Social Sciences
Evaluation of Marxism
The evaluation of Marxism involves critical analysis of its key principles, such as historical materialism, class struggle, and the role of the state. Critics argue that Marxist theory oversimplifies complex social dynamics, underestimates the role of individual agency, and has been historically associated with authoritarian regimes. Proponents, however, emphasize its focus on economic inequality, exploitation, and the potential for societal transformation.
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3 Key excerpts on "Evaluation of Marxism"
eBook - ePub- Darren O'Byrne(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
When I was throwing out some old notes from my sociology classes at school, I found it amusing that the first sentence on Marxism stated that ‘two thirds of the world is run under this system’. Looking back on it, I realised how unhelpful it must have been to have seen Marxism first and foremost in relation to a form of political organisation, which was duly demonised as the ‘enemy’ of the West during the Cold War – talk about prejudicing a choice on the merits of a Marxist theory! And that is the point – Marxism is a general theory of society, not a ‘system’ of state administration. Far better to start with an Evaluation of Marxism as such a theory, which draws particular attention to what is wrong in modern, Western, capitalist societies, and which seeks solutions to those problems, and leave it to politicians to derive from that theory a ‘better’ system of organising society, which may or may not be true to the spirit and the intentions of the man whose ideas it claims to represent. So, it is Marxism as a sociological theory we are discussing here. And there is much to discuss, because the theory has much to offer. More so than possibly any of the other perspectives included in this volume, it is a theory which develops around its own set of very clearly defined key concepts – capitalism and social class are the two big ones, and attached to them are ‘historical materialism’, ‘ alienation ’, ‘ ideology ’, ‘ base and superstructure ’, ‘exploitation’, and dozens more besides. The beauty of a Marxist approach is that while at the next level it is incredibly complex (we won’t be dwelling on the very detailed contributions Marxists have made to economic theory!), and there are certainly many different and often competing interpretations of Marxist theory (which we will be discussing), at its most basic level, Marxism can be quite easy to grasp
- Bruno Jossa(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
This subject is discussed by Abendroth in a well-known 1967 book whose main working hypothesis can be summed up as follows. In the Stalinist and fascist epochs, the fairly moderate post-WWI revolutionary wave of the 1920s was halted by a counter-revolutionary movement, which precipitated the defeat of Marxism conceived of as a mass phenomenon. Finding themselves thrown ‘off-stage’, Western Marxist intellectuals reacted to this change in circumstances by giving themselves up to rhetorical exercise and abstaining from practical action — a clear sign that they no longer anticipated the materialisation of socialism (see Anderson 1976: 35ff.). Let me add that during this process, Western Marxism gradually acquired the connotations of a philosophical, rather than economic, movement (see Blackledge 2004: 60). Around 1980, Anderson’s faith in the final advent of socialism was also badly shaken. In the minds of numerous authors, the retreat into mere philosophising produced a dual impact on the American left: first, it resulted in the adoption of specialist theoretical jargon, which proved impenetrable to non-academics; second, it produced a horde of speculative analyses, which were little related to the crucial social and political events of the time (see Jacoby 1987: 158; Blackledge 2004: 147). It is worth repeating that no theoretical approach can qualify as Marxist if it rejects the idea of revolution and is not inspired by the wish to change the world.As Meyer appropriately puts it (Meyer 1994: 317), the vitality of Marxist thought rests on the prospect of social change. Consequently, if the twenty-first century proves to be a period of steady social stability, it is probable that Marxism in all its forms will be perceived as irrelevant and will die out. In contrast, where no stability is achieved, social thought will necessarily be influenced by Marxist ideas or any other ideas perceived as further developments of Marxism.6 Marxism as science: a critique of Lucio Colletti’s approach
The reflections that I have been developing so far may help us reverse Colletti’s argument that Marxism is no science.Colletti starts out from the idea that Marx’s method of analysis is Hegelian dialectic, which he holds to be in stark conflict with the non-contradiction principle — the true founding stone of scientific investigation. Conversely, I have provided evidence that dialectics can be interpreted in manners that do not conflict with science. This does not mean that Colletti thinks of Marxism as a philosophical, rather than scientific, discipline. As he himself concedes,
eBook - ePub- Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Marxian economists and literary theorists are closest, we would argue, in their inclusion and investigation of “political” concerns as one of the prime means of discursive production. To be clear, it is not that neoclassical and Keynesian thought are “nonpolitical”; it is rather that much energy is spent to efface and ignore the political constitution of such thought. Of course, much of this effacement takes place in the name of science, but in any event, most mainstream economic thought considers itself to be politically and ideologically disinterested. Again, in the cases of Jameson, Eagleton, Macherey, Lukács, Pêcheux, Williams, and others, the political meanings and effects of literary texts and of the criticism of such texts are emphasized and explicitly theorized. From Jameson’s revelation of the “political unconscious” constituting both narrative forms and their analysis to Eagleton’s imperative that to do literary theory and read literature one must start from a politically implicated point of view or “critical counterspace,” Marxist literary theorists most often seem to accept Althusser’s claim that to be a Marxist means to practice a form of political struggle in the realm of theory. Needless to say, most Marxist economists regard their discourse as interwoven throughout with concepts and objects of analysis that call attention to oppositional political positions. Here history, dialectics, class, and so forth combine to produce, in different versions no doubt, a “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” the oppositional political stance that Marx himself believed undergirded his own theoretical endeavors.While there are vast differences between different schools of Marxist thought, much of the disagreement takes place over the purport of the aforementioned concepts and methods and, thus, is situated on a common terrain. In contrast, the discursive differences between Marxian and neoclassical thought, for example, are rarely over the particular meanings and application of these concepts, because Marxists and neoclassicals most often do not recognize each other’s discursive elements to be their own. For the sake of completeness, however, we note that close complementarity between types of economic theory and other disciplinary formations is not unique to Marxism. For example, we believe that neoclassical economic thought may be more contiguous as a “discipline” with contemporary behavioral psychology and Parsonian sociology than with Marxian economic thought.
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