-wing forces in continental European countries for several decades. Ironically, though Marx's theory suggested that proletarian revolutions would triumph in the most economically advanced capitalist nations, during the twentieth century successful revolutions under the banner of Marxism and in the name of the proletariat were carried off only in countries with mainly agrarian economies, in which industrialization was in its early stages and the working class was relatively small.

See also: communism; dialectical materialism; dictatorship of the proletariat; socialism

bibliography

Avineri, Shlomo. (1971). Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Kolakowski, Leszek. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1974). Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism, tr. Ewald Osers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Alfred B. Evans> Jr.