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Marxism Essay, Research Paper

Marxism Marxism is a body of social, political, and economic thought derived from the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Many forms of Marxism have emerged since Karl Marx s death in 1883. Among these are Communism and Socialism. The ideas of Marxism are derived from his analysis of capitalism, mainly how it arose, how it works, whom it works for, and where it will go. Concentrating on the social and economic relations by which people earn their livings, Marx saw through the capitalist legal fa ade and pointed out the base struggle between two classes, the capitalist, or the owners of the productive resources, and the proletariat, or the works. This struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is the driving force throughout history. There are three main theories that make up Marx s analysis of capitalism, the theory of alienation, the labor theory of value, and the materialist conception of history. Even Marx s vision of socialism emerges from his study of capitalism, because socialism is the unrealized potential inherent in capitalism itself for a more rational and friendly social order in which people can develop more fully their distinctive human qualities. Some socialist ideas can be traced as far back as the Bible, but Marxism has its main intellectual origins in German philosophy, English political economy, and French utopian socialism. It is from G. W. F. Hegel that Marx learned a way of thinking about the world, in all its fluid complexity that is called dialectics. Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s view that the values of commodities express the amount of labor time that go into their production underlay Marx’s own labor theory of value. From the French utopians, especially Charles Fourier and the Comte de Saint-Simon, Marx caught a glimpse of a happier future that lay beyond capitalism. With the paradox of an Industrial Revolution that produced as much poverty as it did wealth, these were the main ingredients that went into the formation of Marxism. Marx’s study of capitalism was grounded in a philosophy that was both dialectical and materialist. With dialectics, the changes and interactions that anything undergoes are brought into focus and emphasized, and special attention is devoted to whatever patterns emerge. This method let Marx, when examining a particular problem within capitalism, to keep in view both the broader interactions that made up the whole and the past and future development of present phenomena. In this way, capitalism became the main object of his study. The uneasy tension between the historical forces promoting change and the systemic ones promoting equilibrium were captured in the idea of contradiction, understood as a progressive pulling apart of what is functionally united.Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, which moved in a world of pure ideas, Marx’s dialectic was materialist. Marx was primarily concerned with capitalism as lived rather than as thought about, but people’s lives also involve consciousness. Marx’s materialism puts ideas back into the heads of living people and treats both as parts of a world that is forever being remade through human activities, particularly in production. In this dialectical process, ideas also affect the social conditions and behavior that more generally shape them. The theory of alienation tells how the people who do the work in capitalism own none of the tools that they use in their work. The capitalists, to whom workers must sell their time and energy in return for a wage, own these. This system of labor displays four relations that lie at the core of Marx’s theory of alienation. The worker is alienated from their productive activity, playing no part in deciding what to do or how to do it. The worker is alienated from the product of that activity, having no control over what is made or what becomes of it. The worker is alienated from other human beings, with competition and mutual indifference replacing most forms of cooperation. Finally, the worker is alienated from the distinctive potential inherent in the notion of human being. The alienation of the workers leaves them physically weakened, mentally confused, isolated, and virtually powerless. On the other side of this separation are products and ties with other people, outside the control and lost to the understanding of the worker. In the marketplace the worker’s products pass from one hand to another, changing names and form along the way. Value, commodity, capital, profit, interest, rent, wage, eventually change names and comeback to the worker as the landlord’s house, the grocer’s food, the boss’s factory, and the various laws and customs that keep social order. The world that the worker has made and the capitalists have taken is resold to the worker in the misunderstood form of private property to serve as the necessary conditions for reproducing his or her own alienation. The next of Marx s theories is the labor theory of value, which Marx expanded on from Smith and Ricardo s original ideas. Smith and Ricardo used the theory of value to explain broad price ratios. Marx took this explanation more or less for granted. His labor theory of value is primarily concerned with the more basic problem of why goods have prices at all. The slave owner takes by force what slaves produce. The feudal lord claims as a right some part of what is produced by the serfs. Only in capitalism is the distribution of what is produced a function of markets and prices. Marx’s explanation of this concentrates on the separation of the worker from their means of production and the sale of their hard work that this separation makes necessary. As a result of this separation, all the things that workers produce become available for exchange. In fact, this is why they are produced, for the exchange. Value is the general social form taken by all the products of alienated labor. Such products could

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