Idealistic Politics

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Second Essay Assignment

The American University in Cairo

Fall 2001

SEMR-200-05

Dr. Clarissa Burt

Mufaddal Saifuddin

900 99 2112

Idealistic Politics

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," said Karl Marx, who is considered to be one of the world's most seminal thinkers. Marx categorized these classes in two broad categories; the bourgeoisie versus the proletariats, the upper class opposed to the lower class and the caste that have access to the factors of production against everybody else who are compelled to sell their labor. In political terms the bourgeois were the "…committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (Marx, 20) and in order to reduce any friction, tension or resistance towards their supremacy they then laid down a set of ideals and values for all classes and citizens. The ultimate goal of having a monotonous set of principles was to disintegrate existing ideals and values by instigating the proletariats to fully accept the bourgeois’ set of principles by suspending their own. History, however, has yet to see such an outcome where the bourgeois triumph in instigating such circumstances successfully.

What occurs in such circumstances instead is a conflict due to inconsistency that occurs between the dogmas of both classes; whereby the reality based ideals of the proletariats clashes with the idealistic values of the bourgeoisie. These conflicts in turn affect the political ideologies and actions since the politics is the arena where the battle of principles occurs, primarily due to two reasons.  The first being that these conflicts will not surface in the first place except in the political arena due to the austere nature and secondly the outcomes will not be accepted unless at a level were they are made public and irreversible. Evidence of these conflicts exists in our texts and films, however in differing contexts. In Antigone, Creon represents the bourgeoisie and Antigone the proletariats; in A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences the arts and sciences were the corrupting vales instigated by the intellectuals whilst the savage being was the unlearned and naïve proletariat, and finally in Marx's Communist Manifesto where the distinctions are extremely clear among the two classes. In the course of my paper I wish to examine the strength and weakness of each of these ideal societies and their implications to political ideology and action.

The values of Karl Marx's idealist communist society "may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property" (Marx, 34).  He believed that once private ownership was abolished people would change, and this would finally end the history of all class struggles. Communism to Marx was an extension or a purer form of socialism, whereby the people owned everything and everybody worked for the system, hence no form of personal interests was vested in the system. This assumption was made by placing a gamble on human behavior, probably the most unpredictable factor to place any form of wager on. Marx was assuming that among a whole class of people "no interests [were] separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole" (Marx, 33). The society that Marx visualized was one where all the citizens desired only the interests of the society by not desiring to satisfy their personal interests.

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History, however, does not have a basis for pure communism where a group of people have ceased to exist without any possessions and have lived only by the idea; the closest analogy one could give would be of hunter-gatherer societies. These societies, however, existed during the prehistoric times where human attitudes and behaviours were not being constantly reshaped by the changing economic systems in which people find themselves nowadays, which Marx himself mentions as there being no such thing as fixed “human nature.” Therefore, communism could never work because it goes against human nature. People are naturally more competitive ...

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