| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
Marxism : a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the middle of the 19th century and consisting originally of three interrelated ideas: a philosophical view of man, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. During his lifetime Marx strove to keep these various aspects consistent and coherent; in later years--and especially after his death--various interpretations imposed on his doctrines, as well as political pressures generated by the adoption of Marxism as the official creed of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990/91, led to many compromises and adjustments. Today the term can refer either to the doctrine of the former Soviet government (often called Marxism-Leninism) or of Communist or Socialist parties in other nations on the one hand, or on the other hand to a number of loosely related perspectives on philosophical or social problems as developed by certain Western thinkers inspired by Marx.
The philosophical view of Marxism is that creativity, that is, the ability to exert labour on objects of nature in order to satisfy one's needs, is the defining characteristic of humanity. Further, one labours not merely for the individual but for the species. All human works, from food to art, houses to governments, form the human world, which consists of the various forms of the objectification of humanity's productive powers as a species. Man is a species being, and the species as a whole should enjoy the objectifications of its labour.
Owing to various historical events not entirely within the control of mankind, however, this ideal situation is not achieved. Under capitalism, one class of individuals (the proletariat) invests its creative energies, or labour, while another class (the bourgeoisie) appropriates the products of this energy in exchange for wages. This means that the human world created by the proletariat does not belong to them, but is instead owned by a class of nonlabouring owners. To describe this situation--the ownership by one class of the objectified labour of another--Marx used the word "alienation." When and if the workers could repossess the fruits of their labour, then this alienation would be overcome and all class divisions would cease.
The ideas of both class struggle and classless community were already familiar in Marx's time. The notion that economic interests in society necessarily are in conflict has been traced as far back as Thucydides, while the first decades of the 19th century were rife with sundry socialist critiques of the existing economic order and attempts to found utopian, classless communities. Marx coupled these two ideas in a novel way. The problem of every utopian writer is not to describe what his utopia looks like but to suggest how one achieves it. In his theory of history, Marx adopted the idea of the class struggle as the driving mechanism in the sequence of events that would culminate in the classless society.
The form in which this theory of history was most influential was expressed in the Communist Manifesto, published by Marx and Engels in 1848. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" is its famous first sentence. All history is a protracted struggle between an exploiting class and an exploited class. While previous historians had considered the essential stuff of history to consist of battles, discoveries, inventions, treaties, intrigues, and the like--or so Marx claimed--these were only surface phenomena. The real motor of history was the developing means of production, the methods by which individuals in a society provide themselves with food, shelter, and other commodities.
This is the core of Marx's historical materialism. Human existence requires--is--a material life. To preserve this material life, man must interact with nature through a set of relations called the means of production. These relations are chosen for humanity at each historical stage--there are no capitalists in the 14th century, nor barons in the 20th. Historical stages themselves evolve in a dialectical manner, each stage being succeeded by a contrasting one with which it interacts, creating a synthesis of the two that constitutes a next stage, and so on. In any stage the prevailing means of production stipulate at once a set of relationships between man and nature and between man and man. In certain of these sets of relationships, human beings are deprived of their humanity.
The most recent historical stage is that of capitalism. Capitalism's success is based on its ability to increase productive capacity in a worldwide system that generates enormous quantities of surplus value, which are then appropriated by capitalists. But capitalism is beset by numerous internal contradictions and cannot survive. Most importantly, capitalism turns an entire class of human beings into commodities, dehumanizing them. In so doing, it prepares the way for its own destruction. Capitalism brings the class struggle to its critical point, where the proletariat are so thoroughly deprived of their humanity by such manifest exploitation that they are at last able to unite behind a common goal. The victory of the proletariat is therefore imminent, and the classless society is about to be realized. The interests of the proletariat are therefore the interests of humanity as a whole, and its victory will heal the division within humanity that has plagued it since the introduction of the division of labour.
The failure of the 1848 revolutions, and, much later, the awareness that an increasingly complex social structure was no longer described by Marx's analysis, led to refinements and elaborations of this basic doctrine. These revisions grew more extensive following Marx's death. Engels, followed by Karl Kautsky and others of the so-called orthodox school, transformed Marx's doctrine from a revolutionary program tied to the uniqueness of a particular historical moment to a more peaceful anticipation of eventual evolutionary triumph. In the hands of Vladimir Lenin, Marxism underwent a further transformation. The working class is not able to bring about the revolution by itself, according to Lenin, and must be guided by a professional class of revolutionaries. Lenin also altered Marx's historical analysis to allow for the possibility of revolution occurring in nonindustrialized nations. This fusion of traditional Marxism with an efficient party organization became known as Marxism-Leninism. An Austrian school led by Otto Bauer, called Austro-Marxism, attempted a return to the ethical basis of socialism, against the amorality of those who wished to push the class struggle to its extreme. Marxism as practiced by communist states frequently departed from orthodox Marxism, not only in the Soviet Union but also in states such as China and Cuba. Contemporary intellectuals have often appropriated Marxism as an instrument with which to criticize technological society; a notable example is Jean-Paul Sartre, who fused Marxism with existentialism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
The transformation of the U.S.S.R. into a body of loosely knit republics, the independence of the Baltic states, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and other related events that characterized the last decades of the 20th century made the future of Marxism as a government dynamic uncertain.
Ref: © 1999-2000 Britannica.com Inc.
| Related isms |
| External Links |
| Recommended Readings |
