Oy vey! It's 10:30 PM here and I haven't done anything for Marxism Monday. I had originally planned to do a simplified outline of Marx's primary arguments from Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto, but I realized twenty minutes ago I hadn't done any of the prep work for that. So, let's just explore a couple basic ideas. Remember, kids, this is for those who are interested in Marxism, not already learned. So I'm assuming said hypothetical person maybe isn't too familiar with it. We'll be building from the ground up on this assumption. So, let's begin!
What is Marxism?
Marxism is a socio-economic political theory that examines societal relationships in the context of dialectical materialism (definition to come). It is most often associated with economics because of its drastically and fundamentally different economic paradigm made necessary by the explanation of social relationships within the system. It is named for Karl Marx (1818-1883) and was the base-line inspiration for the majority of socialist experiments on local and national scale for the greater part of the Twentieth Century.
Dialectical Materialism is a philosophical materialism based on the dialectic philosophy of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who posited that experiential truth and actualization of a manifestation of an ideal was arrived upon following a thesis + antithesis = synthesis model. An example is the development of a human's potential:
Thesis: potential + freedom
Antithesis: actual + bondage
Synthesis: actual + freedom
It's all rather complicated and could take up an entire blog, as volumes on Hegelian Dialectics have been written. Check out the wikipedia page on Hegelian Dialectics for more further exploration.
Anyway, understanding the structure of Hegelian Dialectics is important to understanding Marxian Dialectics (or dialectical materialism as we generally call it today). Marx accepted the Hegelian approach to dialectical history, but posited that it was not ideas that lurched humanity forward into different epochs but material concerns. He outlines this simply in the Communist Manifesto when he discusses the various groups of owner and slave classes through history: patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, capitalist and laborer. He says that classical economics met feudal economics, and when feudalism no longer provided for the greater amount of people, capitalism arose to take its place. Likewise, he theorizes, when capitalism no longer provides for the greater amount of people, socialism will take its place. And once socialism is no longer useful, communism will arise and create an ultimately classless society where materialist concerns are no longer governing.
To this end, Marxism posits several alterations to existing world class relationships, including economic democratization, democratic ownership of capital, the concept of world-wide revolution, and the end to capitalism-induced wage slavery. It's because of Marx's emphasis on economic relationships that Marxism is most-often viewed in purely economic terms, when it actually supports a radical redefinition of society to reflect the reorientation of economic relationships.
To further this idea, most national-level socialist experiments have initiated fundamental social reconstruction as one of their first post-revolutionary reforms. The Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Cuba, etc. have all set forth policies and programs to intentionally redirect the relationships between units within their societies. Venezuela is doing it now with the invigoration of their youth councils and labor boards.
While I apologize for the brevity of this entry, I'm hoping to expand upon individual ideas from here on out. Next week is an exploration of what Marx has to say about class relationships and how that translates into the Marxian concept of class warfare.
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