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Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is the social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das Kapital. Since its inception and up to the present day, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes exist in most countries around the world, and Marxism continues to enjoy significant intellectual respect in many circles. Das Kapital Das Kapital Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency (later known as Social Democracy) came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the Second International and these parties supported their own governments in World War One. This issue caused the communists to break away and form their own parties which became members of the Third International. The contemporary meanings of these terms was initially very different: Lenin, for example, was considered a social democrat until the mutation of the latter movement. Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary social movements and political parties around the world, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, relatively few countries have governments which describe themselves as Marxist. Although social democratic parties are in power in a number of Western nations, they long ago distanced themselves from their historical connections to Marx and his ideas. As of 2005, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China had governments in power which describe themselves as socialist in the Marxist sense. However, the private sector comprised more than 50% of the Chinese economy by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially liberalized its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong control over the means of production. While Marx theorized that such a socialist phase would eventually give way to a classless society in which the state essentially ceases to exist and workers collectively own the means of production (communism), such a development has yet to occur in any historical self-claimed Communist state, often due to an initial authoritarian regime's unwillingness to relinquish the power it gained in revolution. These historically communist states have generally followed a socialist, command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage. North Korea is another contemporary Communist state, though the official ideology of the Korean Workers' Party (originally led by Kim Il-sung and currently chaired by his son, Kim Jong-il,) Juche, does not follow doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the leadership of the Soviet Union. Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the Cold War. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes the state's official ideology as Islamic socialism, and has labelled it a third way between capitalism and Marxism. Some libertarian members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist states or big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms have been implemented — not by Marxists but in the forms of Keynesianism, the welfare state, new liberalism, social democracy and other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist states. To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view, many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism (without abolishing it) by coordinating economic actors and dealing with market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state."

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

market failure Marx's immensely rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy. 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. 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 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. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians and Marx attached himself to Bauer. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Marx and Engels quit the Young Hegelians and wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family," and "The German Ideology." 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 another Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach. (Feuerbach had not been one of Hegel's favorite pupils; when Feuerbach sent his thesis to Hegel, Hegel refused to reply. So, the title of Young Hegelian should be considered loosely when considering Feuerbach.) What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach, however, was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Friedrich Engels said in an 1846 essay they entitled "The German Ideology": :In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Also, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation and that was only published in the twentieth century), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (although Engels was the one who coined this term and Marx himself never used it), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: :In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism. The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, but some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse"). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism. Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the "Ethnological Notebooks" that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").

The political-economy roots of Marxism

Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists. Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx 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 the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm] [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm].) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take. Capital is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society. 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 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. Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory, are other important elements of Marxist economics. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible. 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." 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

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—attended his seminar in 1905-06. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to the alleged inconsistencies of Marxian theory. Later, neo-Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labour theory of value.

Class analysis

Marxists believe that in its pure form capitalist society is divided into two powerful social classes:
- the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he believed were responsible for creating the wealth of a society (buildings, bridges and furniture, for example, are physically built by members of this class). Ernest Mandel, in an introduction to Capital, updates this definition to mean people who work for a living (whether "white collar" or "blue collar") and who have no significant savings, where sufficiently large savings are typically invested in the abstract means of production on a shareholder basis.
- the bourgeoisie : those who "own the means of production" and exploit the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie: 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. An example of this would be many small businesses giving way to fewer larger ones, without increasing the number of petty bourgeois bureaucrats required to administer each company. 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. At first the bourgeoisie, and now the proletariat, are considered to be the universal class, the section of society best equipped to take human progress forwards a further step. Marx developed these ideas to support his advocacy of socialism and communism: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the "fruits of their labour". 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. Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core. It is common to speak of Marxian rather than Marxist theory when referring to political study that draws from the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies..

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

Other than control by the working class, 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 took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society.

The October Revolution

1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Further, many, both inside and outside the revolution worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development, as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism, and consequently the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed and the Soviet Union was on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation. Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution. Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society. Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed. The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments since the death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to apply universally. The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs. Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true Marxist party. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role. See also: Communist government and Communist state. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism—or, more commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism.

The term social is derived from the Latin word socius, which as a noun means "an associate, ally, companion, business partner or comrade" and in the adjectival form socialis refers to "a bond between people" (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence.

The Unobservable

Although the term "social" is a crucial category in social science and often used in public discourse, its meaning is often vague, suggesting that it is a fuzzy concept. An added difficulty is that social attributes or relationships may not be directly observable and visible, and must be inferred by abstract thought. Thus the sociologist C. Wright Mills invented the expression "the sociological imagination", which referred to the need to think imaginatively beyond what an individual can empirically observe in order to grasp the social domain in all its dimensions - connecting, for example, "private troubles" and "public issues". A similar point is made in the context of architecture by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn in their groundbreaking work The Invisible in Architecture. General problems concerning the nature of social reality and what (or how) we can know about it are the object of social theory.

Some different definitions

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term "social" is used in many different senses, referring among other things to:
- attitudes, orientations or behaviours which take the interests, intentions or needs of other people into account (in contrast to anti-social behaviour);
- common characteristics of people or descriptions of collectivities (social facts);
- relations between people (social relations) generally, or particular associations among people;
- interactions between people (social action);
- membership of a group of people or inclusion or belonging to a community of people;
- co-operation or co-operative characteristics between people;
- relations of (mutual) dependence;
- the public sector ("social sector") or the need for governance for the good of all, contrasted with the private sector;
- in existentialist and postmodernist thought, relationships between the Self and the Other;
- interactive systems in communities of animal or insect populations, or any living organisms. In one broad meaning, "social" refers only to society as "a system of common life", but in another sense it contrasts specifically with "individual" and individualist theories of society. This is reflected for instance in the different perspectives of liberalism and socialism on society and public affairs. The adjective "social" implies that the verb or noun to which it is applied is somehow more communicative, cooperative, and moderated by contact with human beings, than if it were omitted. That is, it implies that larger society has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism, social psychology and social capital imply that there is some social process involved or considered, a process that is not there in regular, "non-social", realism, justice, constructivism, psychology, or capital. The adjective "social" is also used often in political discourse, although its meaning in such a context depends heavily on who is using it. In left-wing circles it is often used to imply a positive characteristic, while in right-wing circles it is generally used to imply a negative characteristic. It should also be noted that, overall, this adjective is used much more often by those on the political left than by those on the political right. For these reasons, those seeking to avoid association with the left-right political debates often seek to label their work with phrases that do not include the word "social". An example is quasi-empiricism in mathematics which is sometimes labelled social constructivism by those who see it as an unwarranted intrusion of social considerations in mathematical practice, which is supposed to be "objective" and "above" social concerns.

Social theorists

In the view of Karl Marx, human beings are intrinsically, necessarily and by definition social beings who - beyond being "gregarious creatures" -cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social co-operation and association. Their social characteristics are therefore to a large extent an objectively given fact, stamped on them from birth and affirmed by socialization processes; and, according to Marx, in producing and reproducing their material life, people must necessarily enter into relations of production which are "independent of their will". By contrast, the sociologist Max Weber for example defines human action as "social" if, by virtue of the subjective meanings attached to the action by individuals, it "takes account of the behaviour of others, and is thereby oriented in its course". In this case, the "social" domain really exists only in the intersubjective relations between individuals, but by implication the life of these individuals also exists in part outside the social domain. "Social" is thus implicitly also contrasted with "private". In the positivist sociology of Emile Durkheim, a social fact is an abstraction external to the individual which constrains that individual's actions. In his 1895 work Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim writes: "A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an influence, or an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations." In Durkheim's view, sociology is 'the science of social facts'.

Socialism and social democracy

The term "socialism", used from the 1830s onwards in France and England, was directly related to what was called the social question, in essence the problem that the emergence of competitive market societies did not create "liberty, equality and fraternity" for all citizens, requiring the intervention of politics and social reform to tackle social problems, injustices and grievances (a topic on which Jean-Jacques Rousseau discourses at length in his classic work The Social Contract). Originally the term "socialist" was often used interchangeably with "co-operative", "mutualist", "associationist" and "collectivist". The term social democracy originally referred to the political project of extending democratic forms of association to the whole of society, substituting popular sovereignty, the universal franchise and social ownership for the rule of a propertied class which had exclusive voting rights.

Modern uses

In contemporary society, "social" often refers to the redistributive policies of the government which aim to apply resources in the public interest, for example, social security. Policy concerns then include the problems of social exclusion and social cohesion. Here, "social" contrasts with "private" and to the distinction between the public and the private (or privatised) spheres, where ownership relations define access to resources and attention. The social domain is often also contrasted with that of physical nature, but in sociobiology analogies are drawn between humans and other living species in order to explain social behavior in terms of biological factors. The term "social" is also added in various other academic sub-disciplines such as social geography, social psychology, social anthropology, social philosophy, social ontology, social statistics and social choice theory in mathematics. Some references:
- Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert T. Boyd, and Ernst Fehr (eds.), Moral Sentiments and Material Interests, Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life.
- Max Weber, Economy and Society.
- Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action.
- Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society.
- Russell Keat and John Urry, Social Theory As Science.
- Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: an Historical Introduction.
- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination.
- Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn (eds.), The Invisible in Architecture.
- Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
- Charles Derber, The Pursuit of Attention; Power and Ego in Everyday Life.
- Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist.

Politics

Politics is the process by which decisions are made for a given society. The method of making decisions for groups varies, but the act of decision making is the key component that characterises politics. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Political science is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power, i.e. the ability to impose one's will on another. One theorist, Harold Lasswell, has defined politics as "who gets what, when, and how." Another definition of 'politics' is: "how power is distributed within a group or system".

A natural state

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his most famous work, Leviathan, in which he proposed a model of early human development to justify the creation of human associations. Hobbes described an ideal state of nature wherein every person had equal right to every resource in nature and was free to use any means to acquire those resources. He noted that such an arrangement created a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). Further, he noted that men would enter into a social contract and would give up absolute rights for certain protections. While it appears that social cooperation and dominance hierarchies predate human societies, Hobbes’s model illustrates a rationale for the creation of societies (polities).

Early history

V.G. Childe describes the transformation of human society that took place around 6000 BCE as an urban revolution. Among the features of this new type of civilization were the institutionalization of social stratification, non-agricultural specialised crafts (including priests and lawyers), taxation, and writing. All of which require clusters of densely populated settlements - city-states. The word "Politics" is derived from the Greek word for city-state, "Polis". Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments. The oldest form of government was tribal organization. Rule by elders was supplanted by monarchy, and a system of Feudalism as an arrangement where a single family dominated the political affairs of a community. Monarchies have existed in one form or another for the past 5000 years of human history.

Definitions

- Power is the ability to impose one's will on another. It implies a capacity for force, i.e violence.
- Authority is the power to enforce laws, to exact obedience, to command, to determine, or to judge.
- Legitimacy is an attribute of government gained through the acquisition and application of power in accordance with recognized or accepted standards or principles.
- A government is the body that has the authority to make and enforce rules or laws.

Political power

Samuel Gompers’ often paraphrased maxim,"Reward your friends and punish your enemies," hints at two of the five types of power recognized by social psychologists: incentive power (the power to reward) and coercive power (the power to punish). Arguably the other three grow out of these two. Legitimate power, the power of the policeman or the referee, is the power given to an individual by a recognized authority to enforce standards of behavior. Legitimate power is similar to coercive power in that unacceptable behavior is punished by fine or penalty. Referent power is bestowed upon individuals by virtue of accomplishment or attitude. Fulfillment of the desire to feel similar to a celebrity or a hero is the reward for obedience. Expert power springs from education or experience. Following the lead of an experienced coach is often rewarded with success. Expert power is conditional to the circumstances. A brain surgeon is no help when your pipes are leaking.

Authority and legitimacy

Max Weber identified three sources of legitimacy for authority known as (tripartite classification of authority). He proposed three reasons why people followed the orders of those who gave them:

Traditional

Traditional authorities receive loyalty because they continue and support the preservation of existing values, the status quo. Traditional authority has the longest history. Patriarchal (and more rarely Matriarchal) societies gave rise to hereditary monarchies where authority was given to descendants of previous leaders. Followers submit to this authority because "we've always done it that way." Examples of traditional authoritarians include kings and queens.

Charismatic

Charismatic authority grows out of the personal charm or the strength of an individual personality (see cult of personality for the most extreme version). Charismatic regimes are often short lived, seldom outliving the charismatic figure that leads them. Examples include Hitler, Napoleon, and Mao.

Legal-rational

Legal-Rational authorities receive their ability to compel behavior by virtue of the office that they hold. It is the authority that demands obedience to the office rather than the office holder. Modern democracies are examples of legal-rational regimes.

References

GOMPERS,SAMUEL; “Men of Labor! Be Up and Doing,” editorial, American Federationist, May 1906, p. 319

Karl Marx

:This article is about the German political philosopher Karl Marx, for other uses of Marx, see Marx (disambiguation) Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, England) was an influential philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmen's Association. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, 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 struggle."

Biography

Early life

Karl Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Prussia. His father Herschel, descending from a long line of rabbis, although harboring many deistic tendencies, converted to the Christian religion, joining the relatively liberal Lutheran denomination, in order to become a lawyer. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.

Education

In 1835 Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During his stead, Marx wrote much poetry and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity." It was during this period that he absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the left-Hegelians.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of his colleages; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism.

Career

When his mentor, Bruno Bauer, was dismissed from Friedrich-Wilhelms' philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and made his living as a freelance journalist. Marx was soon forced to move, something he would do often as a result of his views. Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions of civil rights and political emancipation that also includes several offensive references to Judaism and Jewish culture. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, a committed Communist, who kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, Marx and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium. There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a scathing criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer, Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had converted in London. That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again. In 1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a base for continued political activism. In his inaugural address, he purported to quote Gladstone's speech, to the effect that, "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." He repeated the citation in Volume 1 of Capital. The discrepancy between Marx's quote and the Hansard version of the speech (which was well-known) was soon employed in an attempt to discredit the International. Marx attempted to rebut the accusations of dishonesty, but the allegation continued to resurface. Marx later gave as his source the newspaper The Morning Star. Engels devoted a good deal of attention to the affair in the preface to the fourth edition of Capital — which, likewise, did not put the matter to rest. Engels claimed that it was not The Morning Star but The Times that Marx was following. Indeed, modern critics of Marx continue to invoke Marx's supposed misquotation as evidence of general dishonesty.

Family life

Karl Marx's engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, an aristocrat, was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Jenny and Karl had many children, several of whom died young. Their daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), who was born in London, was a committed socialist who helped edit her father's works.

Later life

Marx was generally impoverished during the later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from close friend and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living expenses and debts. Following the death of his wife Jenny in 1881, Marx died in London in 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on Marx's tombstone – a monument built in 1954 by the British Communist Party – is: "Workers of all lands, unite". Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned.

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
- The dialectical historicism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
- The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social change. social change Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist interpretation of history (and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point.) Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was 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's philosophy

As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike. Indeed, shortly before his death, Marx himself said, in response to so-called 'marxists' who supported reform instead of revolution, something to the effect of "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist". Subsequently, the merger of Marxist thought with Leninism, forming the official state ideology (Marxism-Leninism) of the Soviet bloc, arguably departed further from Marx's own beliefs and analyses. However, following the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc there has been a return by non-Marxists to Marx's own writing, in particular for insights in his analysis of capitalism that are still relevant today. The notion of labour is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination: :A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness”. The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time. Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: :Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Critique of capitalism

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists. Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour. The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy. Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm]

Critique of bourgeois democracy and of anti-Semitism

Some scholars have presented an alternative reading of Marx, primarily based on his essay On the Jewish Question. Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist Joshua Muravchik have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's belief that if he could convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to dislike non-Jewish capitalists as well. Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons: first, it is based on two short essays written in the 1840s, and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis of capitalism written in the following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to be truly free. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus calling for the emancipation of the Jews. At the same time, many argued that Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism. For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno Bauer, allegedly argued that Christians need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to be emancipated twice — first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to Christianity), then from religion altogether. Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn Bauer's language, and the rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make a more progressive argument. First, he points out that Bruno Bauer's argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity to be more evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly. Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish". This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by "Judaism" one really means "capitalism," then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal Draper and David McLellan.

Marx's influence

See also: Marxism Marxism Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a Marxist"). Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of production, class, commodity fetishism) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means to a communist society. The clash between Marx's own theoretical framework and the umbrella term "Marxist" is often misconstrued, a prime example being the bias placed against studying Marx’s writings during the Cold War period in American academic institutions. Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I. World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist Party. After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, rose to a position of immense power in the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in its own country. It was Stalin's Soviet Union and its policies that undermined the concept of Marxism in the Western world, where, for many years, especially during the Cold War period, it was popularly equated with the system in the USSR - which in turn was understood as a political totalitarianism disregarding civil rights. In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth International." Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state. Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries. In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist revolution. This was a departure from Marx and Lenin's view of revolution, which maintained that the proletariat must have the leading role. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism. Maoism In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise. Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party. In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy. Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history. In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of BBC Radio 4.[http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1530250,00.html]

Criticisms

Many proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, and that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that greed and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system (although economic anthropologists have questioned this assertion) and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the labor theory of value. In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical socialist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Marx has also been criticized from the Left. Evolutionary socialists and social democrats reject his claim that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and violent revolution. Others argue that class is not the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race. However, Marxists argue that these inequalities are linked to class and therefore will largely cease to exist after the formation of a classless society. Some today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of "progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds (Even though it is widely known that the top 1% of wage earners own more than 50% of the nation's publicly traded company stocks). Still others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has criticized Marx's theories as he believed they were not falsifiable, which he argued would render some particular aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political arguments unscientific. Primarily, this stems from Marx's assertion that class revolt will be part of the process in overcoming capitalism. The argument goes that the critic says "this will not happen" to which the reply is "but it will." However it has been argued that such statements show a simplistic understanding or a deliberate misinterpretation, because the reply has no basis in what Marx actually said. A common critique of Marx points out that the increasing class antagonisms he predicted never actually developed in the Western world following industrialization. While socioeconomic gaps between the bourgeoisie and proletariat remained, industrialization in countries such as the United States and Great Britain also saw the rise of a middle class not inclined to violent revolution, and of a welfare state that helped contain any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. While the economic devastation of the Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution was successful. [http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.10009,filter.all/pub_detail.asp] Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union. Critics argue that the Soviet Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism, but modern-day Marxists, especially Trotskyists, respond to this by pointing out that the Soviet Union's political system did not actually resemble true socialism at all. Marx analyzed the world of his day and refused to draw up plans of how a future socialist society should be run saying he did not "write recipes...for cook-shops of the future." Outside Europe and the United States, communism has generally been superseded by anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles which sometimes appeal to Marx for theoretical support. In India, the southern province of Kerala was the first in the world to elect a coalition of communist parties (see Communist Party of India) to power at the state level, in 1957. In the eastern state of West Bengal a coalition of Communist parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been democratically elected to power at the provincial level continuously since 1977. Contemporary supporters of Marx argue most generally that Marx was correct that human behavior reflects determinate historical and social conditions (and is therefore changing and can not be understood in terms of some universal "human nature"). More specifically, they argue his analysis of commodities is still useful and that alienation is still a problem.

References

- Stephen Jay Gould, [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_7_108/ai_55698600/pg_1 A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester], Page 1, [http://www.findarticles.com/ Find Articles.com] (1999). (Marx's tomb)
- Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx, University of Minnesota Press (1986), trade paperback, 244 pages, ISBN 0816615055 (Marx's work considered as science)
- Duncan, Ronald, with Wilson, Colin, (editors) Marx Refuted, Bath, U.K.,(1987) ISBN 0906798-71-X
- David McLellen, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
- Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes). Monthly Review Press.
- Boris Nicolaevski & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter. Penguin books.
- Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999), ISBN 1857026373 (biography of Marx)
- Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin

External links

Bibliography and online texts

- Marx and Engels Internet Archive [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right] (1843)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ On the Jewish Question] (1843)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/ Notes on James Mill] (1844)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844] (1844)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm Theses on Feuerbach] (1845)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ The German Ideology] [with Engels] (1845-46)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ The Poverty of Philosophy] (1846-47)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ Wage-Labour and Capital] (1847)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Manifesto of the Communist Party] [with Engels] (1847-48)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte] (1852)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ Grundrisse] (1857-58)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (1859)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/index.htm Writings on the U.S. Civil War] [with Engels; compiled] (1861)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes] (1862)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ Value, Price and Profit] (1865)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm Capital vol. 1] (1867)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ The Civil War in France] (1871)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ Critique of the Gotha Programme] (1875)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm Notes on Wagner] (1883)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume36/ Capital, vol. 2] [posthumously, by Engels] (1893)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ Capital, vol. 3] [posthumously, by Engels] (1894)
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/index.htm Letters] [with Engels; compiled] (1833-95)
- Ethnological Notebooks — ISBN 9023209249 (1879-80)
-
- [http://www.sicetnon.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=2&page_id=77 "The Reality Behind Commodity Fetishism" (in English)] at [http://www.sicetnon.org/index.php Sic et Non (in German)]
- [http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx Libertarian Communist Library Karl Marx Archive]

Biographies

- Vladimir Lenin's [http://welshcommunists.co.uk/karl.htm Karl Marx Biography]
- Franz Mehring's [http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch01.htm Karl Marx: The Story of His Life]
- Francis Wheen's [http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj85/morgan.htm The Man Behind the Mask]
- [http://www.tutor2u.net/newsmanager/templates/?a=812&z=58 Student-focused biography of Marx]
Portraits

- [http://www.iisg.nl/collections/marx/ Portraits of Karl Marx]
Encyclopedia entries

- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/marx/ Ernest Mandel, Karl Marx (New Palgrave article)] Marx, Karl Marx, Karl
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- Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Category:Humanists Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl ko:카를 마르크스 ms:Karl Marx zh-min-nan:Karl Marx ja:カール・マルクス simple:Karl Marx th:คาร์ล มาร์กซ

Economist

:This article discusses the profession of studying economics; for the news journal published in London, see The Economist. An economist is an individual who studies economics. Within this field of study, there are many sub-fields, ranging from the broad philosophical theories propounded by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx to focused study of minutiae within specific markets, involving statistical analysis and mathematical economics. Any person within any of these fields can properly claim to be an economist, although the broad range of matters coming under this head makes it a practical impossibility for any individual to master all of them. Most major universities have an economics department, where courses are offered in support of potential professional economists. Many economists, however, come from a background in business, sociology, or mathematics.

Journalist

A journalist is a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people. Reporters are one type of journalist. They create reports as a profession for broadcast or publication in

Marxism

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

The political-economy roots of Marxism

The liberal challenge

Class analysis

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

The October Revolution

See also

Other articles about Marxism

See also

External links

Social

Latin root meaning

The Unobservable

Some different definitions

Social theorists

Socialism and social democracy

Modern uses

Politics

A natural state

Early history

Definitions

Political power

Authority and legitimacy

Traditional

Charismatic

Legal-rational

References

See also

Karl Marx

Biography

Early life

Education

Marx and the Young Hegelians

Career

Family life

Later life

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's philosophy

Critique of capitalism

Critique of bourgeois democracy and of anti-Semitism

Marx's influence

Criticisms

References

See also

External links

Bibliography and online texts

Biographies

Portraits

Encyclopedia entries

Economist

See also

Journalist