Marxism
Marxism
Political Theory, a body of doctrine developed by Marx and, to a lesser extent,
by Engels within the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related
ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and
platform . there's also Marxism because it has been understood and practiced by
the varied socialist movements, particularly before 1914.
Then there's Soviet Marxism as figured out by Vladimir Ilich
Lenin and modified by Stalin , which under the name of Marxism-Leninism (see
Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties found out after the
Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by
the anti-Stalinist Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong’s Chinese variant of
Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms within the developing world. there have
been also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s
thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of
Husserl and Heidegger but also from Freud et al. .
The Thought Of Marx
The written work of Marx can't be reduced to a philosophy,
much less to a doctrine . the entire of his work may be a radical critique of
philosophy, especially of G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist system and of the
philosophies of the left and right post-Hegelians. It is not, however, a mere
denial of these philosophies.
Marx
declared that philosophy must become reality. Marxism Political Theory, One
could not be content with interpreting the world; one must worry with
transforming it, which meant transforming both the planet itself and human
consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a critique of experience along
side a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed that each one knowledge
involves a critique of ideas.
He wasn't an empiricist. Rather, his work teems with concepts
(appropriation, alienation, praxis, creative labour, value, then on) that he
had inherited from earlier philosophers and economists, including Hegel, Johann
Fichte, Kant , Smith , Ricardo , and John Stuart Mill. Marxism Political Theory,
What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, rather than making
abstract affirmations a few whole group of problems like attribute , knowledge,
and matter, he examines each problem in its dynamic reference to the others
and, above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and
economic realities.Analysis of society
To go on to the guts of the work of Marx, one must specialise
in his concrete program for humanity. this is often even as important for an
understanding of Marx as are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital . Marx’s
interpretation of attribute begins with human need. “Man,” he wrote within the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,The point of departure of human
history is therefore living citizenry , who seek to satisfy certain primary
needs. “The first historical fact is that the production of the means to
satisfy these needs.” Marxism Political Theory, This satisfaction, in turn,
opens the way for brand spanking new needs. act is thus essentially a struggle
with nature that has got to furnish the means of satisfying human needs: drink,
food, clothing, the event of human powers then of human intellectual and
artistic abilities. during this undertaking, people discover themselves as
productive beings who humanize themselves through their labour. Furthermore, they
humanize nature while they naturalize themselves. By their creation , by their
labour, they realize their identity with the character that they master, while
at an equivalent time, they achieve free consciousness.
Born of nature, they become fully human by opposing it.
Becoming aware in their struggle against nature of what separates them from it,
they find the conditions of their fulfillment, of the belief of their true
stature. The dawning of consciousness is inseparable from struggle. By
appropriating all the creative energies, they discover that “all that's called
history is nothing else than the method of making man through human labour, the
becoming of nature for man. Marxism Political Theory, Man has thus evident and
irrefutable proof of his own creation by himself.” Understood in its universal
dimension, act reveals that “for man, man is that the God .” it's thus vain to
talk of God, creation, and metaphysical problems. Fully naturalized, humans are
sufficient unto themselves: they need recaptured the fullness of humanity in
its full liberty.
Living during a capitalist society, however, the individual
isn't truly free. he's an alienated being; he's not reception in his world. the
thought of alienation, which Marx takes from Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, plays
a fundamental role within the whole of his written work, starting with the
writings of his youth and continuing through Das Kapital . Marxism Political
Theory, within the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the alienation of
labour is seen to spring from the very fact that the more the worker produces
the less he has got to consume, and therefore the more values he creates the
more he devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from
him. The lifetime of the worker depends on things that he has created but that
aren't his, so that, rather than finding his rightful existence through his
labour, he loses it during this world of things that are external to him: no
work, no pay. Under these conditions, labour denies the fullness of concrete
humanity. “The generic being (Gattungwesen) of man, nature also as his
intellectual faculties, is transformed into a being which is alien to him, into
a way of his individual existence.” Marxism Political Theory, Nature, his body,
his spiritual essence become alien to him. “Man is formed alien to man.” When
carried to its highest stage of development, personal property becomes “the
product of alienated labour…the means by which labour alienates itself (and)
the belief of this alienation.” it's also at an equivalent time “the tangible
material expression of alienated human life.”
Although
there's no evidence that Marx ever disclaimed this anthropological analysis of
alienated labour, starting with The German Ideology, the historical, social,
and economic causes of the alienation of labour are given increasing emphasis,
especially in Das Kapital .
Alienated labour is seen because the consequence of market
product, the division of labour, and therefore the division of society into
antagonistic classes. As producers in society, workers create goods only by
their labour. Marxism Political Theory, These goods are exchangeable. Their
value is that the average amount of social labour spent to supply them. The
alienation of the worker takes on its full dimension therein system of market
production during which a part of the worth of the products produced by the
worker is removed from him and transformed into surplus value, which the
capitalist privately appropriates. Market production also intensifies the
alienation of labour by encouraging specialization, piecework, and therefore
the fixing of huge enterprises. Thus the labour power of the worker is employed
along side that of others during a combination whose significance he's unaware
of , both individually and socially. In thus losing their quality as human
products, the products of labour become fetishes, that is, alien and oppressive
realities to which both the individual who possesses them privately and
therefore the individual who is bereft of them submit themselves. within the
free enterprise , this submission to things is obscured by the very fact that
the exchange of products is expressed in money.
This fundamental economic alienation is amid secondary
political and ideological alienations, which supply a distorted representation
of and an illusory justification of a world during which the relations of
people with each other also are distorted. The ideas that folks form are
closely bound up with their material activity and their material relations: Marxism
Political Theory, “The act of creating representations, of thinking, the
spiritual intercourse of men, seem to be the direct emanation of their material
relations.” this is often true of all human activity: political, intellectual,
or spiritual. “Men produce their representations and their ideas, but it's as
living men, men acting as they're determined by a particular development of
their powers of production.” Law, morality, metaphysics, and religion don't
have a history of their own. “Men developing their material production modify
along side their real existence their ways of thinking and therefore the
products of their ways of thinking.” In other words, “It isn't consciousness
which determines existence, it's existence which determines consciousness.”
In bourgeois, capitalist society the individual is split into political
citizen and economic actor. This duality represents his political alienation, Marxism
Political Theory, which is further
intensified by the functioning of the bourgeois state. From this study of
society at the start of the 19th century, Marx came to ascertain the state
because the instrument through which the propertied class dominated other
classes.
Ideological alienation, for Marx, takes different forms,
appearing in economic, philosophical, and legal theories. Marx undertook a
lengthy critique of the primary in Das Kapital and of the second within the
German Ideology. But ideological alienation expresses itself supremely in
religion. taking over the ideas about religion that were current in left
post-Hegelian circles, along side the thought of Feuerbach, Marx considered
religion to be a product of human consciousness. it's a mirrored image of
things of an individual who “either has not conquered himself or has already
lost himself again” (the individual within the world of personal property). Marxism
Political Theory, it's “an opium for the people.” Unlike Feuerbach, Marx
believed that religion would disappear only with changes in society.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but
as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the inspiration of the many communist
regimes within the twentieth century. it's hard to consider many that have had
the maximum amount influence within the creation of the fashionable world.
Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned faraway from philosophy in his
mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, additionally to his
overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of
contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially within the
philosophy of history and therefore the social sciences, and in moral and
political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory of history — is centered
round the concept sorts of society rise and fall as they further then impede
the event of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as
proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by
class war , culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is
predicated on his version of the labour theory useful , and includes the
analysis of capitalist profit because the extraction of surplus value from the
exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics close in Marx’s
prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to get replaced
by communism. However Marx refused to take a position intimately about the
character of communism, arguing that it might arise through historical processes,
and wasn't the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.
Marx’s Life
and Works
Karl Marx was born in Trier, within the German Rhineland, in
1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity in order
that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer within the face of
Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. Marxism Political Theory, A precocious schoolchild,
Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy,
comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus. On completion of his doctorate
in 1841 Marx hoped for a tutorial job, but he had already fallen in with too
radical a gaggle of thinkers and there was no real prospect. Turning to
journalism, Marx rapidly became involved in political and social issues, and
shortly found himself having to think about communist theory. Of his many early
writings, four, especially , stand out. ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, Introduction’, and ‘On The Jewish Question’, were both
written in 1843 and published within the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written in Paris 1844, and therefore
the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ of 1845, remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime.
The German Ideology, co-written with Engels in 1845, was also unpublished
but this is often where we see Marx starting to develop his theory of history.
The Communist Manifesto is probably Marx’s most generally read work, albeit
it's not the simplest guide to his thought. This was again jointly written with
Engels and published with an excellent sense of pleasure as Marx returned to
Germany from exile to require part within the revolution of 1848. With the
failure of the revolution Marx moved to London where he remained for the
remainder of his life.
He now targeting the study of economics, producing, in 1859,
his Contribution to a Critique of economics . this is often largely remembered
for its Preface, during which Marx sketches out what he calls ‘the guiding
principles’ of his thought, on which many interpretations of historical materialism
are based. Marx’s main economic work is, of course, Capital (Volume 1),
published in 1867, although Volume 3, edited by Engels, and published
posthumously in 1894, contains much of interest. Finally, the late pamphlet
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) is a crucial source for Marx’s
reflections on the character and organisation of communist society.
The works thus far mentioned amount only to alittle fragment
of Marx’s opus, which can eventually run to around 100 large volumes when his
collected works are completed. However the things selected above form the
foremost important core from the purpose of view of Marx’s reference to
philosophy, although other works, like the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
(1852), are often considered equally important in assessing Marx’s analysis of
concrete political events. In what follows, I shall consider those texts and
issues that are given the best attention within the Anglo-American
philosophical literature.
The first Writings
The intellectual climate within which the young Marx worked
was dominated by the influence of Hegel, and therefore the reaction to Hegel by
a gaggle referred to as the Young Hegelians, who rejected what they considered
the conservative implications of Hegel’s work. Marxism Political Theory, the
foremost significant of those thinkers was Ludwig Feuerbach, who attempted to
rework Hegel’s metaphysics, and, thereby, provided a critique of Hegel’s
doctrine of faith and therefore the state. an outsized portion of the
philosophical content of Marx’s works written within the early 1840s may be a
record of his struggle to define his own position in reaction thereto of Hegel
and Feuerbach and people of the opposite Young Hegelians.
‘On The Jewish
Question’
In this text Marx begins to form clear the space between
himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians;
especially Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation,
from an atheist perspective, arguing that the faith of both Jews and Christians
was a barrier to emancipation.
In
responding to Bauer, Marx makes one among the foremost enduring arguments from
his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political
emancipation — essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties — and
human emancipation.
Marx’s reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is
perfectly compatible with the continued existence of faith , because the
contemporary example of the us demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper,
in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues
that not only is political emancipation insufficient to cause human
emancipation, it's in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and concepts of
justice are premised on the thought that every folks needs protection from
other citizenry who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal
rights are rights of separation, designed to guard us from such perceived
threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view
overlooks is that the possibility — for Marx, the very fact — that real freedom
is to be found positively in our relationships with people . it's to be found
in human community, not in isolation. Marxism Political Theory, Accordingly,
insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to look at one another in ways in
which undermine the likelihood of the important freedom we may find in human
emancipation. Now we should always be clear that Marx doesn't oppose political
emancipation, for he sees that liberalism may be a great improvement on the
systems of feudalism and non secular prejudice and discrimination which existed
within the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated
liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation.
Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it's
clear that it's closely associated with the thought of non-alienated labour,
which we'll explore below.
‘Contribution to a
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’
This work is home to Marx’s notorious remark that religion is
that the ‘opiate of the people’, a harmful, illusion-generating painkiller, and
it's here that Marx sets out his account of faith in most detail. even as
importantly Marx here also considers the question of how revolution could be
achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about
the emancipation of society as an entire .
With
reference to religion, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach’s claim con to traditional
theology that citizenry had invented God in their own image; indeed a view that
long pre-dated Feuerbach.
Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that
worshipping God diverted citizenry from enjoying their own human powers. While
accepting much of Feuerbach’s account Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach on the
grounds that he has did not understand why people fall under religious
alienation then is unable to elucidate how it are often transcended.
Feuerbach’s view appears to be that belief in religion is only an intellectual
error and may be corrected by persuasion. Marxism Political Theory, Marx’s
explanation is that religion may be a response to alienation in material life,
and thus can't be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which
point religion will wither away. Precisely what it's about material life that
makes religion isn't began with complete clarity. However, it seems that a
minimum of two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour,
which can be explored shortly.
A second is that the need for citizenry to say their communal
essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, citizenry exist as a
community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the
vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, albeit this
is often rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx’s view appears to be
that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions.
initially it's ‘deviously acknowledged’ by religion, which creates a false idea
of a community during which we are all equal within the eyes of God. After the
post-Reformation fragmentation of faith , where religion is not any longer
ready to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the state fills this
need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal within
the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political liberal state, which is
required to manage the politics of spiritual diversity, takes on the role
offered by religion in earlier times of providing a sort of illusory community.
But the state and religion will both be transcended when a real community of
social and economic equals is made .
Of course we are owed a solution to the question how such a
society might be created. it's interesting to read Marx here within the light
of his third Thesis on Feuerbach where he criticises an alternate theory. Marxism
Political Theory, The crude materialism of Owen et al. assumes that citizenry
are fully determined by their material circumstances, and thus to cause an
emancipated society it's necessary and sufficient to form the proper changes to
those material circumstances. However, how are those circumstances to be
changed? By an enlightened philanthropist like Owen who can miraculously break
through the chain of determination which ties down everyone else? Marx’s
response, in both the Theses and therefore the Critique, is that the
proletariat can break away only by their own self-transforming action. Indeed
if they are doing not create the revolution for themselves — in alliance, of
course, with the philosopher — they're going to not be fit receive it.
Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cover a good range
of topics, including much interesting material on personal property and
communism, and on money, also as developing Marx’s critique of Hegel. However,
the manuscripts are best known for his or her account of alienated labour.
Here Marx famously depicts the worker under capitalism as
affected by four sorts of alienated labour. First, from the merchandise , which
as soon because it is made is removed from its producer. Second, in productive
activity (work) which is experienced as a torment.
Third, from species-being, for humans produce blindly and not
in accordance with their truly human powers. Finally, from other citizenry , Marxism
Political Theory, where the relation of exchange replaces the satisfaction of
mutual need. That these categories overlap in some respects isn't a surprise given
Marx’s remarkable methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he
attempts to use a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to
demonstrate that each one the categories of bourgeois economics — wages, rent,
exchange, profit, etc. — are ultimately derived from an analysis of the concept
of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated labour is meant to be
deducible from the previous one. However, Marx gets no further than deducing
categories of alienated labour from one another . Quite possibly within the
course of writing he came to know that a special methodology is required for
approaching economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a really rich text
on the character of alienated labour. the thought of non-alienation has got to
be inferred from the negative, with the help of 1 short passage at the top of
the text ‘On James Mill’ during which non-alienated labour is briefly described
in terms which emphasise both the immediate producer’s enjoyment of production
as a confirmation of his or her powers, and also the thought that production is
to satisfy the requirements of others, thus confirming for both parties our
human essence as mutual dependence. each side of our species essence are
revealed here: our individual human powers and our membership within the human
community.
It is important to know that for Marx alienation isn't merely
a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx’s early
analysis of alienation and his later social theory is that the concept the
alienated individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces
which are themselves a product of act . Marxism Political Theory, In our daily lives we take decisions that have
unintended consequences, which then combine to make large-scale social forces which
can have an utterly unpredicted, and highly damaging, effect. In Marx’s view
the institutions of capitalism — themselves the results of human behaviour —
come to structure our future behaviour, determining the chances of our action.
for instance , for as long as a capitalist intends to remain in business he
must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether or not wracked by guilt
the capitalist must act as a ruthless exploiter. Similarly the worker must take
the simplest job on offer; there's simply no other sane option. But by doing
this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend
this condition, and to require collective control of our destiny — whatever
that might mean in practice — is one among the motivating and sustaining
elements of Marx’s social analysis.
‘Theses on Feuerbach’
The Theses on Feuerbach contain one among Marx’s most
memorable remarks: “the philosophers have only interpreted the planet , the
purpose is to vary it” (thesis 11). However the eleven theses as an entire
provide, within the compass of a few of pages, an interesting digest of Marx’s
reaction to the philosophy of his day. Several of those are touched on already
(for example, the discussions of faith in theses 4, 6 and 7, and revolution in
thesis 3) so here i will be able to concentrate only on the primary , most
overtly philosophical, thesis.
In the first thesis Marx states his objections to ‘all
hitherto existing’ materialism and idealism. Materialism is complimented for
understanding the physical reality of the planet , but is criticised for
ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the planet we
perceive. Idealism, a minimum of as developed by Hegel, understands the active
nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the
planet is made through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the
insights of both traditions to propose a view during which citizenry do indeed
create — or a minimum of transform — the planet they find themselves in, but this
transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not
through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow,
with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which
transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is that the
foundation of Marx’s later theory of history. Marxism Political Theory, As Marx
puts it within the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘Industry is that the real historical
relationship of nature … to man’. This thought, derived from reflection on the
history of philosophy, along side his experience of social and economicrealities, as a journalist, sets the agenda for all Marx’s future work.
Economics
Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the thought of
commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object,
produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity
production are the existence of a market, during which exchange can happen ,
and a social division of labour, during which different people produce
different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange.
Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use,
in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their
price. Marxism Political Theory, Use value can easily be understood, so Marx
says, but he insists that exchange value may be a puzzling phenomenon, and
relative exchange values got to be explained.
Why does a quantity of 1 commodities exchange for a given
quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input
required to supply the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour,
which is labour exerted at the typical level of intensity and productivity for
that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory useful
asserts that the worth of a commodity is decided by the number of socially
necessary labour time required to supply it. Marx provides a two stage argument
for the labour theory useful . the primary stage is to argue that if two
objects are often compared within the sense of being placed on either side of
an sign , then there must be a ‘third thing of identical magnitude in both of
them’ to which they're both reducible. As commodities are often exchanged
against one another , there must, Marx argues, be a 3rd thing that they need in
common. This then motivates the second stage, which may be a look for the
acceptable ‘third thing’, which is labour in Marx’s view, because the only
plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly
contestable.
Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, therein it involves
not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, within
the sort of money, Marxism Political Theory, with the aim of generating profit
through the acquisition of commodities and their transformation into other
commodities which may command a better price, and thus yield a profit. Marx
claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to elucidate how
capitalism as an entire can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the
thought of exploitation of the worker. In fixing conditions of production the
capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for
the day.
the value of this commodity is decided within the same way
because the cost of each other; i.e. in terms of the quantity of socially
necessary labour power required to supply it. during this case the worth of
each day ’s labour power is that the value of the commodities necessary to stay
the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to supply
. Thus the primary four hours of the working day is spent on producing value
like the worth of the wages the worker are going to be paid. this is often
referred to as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is often
referred to as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist.
Surplus value, consistent with Marx, is that the source of all profit. Marxism
Political Theory, In Marx’s analysis labour power is that the only commodity
which may produce more value than it's worth, and for this reason it's referred
to as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the
finished commodities, but don't create any extra value. they're referred to as
constant capital. Profit, then, is that the results of the labour performed by
the worker beyond that necessary to make the worth of his or her wages. this is
often the excess value theory of profit.
It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry
becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and fewer variable
capital, the speed of profit need to fall. For as a proportion less capital are
going to be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital
Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the speed of profit will go
over time, and this is often one among the factors which results in the
downfall of capitalism. (However, as acknowledged by Marx’s able expositor Paul
Sweezy within the Theory of Capitalist Development, the analysis is
problematic.) an extra consequence of this analysis may be a difficulty for the
idea that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to satisfy also
in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis thus far that labour
intensive industries need to have a better rate of profit than those which use
less labour. Not only is that this empirically false, it's theoretically
unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary
during a systematic way from values.
Providing the mathematics to elucidate this is often referred
to as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical
difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now
(albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should always recall that the
labour theory useful was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory
of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as
indirect because it is within the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the
idea drains away. an extra objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour
can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and may be
argued to be merely an artifact of the character of his presentation. Marxism
Political Theory, Any commodity are often picked to play an identical role.
Consequently with equal justification one could began a corn theory useful ,
arguing that corn has the unique power of making more value than it costs.
Formally this is able to be just like the labour theory useful . Nevertheless,
the claims that somehow labour is liable for the creation useful , which profit
is that the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, albeit
they're difficult to determine intimately .
However, albeit the labour theory useful is taken into
account discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The
Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics, picked out
two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to simply accept that
capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist,
replacing this with a category based analysis of the worker’s struggle for
better wages and conditions of labor , versus the capitalist’s drive for ever
greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there's any long-run tendency to
equilibrium within the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which
underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective
to aspects of orthodox theory .
Theory of History
Marx didn't began his theory of history in great detail.
Accordingly, it's to be constructed from a spread of texts, both those where he
attempts to use a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events,
and people of a more purely theoretical nature. Of the latter, the 1859 Preface
to A Critique of economics has achieved canonical status.
However, The German Ideology, co-written with Engels in 1845,
may be a vital early source during which Marx first sets out the fundamentals
of the outlook of historical materialism. We shall briefly outline both texts,
then check out the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history within the hands
of his philosophically most influential recent exponent, G.A. Cohen, who builds
on the interpretation of the first Russian Marxist Plekhanov.
We should, however, remember that Cohen’s interpretation
isn't universally accepted. Cohen provided his reconstruction of Marx partly
because he was frustrated with existing Hegelian-inspired ‘dialectical’
interpretations of Marx, and what he considered to be the vagueness of the
influential works of Louis Althusser, neither of which, he felt, provided a
rigorous account of Marx’s views. Marxism Political Theory, However, some
scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall specialise in is faulty
precisely for its lack of attention to the dialectic. One aspect of this
criticism is that Cohen’s understanding features a surprisingly small role for
the concept of sophistication struggle, which is usually felt to be central to
Marx’s theory of history. Cohen’s explanation for this is often that the 1859
Preface, on which his interpretation is predicated , doesn't provides a
prominent role to class war , and indeed it's not explicitly mentioned.
UGC NET Paper 1 and Paper 2 Notes
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