Marxism Can Only Be Appreciated Retrospectively
Marx failed to predict the future, but it had many useful insights into the past. Discuss.
Marxism was first coined by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederich Engels (1820-1895). It's both a theory and practice based on a scientific method of thought called historical dialectal materialism, meaning there is no one clear answer to a question, instead the theory is based on a certain amount of variables that are always restricted and so most of these theories are limited. Through this historical materialism Marx and other Marxists through time have studied the development of forms of social organisation and consciousness, how they have succeeded one another in history and their interconnections with the development of the forces of production mobilised by social formations at each stage in the unfolding of history.
To test the validity of theory, Marx relied on truth as the empirical evidence and so using methodology, Marx and Engels examined history and this led them to examine and explain theories on class struggle, the foundations of social relations through economics and the form of society that would follow capitalism. Most historians who became Marxists from the 1880's onwards did so because they wanted to change the world in association with labour and socialist movements.
While the origins of Marxism have been developed over time and enriched by working class history, the original theories still remain the same and it has evolved into much of the foundations of modern socialism. No other theories have been put forward either before or after Marxism to explain the role and movement of society and the working class.
Karl Marx was born in 1818 into a professional family. Marx went to university in Berlin originally to become a university lecturer but took a lot of inspiration from the French philosopher Hegel who had died a few years previous, Hegel had been looking into the working class struggle in France at the time however his theory operated solely on ideas, whereas Marx was more concerned with looking at Capitalism as lived rather than thought about. Hegel tended to look at ideas of capitalism but not through the people who held them where as Marx look at both these ideas and the people they came from, as he believed the world to be ever changing through human activities in particular, production.
Marx began writing at the start of the industrial revolution and was able to witness the change from a feudal society where we had lords and serfs to a new industrial and capitalist society with owners and workers (what Marx called the bourgeoisie and the proletariats). Unlike the feudal system whereby the lords were controlled by the king in this new state the capitalists were not controlled anymore and were now free and able to maximise their profits and with the workers supposedly free to sell their labour power to the capitalists.
In the capitalist society, Marx believed that each class is defined by how they are related to the productive process and how their own interests are related. The modes of production: ".....shaped every aspect of human life, was itself not influenced by anything outside of itself, as it supplied it's own driving force." 1 The capitalists have interests in increasing their profits and making sure their power of the workers is secure where as the workers have interests in their work such as higher wages, less working hours and better conditions and also job security. Both these classes have opposite interests and so the class struggle involves everything these two classes do to uphold their own interests at each other's cost. Whereby the capitalists are helped by the control of the state, their own wealth and their domination over institutions such as schools and churches, which can help to distort people's thinking. However, the workers are in the majority and they are able to co-operate and this is why Marx believed that there would eventually be a revolution as they realised they were being exploited.
In a Capitalist society the capitalists have control over the state and so are able to use it to their advantage and exploit the workers. This is done by introducing laws which are anti-working class and also by providing subsidies to the business's owned by the capitalists (what Marx called capitalist welfare). To stop the workers rebelling against these laws through the control over the institutions the capitalists are able to give rise to a way of thinking, meaning the workers accept the status quo or at least confusing them to give rise to replacing it with something ...
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In a Capitalist society the capitalists have control over the state and so are able to use it to their advantage and exploit the workers. This is done by introducing laws which are anti-working class and also by providing subsidies to the business's owned by the capitalists (what Marx called capitalist welfare). To stop the workers rebelling against these laws through the control over the institutions the capitalists are able to give rise to a way of thinking, meaning the workers accept the status quo or at least confusing them to give rise to replacing it with something better. For example, capitalists make the consumers believe they are prime, they determine what gets produced through the choices they make (which mainly are encouraged through what they are taught at the institutions which are controlled through the capitalists). Marx explained that this ideology created a false consciousness for the workers fooling them into thinking that capitalism is fair and so they are reluctant to challenge against it. "Capitalist ideology reflects in thought the fractured lives of alienated people, while at the same time making it increasingly difficult for them to grasp their alienation". 2
Marx's theory of alienation looks into how people become alienated through the means of production and why they are not able to realise this alienation has occurred.
Firstly the worker is alienated from their productive activity in that they have no control over in deciding on what or how they doing. The capitalist sets their conditions and speed of work and also is able to choose whether to employ and sack them. The worker is also alienated of what they are producing in that they have no choice in what is made and what happens to it after it has been made. And thirdly the worker is alienated from other people due to competition and mutual indifferences replacing the norm of cooperation. This not only applies to the capitalists competing against each other but also to the workers in their own class as each of them tries to make a living the best that they can so they compete against each other in the workplace for things such as higher wages, bonuses, and overtime etc. The Capitalists highly encourage this by making incentives for them such as employee of the month, which creates more competition and less cooperation between the workers and also quicker production for the capitalists. Finally, the worker is also alienated from creativity and community, because labour alienates them from their own abilities and talents they gradually begin to lose these finer qualities.
Through this process of alienation it leaves the individual on the one hand in a very confused and diminished state of mind but on the other, the products that come from the worker pass from person to person changing along the way into, 'value', 'commodity', 'capital' etc. depending on who has them and how they are used but eventually these same products though no longer seen as such, re-enter the worker's daily life as items such as the house they rent, the food they eat, the loan they have etc. and so unknowingly the worker has created his own alienation. The world that the worker has made and lost in alienated labour becomes someone else's private property which he only has access to by selling more labour power to the capitalists and undertaking more alienated labour.
Marx's theory of value needs to be taken into account in order to understand the effects of the worker's alienated labour on it's products, with regards to what can these products do and what can be done with them. Firstly Marx takes his basic principles from Smith and Ricardo's earlier theory where by the value of any commodity stems from the amount of labour time it took during production. Although Marx is more concerned with why goods have prices in the first place. A Capitalist society is the only one to have it's production proceed through a medium of markets and prices. For example, before the capitalism came into practice, in the feudal state, the lord claims only part of what the serfs produce leaving the serfs to consume the rest for themselves and so therefore does not have a price.
Because everything in a Capitalist society has a price, Marx puts great emphasis on the worker becoming separated from his or her means of production because in a Feudal state the serfs are tied to their means of production. Because of this, the workers have to sell their labour power to the capitalists, and so by doing this, they give up all claims of ownership to the products they produce during their labour. These products are now free to enter a market place in which workers may enter and purchase small amounts of these products with the wages they receive from their labour power. The products are priced with regard to what they are used for and the value placed upon them is the set of conditions that make up the price of that product. Because of this Marx calls 'value' a product of capitalism because the ideal price (what it's exchange at in the market) and the ways in which it's meant to be used (use value) clearly show the ways the capitalists exploit the workers during the means of production as many of the workers are unhappy as they have no choice but to work for the capitalists and are not able to chose what they want to do with their lives.
Marx believed the exchange value of a product reflects that the quality and variety of
Work that has gone into it's production but has not been accounted for. Smith and Ricardo believed, the value of any product depends on how much time it took to make and Marx believed this idea fails to look at the quality that has gone into the product which doesn't seem to account for anything and he believed this attitude also portrayed many of the relationships in human relations found in a capitalist society because few people in society have quality lives where they are happy and fulfilled and like the product this quality is not accounted for.
Finally surplus value is the different between the exchange (price) of the product and the use value created by the workers and the amount they receive from this as wages. For example, the capitalist buys the workers labour power for eight hours a days, however, the worker is able to produce enough products to match their wages in just four hours meaning the rest of the time money made each from this workers products goes to the capitalists. Because the capitalists have the control to do this as they own the land and property in which the workers need to work on in order to survive they are able to consume large profits. This also causes another conflict between the workers and capitalists as they try to extend working hours, and lower conditions making it even cheaper for them to employ the labour power and making even more profits while the workers try to protect themselves from these poor working conditions. Also due to increasingly new technology and with capitalists wanting to continue increasing their profits workers are now constantly being replaced by machinery, a quicker and more effective way of creating more surplus value for the capitalists.
The only positive thing for workers to come out of surplus value is that because workers only earn a small proportion of the profits made from the products they can only buy so much of them and so this is where capitalists have their greatest failure known as overproduction whereby the produce too many products to meet the markets requirements and also with constant competition from other capitalists they can easily be pushed out of the market meaning profits fall dramatically for them. This is known as capitalism's classic contradiction where by people are forced to live on too little because they produce too much.
In his Immiseration Thesis Marx predicted the rich and poor gap between the workers and capitalists to increase dramatically in a capitalist society with the capitalists having all the wealth and the workers having nothing and becoming poorer and poorer, he also believed that the class divisions would become more polarised with the middle class either falling with the workers or growing with the capitalists.
Marx believed that as Capitalism becomes more contradicting and more clearer to workers that they are being exploited, neither the capitalist ideology or the state will be able to control the masses of workers who will join together and as they realise they are being exploited. He believed that a capitalist economy and was erratic and unpredictable due to constant rises and falls in profits and that eventually there would be a final collapse of the capitalist system along with the workers support.
It would appear though that this has still not happened, capitalism still exists in society today although it has changed a lot in the past hundred years, for example workers now have trade unions which stop the capitalists from exploiting the workers, also the capitalists do not have as much control over the state as they used, for example business's are not allowed to expanded to over a certain and monopolise the market which is what used to happen in the past. Although, our capitalist society still has the same basic relations and structures which distinguish it from being a feudal or social society. Even though workers now earn more money than they did in the past hundred years, so do the capitalists. Also the income gap between the rich and the poor is now bigger than it has ever been. And also Marx's theories on alienation and theory of value in regards to worker's relations to their labour, products and capitalists are practically the same. Again, the only real change is to the state having more involvement with the capitalists to cut expanding profits but many still believe this is to disguise the obvious connections between the state and capitalists with regards to the capitalist ideology.
Over the years though there have been many criticisms of Marx's work, for example his theories give the impression that his work is scientific predicts the future through previous history but he underestimates the freedom people have to alter this history.
For example, he predicted there to be greater poverty for workers when in fact they now have much better living standards and working conditions. He believed there would be polarisation between the classes when in fact the middle class is continually growing due to better living standards and wages. Also instead of a revolution against capitalism it would appear that workers have reconciled to capitalism. In all the European countries where they have had communist governments they have failed and converted into capitalism including the break up of the U.S.S.R into Russia because it's communist government collapsed. Even though Capitalism has imperfections and has caused major tragedies over the years including Nazi Germany and the sixties in Brazil which, displayed horrific brutality and cruelty, it would appear that capitalism is still the best available system for a society to be governed by. Western liberal democracies have good strong records for material progress and political freedom and in some aspects they are becoming more social but not to the extremes of communism.
The Marxism of today is so diverse that it is extremely difficult to find two people who can come to an agreement on what Marxism actually is! It is simply the workers movement, which has changed through history as Marx never set out to build a movement of followers who all adhered to a self-closed ideology.
"Marxism remains a movement rather than just a tendency however. For even though the Marxist movement has fragmented, it remains oriented to the struggle for socialism in and through the organised working class, and it is the struggles of the working class, united in its material existence as a social class, which constitute the life-blood and essential thread of the Marxist movement."3
So therefore, Marx had many useful insights into what has happened in the past to society and explains why revolutions have occurred between the proletariats and the bourgeoisie but Marx failed to predict the future as the extremes of it's ideology do not work in society today, so more lighter and less extreme versions of it exist in society today in the form of socialism.
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www.guardian.co.uk
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Historiography - Ernst Breisach (2nd Edition, 1994, p293)
2 Academic American Encyclopedia (Arete Publishing Company, Princeton, NewJersey., 1981)
3 www.marxists.org
