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ABC of Marxism
By a profound study of the modern capitalist system of production, Karl Marx was enabled to discover certain scientific laws that explain the general historical development of mankind. These laws constitute the basis for modern social science. Our work in this course will serve to illustrate and give some content to these laws. It is a preliminary to more exhaustive study.
Briefly, Marx’s discoveries may be summarized under 4 headings:
The form of society in which men live is determined by the way they make a living, that is by what is called the mode of production. When the mode of production undergoes a change, the form of society changes accordingly. Economic factors are not the only ones that determine social evolution, altho they are basic ones. Social institutions are based on the prevailing mode of production, but these institutions and the ideas through which man becomes conscious of his environment also become forces in social evolution. Marx expressed this conception in the Critique of Political Economy as follows:
“In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum-total of these relations constitute the economic structure of society – the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”
“In the work of production, men do not stand in relation to nature alone but also to each other.” These relations are the relations of property. In modern society the few own the property, the many are propertyless. Men thus fall into different classes. Classes are the product of the mode of production. They have divergent and opposed economic interests. In the productive relations these contradictory interests bring about the class struggle. Every class struggle is basically a political struggle. Such a struggle carried to its highest expression becomes a complete revolution. With the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of the classless society class exploitation disappears and the class struggle is resolved. Human will enters into the class struggle. It can therefore be said that man makes his own history, although “not out of the whole cloth, but within the material conditions at hand. All history is the history of class struggle.”
The material world including society undergoes constant change. It evolves. It is never static in any absolute sense. Dialectics is the method of analysing and explaining the process of material and social change; it enables us to understand and deal with the contradictions inherent in class society. In the struggle between the two opposing and irreconcilable classes dialectics show how society is lifted to a new and higherplane where opposing elements disappear in a new social synthesis. A change in the mode of production brings about the abolition of classes and a new evolution of humanity begins.
Capitalism can be characterized by the fact that by and large all human needs can be bought and sold in the form of commodities. Among other commodities the worker sells his labor-power to the boss who employs him. Now by capitalist law, whatever the worker produces belongs to the employer, who in return pays the worker only part of the value of his product in the form of wages. The value retained by the capitalist in this exploitive process is called surplus value. Under capitalism the class struggle centers about the relative portions of the value produced by the worker that go to the worker in the form of wages and to the capitalist as surplus value.
The Communist Manifesto – Marx and Engels
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific – Engels
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Last updated: 7 August 2019