What was marxist theory

The middle class? Marxist critics are also interested in how the lower or working classes are oppressed - in everyday life and in literature. The Marxist school follows a process of thinking called the material dialectic. This belief system maintains that " Marx asserts that " This cycle of contradiction, tension, and revolution must continue: there will always be conflict between the upper, middle, and lower working classes and this conflict will be reflected in literature and other forms of expression - art, music, movies, etc.

Between these two dates, Marx commented on, and intervened in, the revolution in Germany through the Neue Rheinische Zeitung —49 , the paper he helped to establish and edit in Cologne. This third and longest exile was dominated by an intellectual and personal struggle to complete his critique of political economy, but his theoretical output extended far beyond that project. Between and Marx also wrote well over three hundred articles for the New York Daily Tribune ; sometimes unfairly disparaged as merely income-generating journalism, they frequently contain illuminating attempts to explain contemporary European society and politics including European interventions in India and China to an American audience helpfully presumed to know little about them.

The character and lessons of the Commune—the short-lived, and violently suppressed, municipal rebellion that controlled Paris for several months in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war—are discussed in The Civil War in France He never succeeded in fixing and realising the wider project that he envisaged. Volume One of Capital , published in , was the only significant part of the project published in his own lifetime, and even here he was unable to resist heavily reworking subsequent editions especially the French version of — In addition, the publication in —a previous two-volume edition and had only a highly restricted circulation—of the so-called Grundrisse written in —58 was also important.

His inability to deliver the later volumes of Capital is often seen as emblematic of a wider and more systematic intellectual failure Stedman Jones Anderson Marx died in March , two months after the death of his eldest daughter. The truth here is complex, and Engels is not always well-treated in the literature. Marx and Engels are sometimes portrayed as if they were a single entity, of one mind on all matters, whose individual views on any topic can be found simply by consulting the other.

Despite their familiarity, neither caricature seems plausible or fair. The attempt to establish a reliable collected edition has proved lengthy and fraught. In its current form—much scaled-down from its original ambitions—the edition will contain some volumes well over a half of which are published at the time of writing.

Texts are published in their original language variously German, English, and French. For those needing to utilise English-language resources, the fifty volume Marx Engels Collected Works — can be recommended.

There are also several useful single volume selections of Marx and Engels writings in English including Marx It identifies a distinct kind of social ill, involving a separation between a subject and an object that properly belong together. And the relation between the relevant subject and object is one of problematic separation. Both elements of that characterisation are important. Not all social ills, of course, involve separations; for instance, being overly integrated into some object might be dysfunctional, but it is not characteristic of alienation.

Moreover, not all separations are problematic, and accounts of alienation typically appeal to some baseline unity or harmony that is frustrated or violated by the separation in question. Theories of alienation vary considerably, but frequently: first, identify a subset of these problematic separations as being of particular importance; second, include an account sometimes implicit of what makes the relevant separations problematic; and, third, propound some explanatory claims about the extent of, and prognosis for, alienation, so understood.

It is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. In their imagination humans raise their own powers to an infinite level and project them on to an abstract object. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible.

One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognise it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life.

After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the modern state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political or liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community.

But the political state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created. Although Marx was greatly inspired by thinking about religious alienation, much more of his attention was devoted to exploring alienation in work. In a much-discussed passage from the Manuscripts , Marx identifies four dimensions of alienated labour in contemporary capitalist society MECW 3: — First, immediate producers are separated from the product of their labour; they create a product that they neither own nor control, indeed, which comes to dominate them.

Third, immediate producers are separated from other individuals; contemporary economic relations socialise individuals to view others as merely means to their own particular ends. Fourth, and finally, immediate producers are separated from their own human nature; for instance, the human capacities for community and for free, conscious, and creative, work, are both frustrated by contemporary capitalist relations.

Note that these claims about alienation are distinct from other, perhaps more familiar, complaints about work in capitalist society. For instance, alienated labour, as understood here, could be—even if it is often not—highly remunerated, limited in duration, and relatively secure.

Marx holds that work has the potential to be something creative and fulfilling. He consequently rejects the view of work as a necessary evil, denying that the negative character of work is part of our fate, a universal fact about the human condition that no amount of social change could remedy. It was suggested above that alienation consists of dysfunctional separations—separations between entities that properly belong together—and that theories of alienation typically presuppose some baseline condition whose frustration or violation by the relevant separation identifies the latter as dysfunctional.

For Marx, that baseline seems to be provided by an account of human flourishing, which he conceptualises in terms of self-realisation understood here as the development and deployment of our essential human capacities. Labour in capitalism, we can say, is alienated because it embodies separations preventing the self-realisation of producers; because it is organised in a way that frustrates the human need for free, conscious, and creative work.

So understood, and returning to the four separations said to characterise alienated labour, we can see that it is the implicit claim about human nature the fourth separation which identifies the other three separations as dysfunctional. If one subscribed to the same formal model of alienation and self-realisation, but held a different account of the substance of human nature, very different claims about work in capitalist society might result.

Imagine a theorist who held that human beings were solitary, egoistic creatures, by nature. That theorist could accept that work in capitalist society encouraged isolation and selfishness, but deny that such results were alienating, because those results would not frustrate their baseline account of what it is to be a human being indeed, they would rather facilitate those characteristics.

Marx seems to hold various views about the historical location and comparative extent of alienation. These include: that some systematic forms of alienation—presumably including religious alienation—existed in pre-capitalist societies; that systematic forms of alienation—including alienation in work—are only a feature of class divided societies; that systematic forms of alienation are greater in contemporary capitalist societies than in pre-capitalist societies; and that not all human societies are scarred by class division, in particular, that a future classless society communism will not contain systematic forms of alienation.

Marx maintains that alienation flows from capitalist social relations, and not from the kind of technological advances that capitalist society contains. His disapproval of capitalism is reserved for its social arrangements and not its material accomplishments. Industry and technology are understood as part of the solution to, and not the source of, social problems.

There are many opportunities for scepticism here. In the present context, many struggle to see how the kind of large-scale industrial production that would presumably characterise communist society—communism purportedly being more productive than capitalism—would avoid alienation in work. Interesting responses to such concerns have been put forward, but they have typically come from commentators rather than from Marx himself Kandiyali Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation.

In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation—essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties—and human emancipation. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security.

Therefore, liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility—for Marx, the fact—that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of liberal rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.

Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feudalism and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation.

Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the ideas of non-alienated labour and meaningful community. Three concerns are briefly addressed here. The once-popular suggestion that Marx only wrote about alienation in his early writings—his published and unpublished works from the early s—is not sustained by the textual evidence.

However, the theoretical role that the concept of alienation plays in his writings might still be said to evolve. A second concern is the role of human nature in the interpretation of alienation offered here. However, there is much evidence against this purported later rejection of human nature see Geras To provide for the latter, a society must satisfy not only basic needs for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity , but also less basic needs, both those that are not always appreciated to be part of his account for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure , and those that Marx is more often associated with for fulfilling work and meaningful community Leopold — These two forms of alienation can be exemplified separately or conjointly in the lives of particular individuals or societies Hardimon — Marx seems to allow that these two forms of alienation are conceptually distinct, but assumes that in capitalist societies they are typically found together.

Indeed, he often appears to think of subjective alienation as tracking the objective variant. That said, Marx does allow that they can come apart sociologically. Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature. However, the manuscripts collected together as The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in , are also a much used early source.

Cohen Cohen [], , who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov — Plekhanov []. However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its insistence on a mechanical model and its lack of attention to the dialectic.

Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital.

Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create —or at least transform—the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels.

In The German Ideology manuscripts, Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. This is the thesis that the productive forces tend to develop, in the sense of becoming more powerful, over time.

The productive forces are the means of production, together with productively applicable knowledge: technology, in other words. The development thesis states not that the productive forces always do develop, but that there is a tendency for them to do so. The next thesis is the primacy thesis, which has two aspects. Indeed, many activities may well combine aspects of both the superstructure and ideology: a religion is constituted by both institutions and a set of beliefs. Revolution and epoch change is understood as the consequence of an economic structure no longer being able to continue to develop the forces of production.

In outline, then, the theory has a pleasing simplicity and power. It seems plausible that human productive power develops over time, and plausible too that economic structures exist for as long as they develop the productive forces, but will be replaced when they are no longer capable of doing this. Yet severe problems emerge when we attempt to put more flesh on these bones. The antipathy is well summed up with the closing words of H.

One difficulty taken particularly seriously by Cohen is an alleged inconsistency between the explanatory primacy of the forces of production, and certain claims made elsewhere by Marx which appear to give the economic structure primacy in explaining the development of the productive forces. This appears to give causal and explanatory primacy to the economic structure—capitalism—which brings about the development of the forces of production.

Cohen accepts that, on the surface at least, this generates a contradiction. Both the economic structure and the development of the productive forces seem to have explanatory priority over each other.

The essential move is cheerfully to admit that the economic structure, such as capitalism, does indeed develop the productive forces, but to add that this, according to the theory, is precisely why we have capitalism when we do.

That is, if capitalism failed to develop the productive forces it would disappear. And, indeed, this fits beautifully with historical materialism. Essentially fettering is what happens when the economic structure becomes dysfunctional.

Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device.

The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard Elster 27— If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job.

However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. We must remember the Hegelian origins of Marxist thought. Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe, and that the history of the world is simply the history of this world mind, which, as in the case of everything spiritual, tends indefinitely towards perfection. Weil [ 43]. Cohen is well aware of the difficulty of appealing to purposes in history, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology.

In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone.

The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest. Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements. But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works.

Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently. Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete in some respects to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight.

Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in the absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence. At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail.

Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised. The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest.

Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology.

The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.

But what is it that drives such development? Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do.

Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers. Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity.

Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs.

Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory. It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event.

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What Kind of Philosophy Is Marxism? What Did Marx Predict for the Future? Was Marx Right? Key Takeaways Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx that focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class.

Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were inherently exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict. He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy. Karl Marx believed that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism in a violent revolution. Article Sources.

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