Marxism

10 Key excerpts on "Marxism"

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  International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First Century

  An Introduction

  • Martin Griffiths, Martin Griffiths(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Marxism Mark Rupert

  Introduction

  Deeply enmeshed in intellectual and political projects spanning well over a century and much of the world, Marxism – the tradition of ‘practical-critical activity’ founded by Karl Marx – defies reduction to any simple doctrine or single political position. Its breadth and diversity is illustrated by the sheer mass of Leszek Kolakowski’s multivolume survey Main Currents of Marxism (2005), a schematic overview of historical and actually existing Marxisms. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand this constellation of intellectual and political positions as constituting variants of historical materialism (the core of the Marxist worldview) insofar as they are animated by a critique of capitalism, understood as a particular historical form of organization of human social life, rather than a natural or necessary expression of some innate and invariant human nature. Without pretending to speak for the whole of Marxism, this chapter will present a particular interpretation of historical materialism and its relevance for global politics.

  Contrary to simplistic caricatures which retain in some quarters a measure of academic currency, historical materialism has focused its attention upon capitalism as a material way of life, an ensemble of social relations which has never been coterminous with ‘the economy’ as we know it in the modern world, nor with the so-called ‘domestic’ sphere putatively contained within the boundaries of the sovereign state. Marxism has much to say about historically evolving structures and practices which have crossed national boundaries and linked the domestic and the international, the economic and the political – much to say, in short, about the social production of global politics. Historical materialism suggests that states and systems of interstate and transnational power relations are embedded in and (re-)produced through systems of relations that encompass (among other things) the social organization of production. The latter is itself structured according to relations of class (and, many contemporary Marxists acknowledge, by race and gender as well as other relations of domination), and is an object of contestation among social classes, state managers, and other historically situated political agents. Thus politics is not confined to the formally public sphere of the modern state, but permeates the economic sphere as well: just as the state and interstate politics can profoundly shape economic and social life, so the politics of the economy can have enormous implications – not generally recognized within the terms of liberal worldviews – for the historical form taken by particular states and world orders constructed among states. The point here, it must be emphasized, is not to reconstruct global politics on the basis of an economistic reductionism in which all causality is seen as emanating from an already constituted, foundational economic sphere (a sort of universal independent variable), but rather to argue something very nearly the opposite – that politics and political stru ggle are essential aspects of the processes by which all social structures are (re-)produced, and hence that the analytical separation of political from economic life – as well as domestic and international aspects of these – represents a false dichotomy which obscures much of potential political importance.

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  Theories of International Relations

  Contending Approaches to World Politics

  • Stephanie Lawson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  6

  Marxism, Critical Theory and World-Systems Theory

  Since the publication in 1848 of The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his colleague Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the influence of Marxism in both intellectual and practical spheres has been profound. There is not a single discipline in the humanities and social sciences that has not been inspired by Marxist thought, either in positive support of its precepts or as a negative critique of them. At the same time, the impact of Marxist thought – or interpretations of Marxist thought by others – on twentieth-century world history is immeasurable, from the former USSR and Eastern Europe to China and many parts of what we now call the Global South. In many of these places, however, Marxism was used as a basis for instituting repressive authoritarian regimes which Marx himself would have found repugnant. Marx once famously declared that he was not a Marxist, and if he had lived to see how his ideas were deployed in the twentieth century he would surely have distanced himself even further. In the event, the clash of ideologies between the oppressive versions of communism underpinning the regimes of the Soviet Union and its allies, on the one hand, and those which aligned themselves with the democratic West, on the other, constituted the principal engine which drove the Cold War.

  Moderate forms of non-revolutionary socialism incorporating democratic principles had been developed by other theorists from the early nineteenth century, especially in France, where the early use of the word ‘socialism’, emphasizing the social dimensions of human life, had been used in contrast to the ‘individualism’ promoted by liberals. ‘Communism’ relates to ‘community’ and things held ‘in common’, which also contrasts with individualism. Some speculative political thought along these lines drew inspiration from the long-distance voyages made by Europeans from the late fifteenth century in which encounters with ‘primitive’ societies with strongly communal characteristics, and apparently lacking notions of private property, provoked critical comparisons with the ‘corrupt civilization’ of Europe. As we saw earlier, Rousseau believed that European civilization represented the descent of human society from an earlier, relatively benign state of existence, and his emphasis on equality provided a foundation for later socialist and communist thought (Hobsbawm, 2011, pp. 19, 22).

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  Sociological Interpretations of Education

  • David Blackledge, Barry Hunt(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II The Marxist Perspective Passage contains an image

  6 The Marxist Perspective – An Introduction

  Our purpose in this chapter is to provide an introduction to the main ideas and issues within Marxist theory as a basis for an understanding of the Marxist perspective on education.

  Marxist theory can be divided into two parts. First there is the theory of society and history that is usually referred to as 'historical materialism'. It is a conception of how society changes and how the various parts of society are related to one another. Second there is the Marxist concept of man or human nature, which is interwoven with a theory of the 'good society'. The notions of 'alienation' and 'communism' are here central.

  Historical Materialism

  The starting-point of a Marxist analysis is the view that it is what people do to keep alive or maintain themselves in existence that really matters. The basic fact about society is how men and women produce the means to live. It is therefore economic activity, or production in a wide sense of the word, that is fundamental. Everything else that people do and that goes on in society is in some way related to or derived from this. Hence Marxists see society as composed of two major parts: (1) the economic structure or 'base' or 'foundation' and (2) the 'superstructure' of other social institutions and practices such as politics, education, religion, family life, and men's ideas, beliefs and values.

  However, over and above this short statement one enters into areas of controversy. For, as Kolakowski points out: 'There is scarcely any question relating to the interpretation of Marxism that is not a matter of dispute.'1 In what follows we shall explore some of these disputes.

  Base and Superstructure

  First there is the 'base/superstructure' issue and the related controversy of 'determinism versus voluntarism' in Marxist thought. For, although Marxists believe that everything that goes on in the superstructure of society is in some way related to economic activity (or the base), they differ in their views as to the nature of that relationship. On the one hand there are those who believe that the economic base determines the superstructure in the sense that, for example, a society's educational system, or its form of government, or the type of family prevalent at any particular time is a direct consequence of the nature of its economic system. Furthermore, as the economic base changes, so too do these other social, political and cultural institutions. As Marx himself says: 'With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.'2

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  Understanding Marxism

  • Geoff Boucher(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Marx, then, did not espouse Marxism. Nonetheless, it was as Marxists, and not as “historical materialists”, that the masses marched and the leaders acted during the convulsions of the twentieth century. In fact, the key figure in the emergence of one of the major political and intellectual forces of twentieth-century history is Engels. It was Engels who sorted “Marxism” out from a host of contradictory and open-ended research questions in the final work of the mature Marx, and then popularized and disseminated it as a political doctrine. The codification, systemati-zation and simplification of Marx’s positions that Engels performed in his major works centres on the reduction of dialectical philosophy to the method of the natural sciences.

  Engels’s transformation of historical materialism into Marxist politics under the title of “scientific socialism” inaugurates the period of “classical Marxism”. Following Engels, the leaders of the socialist movement, such as Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), Vladimir Ilych Lenin (1870–1924), Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), Leon Trotsky (1878–1940) and Mao Tse-Tung (1893–1976), modified specific predictions and strategies in light of historical developments and political successes. But from Engels onwards, during the century of historical Communism (1883–1989), the Marxism of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals remained substantially the same. Marxism was a scientific politics that revolutionized history just as Darwin had radicalized nature. It formulated general laws of history that demonstrated a unilinear process of social evolution, which ascended through a historically necessary sequence of modes of production, culminating in communist society.

  The result is a relation between practice, history and structure based on the adaptation of human society to the natural environment. Practice is accordingly defined through the level of technological development of the productive forces, which is held to be the motor of historical dynamics. Historical evolution is seen as passing through the emergence, maturation and then stagnation of a society’s characteristic productive forces, as these are promoted and then retarded by its typical social relations of production. Because social structure depends upon the reflection of economic arrangements in politics, law and ideology (and the reaction back upon economics of these factors), mutations in the economic foundation of society catalyse wider changes.

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  The Problem of Sociology

  • David Lee, Howard Newby(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter we shall deal with a specific piece of analysis by Marx—his analysis of capitalism. In doing so we hope to clarify many of the issues raised in the previous chapter and to demonstrate how Marx wove them together in a highly intricate pattern in order to form a substantive analysis of capitalist society. Thus many of the concepts which were introduced in the previous chapter—historical materialism, the base/ superstructure distinction, the mode of production, the dialectic, the class struggle— will be encountered again. We shall find it necessary to elaborate and extend our discussion of them as well as providing a much deeper understanding of Marx’s theoretical scheme within the context of his discussion of capitalist development. Thus by the end of this chapter we should be in a much better position to evaluate Marx’s contribution to the history of sociological thought. In particular we shall be able to examine the claims (to which readers of commentaries on Marx’s work are frequently exposed) that ‘Marxism’ is something entirely separate from ‘bourgeois sociology’ with its own unique and definitive ‘problematic’. In doing so we shall also return to the distinction introduced in the previous chapter between ‘humanist’ and ‘scientific’ Marxism and seek to demonstrate how Marxism is itself now divided over the same problems of explanation which plague ‘bourgeois’ (that is, non-Marxist) schools of social theory. In fairness, however, it should be stated that the interpretation offered in this chapter leans more to the ‘humanist’ rather than the ‘scientific’ interpretation of Marxism.

  Capital is clearly Marx’s magnum opus. It is a towering monument to his intellectual capacities —the work for which he is best remembered, and deservedly so. It combines sociology and economics by investigating economic life within a social context, all aspects of which are interrelated, and it is upon this foundation that Marx provides an alternative theory of capitalist production to that favoured by ‘bourgeois political economy’. Marx, therefore, refused to recognize the distinction between social and economic relations; it is the abstraction of the latter from the former which he regarded as the obfuscating error of conventional economics. Nevertheless Marx, it should be emphasized, agreed with much of the orthodox political economy offered by the Scottish and English utilitarians such as Adam Smith, John Locke, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Where Marx fundamentally diverged from them was in their belief that the economic ‘laws’ which they had discovered— such as the ‘laws’ of supply and demand—were indeed natural laws neither made nor alterable by human will. Marx would have no truck with this. Such economic laws, he argued, were dependent upon social relations rather than governed by immutable factors beyond human control. Marx’s dominant interest was therefore in ascertaining the laws of social and historical evolution to which capitalist economics was subordinate

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  The History and Philosophy of Social Science

  • H. Scott Gordon(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  But these too, they believed, had been converted into apologetic instruments by the ‘vulgar economists’ and it was necessary to construct a scientific analysis of society virtually from the ground up. Marx and Engels felt that ideological rationalization always plays a role in human thought, even in science, but this can be overcome by a strong determination to be objective and a proper appreciation of the principles of scientific method. Marx was confident that he had accomplished this transcendence in his own work. Today the sharpest point of controversy between Marxists and non-Marxists relates to this issue, Marxists contending that Marxian theory, despite its weaknesses on specific points, is the objectively scientific theory of society, while non-Marxists see it as epistemologically flawed, some even regarding it as belonging more to speculative metaphysics than to positive science (see, for example, M. Blaug, A Methodological Appraisal of Marxian Economics, 1980). As a philosophical outlook, modern Marxism is frequently described as ‘dialectical materialism’. Marx and Engels never used this term themselves. It was coined by the Russian Marxist G.V.Plekhanov in the 1890s. Lenin adopted it as a way of distinguishing Marxian theory from other types of materialism and, after the Russian Revolution, it became the established term for the philosophical description of communism. Whether Marx and Engels would have approved of this we do not know, but they did regard their philosophical outlook as ‘dialectical’ and ‘materialistic’, so it would not seem improper to join these notions together. The concept of ‘materialism’ has already been discussed, especially in section B of this chapter, dealing with the Marxian theory of historical development

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  Dialectics of Class Struggle in the Global Economy

  • Clark Everling(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Second, these political economic theories were focused upon concern for the stability of the capitalist system. This took the form of theories of reproductive crises within capitalism and had the effect of reducing Marxism to a prediction of capitalist cycles within capitalism and the presence or absence of economic decline. These narrow interpretations obscured Marx's central argument of capitalism as a system in which humans were at war with themselves in the contradiction between social production and private appropriation. These narrow interpretations had the further effect of suppressing the profound cost to human subjects, as if, for example, the causes of two world wars and numerous others, human degradation, and environmental destruction were not to be sought in capitalism as an international class relation through imperialism.

  Third, these theories of Marxist political economy suppressed recognition of the working class and its international development by reducing workers to the category of labor and taking only activities of employment and the wage relation as evidence of working class practical activities. Ultimately, this resulted in the dismissal of the working class from these theories until even the category of labor itself faded from view. Surplus value, as human exploitation, was, in this way, transformed into a theory of a social surplus based upon commodities and money.

  Early debates on value theory

  The movement of Marxism from class struggle to political economy is seen in its embryonic form in the early debates on value theory. Following discussion of this, I examine revisionism within Social Democracy as the second embryonic source of Marxian economic categories. Finally, in this connection, I consider the evolution of class-state relations within imperialism and of Soviet socialism into Stalinism as the sources which provided the premises for reflection by Marxist economists for most of the rest of the twentieth century. Throughout all of this, the increasing instability, decline, and class oppositions of capitalism within increasingly global social production will be shown to have created the premises for these developments and theories.

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  Adult Education and Socialist Pedagogy

  • Frank Youngman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Because the basis includes the social relations of production, it is the class structure which is of special significance for a Marxist sociology of knowledge. The general conclusion of Marx and Engels’ argument on knowledge as a social product is that in class society the very nature of ideas has an inescapable class dimension. The knowledge held by the individual has a class character:

  Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual derives...them through traditions and upbringing... 46

  The analysis of the class nature of knowledge has been elaborated in Marxist theories of ideology, which discuss the products of consciousness, that is, ideas, values, theories, beliefs, and their expression in language.

  Ideology

  Ideology is a widely used term both inside and outside Marxism and one which is susceptible to a wide variety of meanings. The problem of definition arises in the work of Marx and Engels itself as they did not produce a systematic theory of ideology and left ambiguities which have led to divergent emphases by their interpreters. However, I think it is possible to give a coherent view of the concept which indicates its complexity but which is not contradictory.

  At a surface level of meaning, ideology is simply a system of ideas and beliefs. It is evident from the preceding section that a Marxist viewpoint will relate ideology to the social structure and indicate a correlation between different classes and the ideas they hold. On the whole, different classes will view the world differently according to their distinct experience of life. One dimension of the concept of ideology therefore takes account of the way in which a class holds ideas which arise spontaneously from its way of life. But in a class-divided society, the ruling class has the economic and political power to consciously disseminate ideas which will justify and support its own class interests. A second dimension of ideology thus recognises that a system of ideas comes to predominate in society because it is used by the ruling class to serve its interests. Both these processes of idea formation contain pressures which lead to false ideas and distorted views of reality, so that a third dimension of ideology refers to a system of illusory ideas. I will now elaborate these three dimensions of meaning.

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  Sport and Leisure in Social Thought

  • Grant Jarvie, Joseph Maguire(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are reasons for believing that the death of Marxism is both premature and exaggerated. First, as a nineteenth-century thinker Marx's academic future is secure in the same way as, for example, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, Hebert Spencer or Charles Darwin. The force of Darwinism as a pattern of thought is not fatally diminished by new advances in biology, nor is the work of Adam Smith, or other nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, increasingly irrelevant as a result of changing attitudes towards political economy or global culture.

  Second, as long as domination, exploitation, and subordination exist in the world, Marxism is likely to remain a form of explanation and praxis, although one has to be sceptical about any notions of a working-class vanguard in the late twentieth century. Class reductionism has for some time been questioned by Marxists themselves. In a classical Marxist sense the working class had at least four clear characteristics: it was a majority in society; and it comprised the people who did the producing, the people who were exploited and the people in the greatest need. It is doubtful today if such a group exists in the classical sense of the term working class and yet other forms of exploitation, an ever present gap between rich and poor and the relationship between the First World and the developing Third World, are still potential organic sources of tension and crises for Western capitalism in particular.3

  Third, in Britain we began the 1980s with the Marxist left more influential in the main party of the left, the Labour party, than in any other Western state. Since then the 1984–5 miners' strike has destroyed many notions of working-class power. The 1987 election destroyed unilateralism, while the 1992 election defeat consolidated the treaty of Union and put paid to the constitutional challenge which was one of the few genuinely radical projects supported by the left. Yet, despite such events, it is likely that both politics and the academy will continue to find a place for the humanitarian, egalitarian social and political justice that is at the heart of Marxism. Many people will continue to believe in the possibility of transforming capitalism into a more progressive and better society. Marxist thought, although not Marxist dogma, will continue to have a part to play in this process. What label you put on such a process is perhaps irrelevant.

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  Marxism Goes to the Movies

  • Mike Wayne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  re-grounding of ideas, theory, values, beliefs, culture, art and so forth is central to Marxism as a political and research project and is one of its major contributions to intellectual life in the modern period. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, given the powerful trends at work encouraging ‘separation’, Marxism remains one of the crucial intellectual and political resources we have available to us to resist such pressure and defend critical reason.

  In The German Ideology , Marx and Engels also made their very well-known formulation about ideology and class when they stated 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 class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.32

  As a broad initial orientation this formulation would certainly make sense of much of our intellectual and cultural life today. It can hardly be denied, for example, that compulsory education, in terms of what is taught and how and with what aims, is very profoundly shaped by the needs and interests of the employers who dominate the economy, nor how stratified in class terms our education systems (in the UK especially) are. Meanwhile the mainstream media does not spend much or any of its time fundamentally attacking the capitalist system of production, always preferring to discuss problems without tracking them back to a deeper causal nexus (i.e. adequate mediation). The extent to which, generally speaking, the ideas of those who ‘lack the means of mental production are subject to’ those who own the means of production, is a historical and socially variable question for sure. We also will certainly want to nuance the formulation a little bit more. It may be, for example, that there are ideas and value systems that predominate across public opinion but because they are inconvenient or incongruous with the dominant class view of the world, go unacknowledged within the dominant ideology, at least officially.

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