Classical Marxism refers to the economic,
philosophical and sociological theories expounded
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as contrasted
with later developments in Marxism, especially
Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.
== Karl Marx ==
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany
– March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely
influential German philosopher, sociologist,
political economist and revolutionary socialist.
Marx addressed a wide range of issues, including
alienation and exploitation of the worker,
the capitalist mode of production and historical
materialism, although he is most famous for
his analysis of history in terms of class
struggles, summed up in the opening line of
the introduction to The Communist Manifesto:
"The history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles". The influence
of his ideas, already popular during his life,
was given added impetus by the victory of
the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1917 October
Revolution and there are few parts of the
world which were not significantly touched
by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth
century.
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: German philosophy,
English/Scottish political economy and French
socialism.
==== German philosophy ====
Main influences include Immanuel Kant; G.
W. F. Hegel; and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils,
Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young
Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However,
from 1841 he and Engels came to disagree with
Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians
about socialism and also about the usage of
Hegel's dialectic and progressively broke
away from German idealism and the Young Hegelians.
Marx's early writings are thus a response
towards Hegel, German idealism and a break
with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx,
"stood Hegel on his head", in his own view
of his role by turning the idealistic dialectic
into a materialistic one, in proposing that
material circumstances shape ideas instead
of the other way around. In this, Marx was
following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory
of alienation, developed in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published
in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's
critique of the alienation of Man in God through
the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics
(thus man projected on God all qualities which
are in fact man's own quality which defines
the "human nature"). But Marx also criticized
Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic.
==== 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
labour-values and money prices. He claimed
that the source of profits under capitalism
is value added by workers not paid out in
wages. This mechanism operated through the
distinction between "labour power", which
workers freely exchanged for their wages;
and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists
thereby gained control. This practical and
theoretical distinction was Marx's primary
insight, and allowed him to develop the concept
of "surplus value", which distinguished his
works from that of 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 therefore 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 Industrial
Revolution. A number of sweeping plans of
reform were developed by thinkers on the political
left. Among the more grandiose were the plans
of Charles Fourier and the followers of Saint-Simon.
Fourier wanted to replace modern cities with
utopian communities while the Saint-Simonians
advocated directing the economy by manipulating
credit. Although these programs did not have
much support, they did expand the political
and social imagination of Marx.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”.Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon participated in the February 1848
uprising and the composition of what he termed
"the first republican proclamation" of the
new republic, but he had misgivings about
the new government because it was pursuing
political reform at the expense of the socio-economic
reform, which Proudhon considered basic. Proudhon
published his own perspective for reform,
Solution du problème social, in which he
laid out a program of mutual financial cooperation
among workers. He believed this would transfer
control of economic relations from capitalists
and financiers to workers. It was Proudhon's
book What Is Property? that convinced the
young Karl Marx that private property should
be abolished.
==== Other influences on Marx ====
Main influences includes Friedrich Engels;
ancient Greek materialism; Giambattista Vico;
and Lewis H. Morgan.
Marx's revision of Hegelianism was also influenced
by Engels' book The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to
conceive of the historical dialectic in terms
of class conflict and to see the modern working
class as the most progressive force for revolution.
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.
Giambattista Vico propounded a cyclical theory
of history, according to which human societies
progress through a series of stages from barbarism
to civilization and then return to barbarism.
In the first stage—called the Age of the
Gods—religion, the family and other basic
institutions emerge; in the succeeding Age
of Heroes, the common people are kept in subjection
by a dominant class of nobles; in the final
stage—the Age of Men—the people rebel
and win equality, but in the process society
begins to disintegrate. Vico's influence on
Marx is obvious.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 (November 28, 1820, Wuppertal
– August 5, 1895, London) was a nineteenth-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 poverty,
Engels began writing an account which he published
in 1845 as The Condition of the Working Class
in England in 1844 ([1]).
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 Revolution
of 1848, taking part in the uprising at Elberfeld.
Engels fought in the Baden campaign against
the Prussians (June/July 1849) as the aide-de-camp
of August Willich, who commanded a Free Corps
in the Baden-Palatinate uprising. [2]
=== Marx and Engels ===
Marx and Engels first met in person in September
1844. They discovered that they had similar
views on philosophy and on capitalism and
decided to work together, producing a number
of works including Die heilige Familie (The
Holy Family). After the French authorities
deported Marx from France in January 1845,
Engels and Marx decided to move to Belgium,
which then permitted greater freedom of expression
than some other countries in Europe. Engels
and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846,
where they set up the Communist Correspondence
Committee.
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.
== Main ideas ==
Marx's main ideas included:
Alienation: Marx refers to the alienation
of people from aspects of their "human nature"
("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. 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.
Base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use
the “base-structure” concept to explain
the idea that the totality of relations among
people with regard to “the social production
of their existence” forms the economic basis,
on which arises a superstructure of political
and legal institutions. To the base corresponds
the social consciousness which includes religious,
philosophical and other main ideas. The base
conditions both, the superstructure and the
social consciousness. A conflict between the
development of material productive forces
and the relations of production causes social
revolutions and the resulting change in the
economic basis will sooner or later lead to
the transformation of the superstructure.
For Marx, this relationship is not a one way
process—it is reflexive and the base determines
the superstructure in the first instance at
the same time as it remains the foundation
of a form of social organization which is
itself transformed as an element in the overall
dialectical process. The relationship between
superstructure and base is considered to be
a dialectical one, ineffable in a sense except
as it unfolds in its material reality in the
actual historical process (which scientific
socialism aims 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).
Means of production: the means of production
are a combination of the means of labor and
the subject of labor used by workers to make
products. The means of labor include machines,
tools, equipment, infrastructure and "all
those things with the aid of which man acts
upon the subject of labor, and transforms
it". The subject of labor includes raw materials
and materials directly taken from nature.
Means of production by themselves produce
nothing— labor power is needed for production
to take place.
Ideology: without offering a general definition
for "ideology", 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”. 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”.
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 ===
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-sense 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 proletariat: "those individuals who sell
their labor power, (and therefore add value
to the products), and who, in the capitalist
mode of production, do not own the means of
production". According to Marx, the capitalist
mode of production establishes the conditions
for the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat
due to the fact that the worker's labor power
generates an added value greater than his
salary.
The bourgeoisie: those who "own the means
of production" and buy labor power from the
proletariat, who are recompensed by a salary,
thus exploiting the proletariat.The bourgeoisie
may be further subdivided into the very wealthy
bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The
petty bourgeoisie are those who employ labor,
but may also work themselves. These may be
small proprietors, land-holding peasants,
or trade workers. Marx predicted that the
petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed
by the constant reinvention of the means of
production and the result of this would be
the forced movement of the vast majority of
the petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat.
Marx also identified the lumpenproletariat,
a stratum of society completely disconnected
from the means of production.
Marx also describes the communists as separate
from the oppressed proletariat. The communists
were to be a unifying party among the proletariat;
they were educated revolutionaries who could
bring the proletariat to revolution and help
them establish the democratic dictatorship
of the proletariat. According to Marx, the
communists would support any true revolution
of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
Thus the communists aide the proletariat in
creating the inevitable classless society
(Vladimir Lenin takes this concept a step
further by stating that only "professional
revolutionaries" can lead the revolution against
the bourgeoisie).
=== 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. In general,
Marx and Engels identified five successive
stages of the development of these material
conditions in Western Europe.
Primitive communism
Asiatic
Ancient slave society
Feudalism
Modern bourgeois society
== See also ==
Marxian economics
== References ==
