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Marxism: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Marxism
Karl Marx never called himself a Marxist, a fact that would become the defining irony of his legacy. In 1883, the German philosopher wrote a letter to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue and French labor leader Jules Guesde, both of whom claimed to represent his principles. Marx accused them of revolutionary phrase-mongering and denying the value of reformist struggle, concluding with a famous declaration: if their politics represented Marxism, then one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist. This self-exclusion from the label that now bears his name highlights the tension between the man and the movement that grew from his ideas. Marx died in 1883, leaving behind a body of work that would be elaborated, adapted, and often distorted by countless thinkers and political movements. The term Marxism itself was popularized by Karl Kautsky, who considered himself an orthodox Marxist during the dispute between Marx's orthodox and revisionist followers. Kautsky's revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein also later adopted the term, despite Engels' objections. Engels did not support using Marxism to describe either Marx's or his views, claiming that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as genuine followers of Marx while casting others in different terms, such as Lassallians. In 1882, Engels claimed that Marx had criticized self-proclaimed Marxist Paul Lafargue by saying that if Lafargue's views were considered Marxist, then one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist. This early resistance to the label underscores the complexity of a philosophy that would eventually shape the geopolitical landscape of the 20th century.
The Engine of History
The core of Marxism lies in its materialist methodology, known as historical materialism, which analyzes the underlying causes of societal development from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living. Marx's account of the theory is found in The German Ideology, written in 1845, and the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. All constituent features of a society, including social classes, political pyramids, and ideologies, are assumed to stem from economic activity, forming what is considered the base and superstructure. The base includes the material forces of production such as labor, means of production, and relations of production, which are the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political forms of social consciousness that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provoke social revolutions, whereby changes to the economic base lead to the superstructure's social transformation. This relationship is reflexive in that the base initially gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization. Those newly formed social organizations can then act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure so that rather than being static, the relationship is dialectic, expressed and driven by conflicts and contradictions. Engels clarified this dynamic by stating that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, and capitalism. While historical materialism has been referred to as a materialist theory of history, Marx did not claim to have produced a master key to history and that the materialist conception of history is not an historico-philosophic theory of the, imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself. In a letter to the editor of the Russian newspaper paper in 1877, he explained that his ideas were based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe.
Karl Marx never called himself a Marxist. In 1883, he wrote a letter to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue and French labor leader Jules Guesde, stating that if their politics represented Marxism, then one thing is certain and that is that he is not a Marxist.
What is the core methodology of Marxism?
The core of Marxism lies in its materialist methodology known as historical materialism. This theory analyzes the underlying causes of societal development from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living, as found in The German Ideology written in 1845 and the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy published in 1859.
When did the October Revolution occur and what state did it establish?
The October Revolution occurred in 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power from the Russian Provisional Government. This event established the first socialist state based on the ideas of soviet democracy and Leninism, which promised to end Russian involvement in World War I and establish a revolutionary worker's state.
Which countries remained officially Marxist Leninist states at the turn of the 21st century?
At the turn of the 21st century, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam remained the only officially Marxist Leninist states remaining. A Maoist government led by Prachanda was also elected into power in Nepal in 2008 following a long guerrilla struggle.
Who popularized the term Marxism and when did Engels object to its use?
The term Marxism itself was popularized by Karl Kautsky, who considered himself an orthodox Marxist during the dispute between Marx's orthodox and revisionist followers. Engels did not support using Marxism to describe either Marx's or his views, claiming that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as genuine followers of Marx.
What are the main criticisms of Marxism from Karl Popper and Austrian economists?
Philosopher Karl Popper criticized Marxism in his books The Poverty of Historicism and Conjectures and Refutations, arguing that the theory avoided falsification by adding ad hoc hypotheses and degenerated into pseudoscientific dogma. Austrian economists including Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises attacked the law of value and the economic calculation problem, claiming that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.
According to the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary socialist Vladimir Lenin, the principal content of Marxism was Marx's economic doctrine. Marx demonstrated how the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are one and the same. He believed that they did this by purporting the concept that the fastest possible growth of productive capital was best for wealthy capitalists and workers because it provided them with employment. Exploitation is a matter of surplus labor, the amount of labor performed beyond what is received in goods. Exploitation has been a socioeconomic feature of every class society and is one of the principal features distinguishing the social classes. The power of one social class to control the means of production enables its exploitation of other classes. Under capitalism, the labor theory of value is the operative concern, whereby the value of a commodity equals the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. Under such conditions, surplus value, the difference between the value produced and the value received by a laborer, is synonymous with surplus labor, and capitalist exploitation is thus realized as deriving surplus value from the worker. In pre-capitalist economies, exploitation of the worker was achieved via physical coercion. Under the capitalist mode of production, workers do not own the means of production and must voluntarily enter into an exploitative work relationship with a capitalist to earn the necessities of life. The worker's entry into such employment is voluntary because they choose which capitalist to work for. However, the worker must work or starve. Thus, exploitation is inevitable, and the voluntary nature of a worker participating in a capitalist society is illusory; it is production, not circulation, that causes exploitation. Marx emphasized that capitalism per se does not cheat the worker. Alienation is the estrangement of people from their humanity and a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and generate alienated laborers. In Marx's view, alienation is an objective characterization of the worker's situation in capitalism, his or her self-awareness of this condition is not prerequisite. In addition to criticism, Marx has also praised some of the results of capitalism stating that it has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together and that it has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal arrangements.
The Class Struggle
Marx distinguishes social classes based on two criteria, ownership of means of production and control over the labor power of others. Following this criterion of class based on property relations, Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of production with the following social groups. The proletariat is the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. The capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat as the worker's labor generates a surplus value greater than the worker's wage. The lumpenproletariat is the outcasts of society, such as the criminals, vagabonds, beggars, or prostitutes, without any political or class consciousness. Having no interest in national, let alone international, economic affairs, Marx claimed that this specific sub-division of the proletariat would play no part in the eventual social revolution. The bourgeoisie are those who own the means of production and buy labor power from the proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat. They subdivide as bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie. The petite bourgeoisie are those who work and can afford to buy little labor power, such as small business owners, peasants, landlords, and trade workers. Marxism predicts that the continual reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the petite bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat. Landlords are a historically significant social class that retains some wealth and power. Peasantry and farmers are a scattered class incapable of organizing and effecting socioeconomic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat while some would become landlords. Class consciousness denotes the awareness of itself and the social world that a social class possesses and its capacity to act rationally in its best interests. Class consciousness is required before a social class can effect a successful revolution and, thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without defining ideology, Marx used the term to describe the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces. Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, the ruling social ideas, is determined by the best interests of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, Marx says that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is, at the same time, its ruling intellectual force. The term political economy initially referred to the study of the material conditions of economic production in the capitalist system. In Marxism, political economy is the study of the means of production, specifically of capital and how that manifests as economic activity.
The Revolution of Ideas
As a school of thought, Marxism has had a profound effect on society and global academia. To date, it has influenced many fields, including anthropology, archaeology, art theory, criminology, cultural studies, economics, education, ethics, film theory, geography, historiography, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, political science, political economy, psychoanalysis, science studies, sociology, theatre, and urban planning. Classical Marxism denotes the collection of socio-eco-political theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Ernest Mandel remarked, Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical. Classical Marxism distinguishes Marxism as broadly perceived from what Marx believed. In 1883, Marx wrote to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue and French labor leader Jules Guesde, both of whom claimed to represent Marxist principles, accusing them of revolutionary phrase-mongering and denying the value of reformist struggle. Libertarian Marxism emphasizes the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, such as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism, Leninism. Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the and The Civil War in France, emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its destiny without the need for a vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism. Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Freudo-Marxism, a form of psychoanalysis, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often strongly influenced both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, Raoul Vaneigem, and Yanis Varoufakis, the latter claiming that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist. Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works, such as Capital. They hold that grasping Marx's philosophical foundations is necessary to understand his later works properly. Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and interpretations of Marx rooted in the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism. Whereas other Marxist philosophies see Marxism as natural science, Marxist humanism reaffirms the doctrine that man is the measure of all things, that humans are essentially different to the rest of the natural order and should be treated so by Marxist theory.
The Red Century
With the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks took power from the Russian Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks established the first socialist state based on the ideas of soviet democracy and Leninism. Their newly formed federal state promised to end Russian involvement in World War I and establish a revolutionary worker's state. Lenin's government also instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education, universal healthcare, and equal rights for women. 50,000 workers had passed a resolution in favor of Bolshevik demand for transfer of power to the soviets. Following the October Revolution, the Soviet government struggled with the White Movement and several independence movements in the Russian Civil War. In 1919, the nascent Soviet Government established the Communist Academy and the Marx, Engels, Lenin Institute for doctrinal Marxist study and to publish official ideological and research documents for the Russian Communist Party. With Lenin's death in 1924, there was an internal struggle in the Soviet Communist movement, mainly between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, in the form of the Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev and the Left Opposition, respectively. These struggles were based on both sides' different interpretations of Marxist and Leninist theory based on the situation of the Soviet Union at the time. This period is marked by the development of Marxism, Leninism and it becoming the dominant ideological strain. At the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and, more widely, World War II, the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred within the context of the Chinese Civil War. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, conflicted with the Kuomintang over the country's future. Throughout the Civil War, Mao Zedong developed a theory of Marxism for the Chinese historical context. Mao found a large base of support in the peasantry as opposed to the Russian Revolution, which found its primary support in the urban centers of the Russian Empire. Some significant ideas contributed by Mao were the ideas of New Democracy, mass line, and people's war. The People's Republic of China was declared in 1949. The new socialist state was to be founded on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. From Stalin's death until the late 1960s, there was increased conflict between China and the Soviet Union. De-Stalinization, which first began under Nikita Khrushchev, and the policy of detente, were seen as revisionist and insufficiently Marxist. This ideological confrontation spilled into a broader global crisis centered around which nation was to lead the international socialist movement. In 1959, the Cuban Revolution led to the victory of Fidel Castro and his July 26 Movement. Although the revolution was not explicitly socialist, upon victory, Castro ascended to the position of prime minister and adopted the Leninist model of socialist development, allying with the Soviet Union. One of the leaders of the revolution, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, subsequently went on to aid revolutionary socialist movements in Congo-Kinshasa and Bolivia, eventually being killed by the Bolivian government, possibly on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency, although the CIA agent sent to search for Guevara, Felix Rodriguez, expressed a desire to keep him alive as a possible bargaining tool with the Cuban government. He posthumously went on to become an internationally recognized icon. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the collapse of most of those socialist states that had professed a Marxist, Leninist ideology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of the New Right and neoliberal capitalism as the dominant ideological trends in Western politics championed by United States president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher led the West to take a more aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union and its Leninist allies. Meanwhile, the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 and sought to abandon Leninist development models toward social democracy. Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms, coupled with rising levels of popular ethnic nationalism, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 into a series of constituent nations, all of which abandoned Marxist, Leninist models for socialism, with most converting to capitalist economies.
The Modern Echo
At the turn of the 21st century, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam remained the only officially Marxist, Leninist states remaining, although a Maoist government led by Prachanda was elected into power in Nepal in 2008 following a long guerrilla struggle. The early 21st century also saw the election of socialist governments in several Latin American nations, in what has come to be known as the pink tide, dominated by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez. This trend also saw the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Forging political and economic alliances through international organizations like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, these socialist governments allied themselves with Marxist, Leninist Cuba. Although none espoused a Stalinist path directly, most admitted to being significantly influenced by Marxist theory. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declared himself a Trotskyist during the swearing-in of his cabinet two days before his inauguration on the 10th of January 2007. Venezuelan Trotskyist organizations do not regard Chávez as a Trotskyist, with some describing him as a bourgeois nationalist, while others consider him an honest revolutionary leader who made significant mistakes due to him lacking a Marxist analysis. For Italian Marxist Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism, this new weak communism differs substantially from its previous Soviet and current Chinese realization, because the South American countries follow democratic electoral procedures and also manage to decentralize the state bureaucratic system through the Bolivarian missions. In sum, if weakened communism is felt as a spectre in the West, it is not only because of media distortions but also for the alternative it represents through the same democratic procedures that the West constantly professes to cherish but is hesitant to apply. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has announced a deepening commitment of the Chinese Communist Party to the ideas of Marx. At an event celebrating the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth, Xi said, We must win the advantages, win the initiative, and win the future. We must continuously improve the ability to use Marxism to analyze and solve practical problems, adding that Marxism is a powerful ideological weapon for us to understand the world, grasp the law, seek the truth, and change the world. Xi has further stressed the importance of examining and continuing the tradition of the CPC and embracing its revolutionary past. The fidelity of those varied revolutionaries, leaders, and parties to the work of Karl Marx is highly contested and has been rejected by many Marxists and other socialists alike. Socialists in general and socialist writers, including Dimitri Volkogonov, acknowledge that the actions of authoritarian socialist leaders have damaged the enormous appeal of socialism generated by the October Revolution.
The Critics and the Critics
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies and academic disciplines. This includes general criticism about lack of internal consistency, criticisms related to historical materialism, that it is a type of historical determinism, the necessity of suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism, and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified. Some Marxists have criticized the academic institutionalization of Marxism for being too shallow and detached from political action. Zimbabwean Trotskyist Alex Callinicos, himself a professional academic, stated: Its practitioners remind one of Narcissus, who in the Greek legend fell in love with his own reflection. Sometimes it is necessary to devote time to clarifying and developing the concepts that we use, but indeed for Western Marxists this has become an end in itself. The result is a body of writings incomprehensible to all but a tiny minority of highly qualified scholars. Additionally, some intellectual critiques of Marxism contest certain assumptions prevalent in Marx's thought and Marxism after him without rejecting Marxist politics. Other contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many aspects of Marxist thought are viable but that the corpus is incomplete or outdated regarding certain aspects of economic, political, or social theory. They may combine some Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber, the Frankfurt School is one example. General philosopher and historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski said that Marx's theory is incomplete or ambiguous in many places, and could be applied in many contradictory ways without manifestly infringing its principles. Specifically, he considers the laws of dialectics as fundamentally erroneous, stating that some are truisms with no specific Marxist content, others philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means, and some just nonsense; he believes that some Marxist laws can be interpreted differently, but that these interpretations still in general fall into one of the two categories of error. Okishio's theorem shows that if capitalists use cost-cutting techniques and real wages do not increase, the rate of profit must rise, which casts doubt on Marx's view that the rate of profit would tend to fall. The allegations of inconsistency have been a large part of Marxian economics and the debates around it since the 1970s. Andrew Kliman argues that this undermines Marx's critiques and the correction of the alleged inconsistencies because internally inconsistent theories cannot be correct by definition. However, in his book, Kliman presents an interpretation where these inconsistencies can be eliminated. The connection between the inconsistency allegations and the lack of study of Marx's theories was argued further by. Critics of Marxism claim that Marx's predictions have failed, with some pointing towards the GDP per capita generally increasing in capitalist economies compared to less market-oriented economics, the capitalist economies not suffering worsening economic crises leading to the overthrow of the capitalist system, and communist revolutions not occurring in the most advanced capitalist nations, but instead in undeveloped regions. It has also been criticized for allegedly resulting in lower living standards in relation to capitalist countries, a claim that has been disputed. In his books, The Poverty of Historicism and Conjectures and Refutations, philosopher of science Karl Popper criticized the explanatory power and validity of historical materialism. Popper believed that Marxism had been initially scientific in that Marx had postulated a genuinely predictive theory. When these predictions were not borne out, Popper argues that the theory avoided falsification by adding ad hoc hypotheses that made it compatible with the facts. Because of this, Popper asserted, a theory that was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudoscientific dogma. Anarchism has had a strained relationship with Marxism. Anarchists and many non-Marxist libertarian socialists reject the need for a transitory state phase, claiming that socialism can only be established through decentralized, non-coercive organization. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin criticized Marx for his authoritarian bent. The phrases barracks socialism or barracks communism became shorthand for this critique, evoking the image of citizens' lives being as regimented as the lives of conscripts in barracks. Other critiques come from an economic standpoint. Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev writing in 1898, Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz writing in 1906, 1907, and subsequent critics have alleged that Marx's value theory and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are internally inconsistent. In other words, the critics allege that Marx drew conclusions that do not follow his theoretical premises. Once these alleged errors are corrected, his conclusion that aggregate price and profit are determined by and equal to the aggregate value and surplus value no longer holds. This result calls into question his theory that exploiting workers is the sole source of profit. Marxism and socialism have received considerable critical analysis from multiple generations of Austrian economists regarding scientific methodology, economic theory, and political implications. During the marginal revolution, a theory of subjective value was developed by Carl Menger, with scholars viewing the development of marginalism more broadly as a response to Marxist economics. Second-generation Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk used praxeological and subjectivist methodology to fundamentally attack the law of value. Gottfried Haberler has regarded his criticism as definitive, arguing that Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx's economics was so thorough and devastating that he believes that as of the 1960s, no Marxian scholar had conclusively refuted it. Third-generation Austrian Ludwig von Mises rekindled the debate about the economic calculation problem by arguing that without price signals in capital goods, in his opinion, all other aspects of the market economy are irrational. This led him to declare that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that Marx's economic theory was fundamentally flawed because it attempted to simplify the economy into a few general laws that ignored the impact of institutions on the economy. These charges have been disputed by other influential economists, like John Roemer and Nicholas Vrousalis.