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He believed that a revolution would be the catalyst in the transformation from capitalism to socialism. Locating itself at the far left, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream since its inception and up to the present day, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes survive in most countries around the world, while the influences of Marx's philosophy may be found in many non-Marxist works.


The Hegelian roots of Marxism[edit]

G.W.F. Hegel was an important figure in the development of Marxism.
Main articles: Marxist philosophy and Hegelianism

Marx's rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy and its philosophical conception of history, but later became mixed with very practical and material questions concerning the rising workers' movement of the 19th century.


Hegel[edit]

Main article: Hegel

Friedrich Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which the progress of freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses by the development of ideas into their contraries. That is, material circumstances in the world are dictated by a series of conflicts and subsequent compromises between ideas. Hegel believed that for every thesis in the history of humanity there arises an antithesis to counter it. In the conflict that follows a synthesis is formed. For example, in France during the 18th century that divine right absolutism of King Louis XIV would be a thesis on government. The radical liberalism of Robespierre would be an antithesis. Finally, the enlightened despotism of Napoleon would be a synthesis of the two. This process, dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, servants of a World Spirit (Weltgeist) whose Freedom has reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the material.


Criticisms of the "human rights"[edit]

In the same way, following Babeuf, considered as one of the founder of communism during the French Revolution, he criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham's utilitarianism. Alongside Freud and Nietzsche, Marx thus takes a place amongst the trio of 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European colonialism) and then through the globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the industrial revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus. Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique, by Edmund Burke, whom dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the Englishman": it is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment's universalism and humanist project on behalf of the right of tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Etienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of "human rights", since these therefore appears both as the language in which exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited' class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake".[1] Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest Magna Charta of a day work limited by law":

"The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo!"[2]

But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("collectivism"[3]), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production."[4]


Historical materialism[edit]

Main articles: Historical materialism and Dialectical materialism


The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in dialectical materialism (diamat, as it was known in the Soviet Union). They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain economic determinism (or economism), which has been criticized by various Marxist theorists. "Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure. However, this positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.

The political-economy roots of Marxism[edit]

Main article: Marxian economics


This investigation is commonly taken to commit Marx to a species of labor theory of value as described above. This and other intrinsic theories of economic value are incompatible with modern, predictive economics in which the theory of value is that of marginalism: on one side, technical production coefficients; on the other, subjective preferences. To neoclassical economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory.


Marx suggested that capitalist dynamics included the tendential law of a falling rate of profit. The general tendency could be explained by the actions of individual capitalists. Competition forced them to cut costs by boosting labour productivity, yet this technical change through mechanisation caused a corresponding fall in the "productivity of capital" (the output-capital ratio). As such the average rate of profit fell over the economy as a whole. Certain Marxist economists, such as Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick Sr, have used this theoretical edifice to construct a theory of capitalist "breakdown". Others have explained it as an aspect of capitalist crisis, and prone to counter-tendencies during economic booms.

Marx argues that capitalism is, in the words of Ernest Mandel, an editor of Marx's Capital, a "gigantic enterprise of dehumanization," described as much in his theory of alienation as in his theory of commodity fetishism. In The Communist Manifesto, co-written with Engels and published in 1848, Marx and Engels describe the effects capitalism has on the individual and society: Capitalism "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

The liberal challenge[edit]

The Austrian School were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School; Marxist authors have decried the Austrian school as a "bourgeois" reaction to Marx. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists—including Rudolf Hilferding, a member of the Austromarxists —attended his seminar in 1905-06. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to alleged inconsistencies in Marxian theory. Later, neo-Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labor theory of value.

Class analysis[edit]

From a Marxist perspective, the actually existing basic classes in today's advanced economies are the capitalist class, the new middle classes who engage in both labour and managerial responsibilities, self-employed proprietors, the working class and a lower "lumpenised" stratum. Many modern Marxists would argue that due to the modern global economy, most proletariats now exist almost entirely in the developing world; others argue that, although the imperial proletariat is relatively wealthy and widely incorporated into capitalist structures, this class remains of paramount importance in conflicts with the imperial bourgeoisie.

Marx's works founded "Historical materialism" (although he himself never referred to the expression and talk about a "materialist conception of history") and most of Marx's work was aimed at the revolution of the economic system. Marx thought that "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." (Theses on Feuerbach). Communism is an economic system in which the people are the sole beneficiaries of the fruits of their labour, following the revolutionary dissolution of economic classes.

Some of these ideas were shared by anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin argued that the state per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity.

Marxist revolutions and governments[edit]

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Marx's views on the structure of communist society[edit]

Other than control by the working class, Karl Marx laid out no plans for the structuring of a communist society or of the society that the working class would build on the way to communism. He assumed the working class could do that for themselves and that it would be a productive society able to meet the needs of the people and much more. The political parties who adopted his theories followed Marx in his optimistic approach and detailed plans for the structuring of socialist society were not put forth or developed. With the success of the October Revolution in Russia, a Marxist party (the Bolsheviks) took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society.


Criticisms[edit]

Main article: Criticisms of Marxism

There are various criticisms against Marxist theory.

Endnotes[edit]

  1. ^ Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 1993, p.74 original edition
  2. ^ Karl Marx, Das Kapital, chapter X, section 7
  3. ^ Louis Dumont argued that Marx represented exacerbated individualism instead of holism as the popular interpretation of Marxism as "collectivism" would have it
  4. ^ Karl Marx, Das Kapital, chapter XXXII, section 1

See also[edit]

Other articles about Marxism[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  • E. Screpanti & S. Zamagna (1993): An Outline of the History of Economic Thought.

External links[edit]

Criticisms[edit]

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