KARL MARX AND MARXISM
McLellan, D. (1995) The Thought of Karl Marx, London: Papermac.
The Correspondence of 1843
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Man must recognize his own forces as social forces, organize them and thus
no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political
forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be completed.
19
Paris Manuscripts
-
That the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital
int a few hands, and thus a a more terrible restoration of monopoly; and
that finally the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and that
between peasant and industrial worker disappears and the whole of society
must fall apart into the two classes of the property owners and the propertyless
workers. 23
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Supposing that we have produced in a human manner; each of us would in
his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would
have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity
and thus both in my activity enjoys an individual expression of my life
and also I looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing
my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power raised
beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have
had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human
need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned
for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have
been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged
an felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part
of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed both in your thought
and in your love. (4) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned
your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized
my own essence, my human, my communal essence. (23)
-
It [Communism] is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and
nature and between man and man. (24)
On the Jewish Question, 1843-4
-
Revolution in general - the overthrown of the existing power and dissolution
of previous relationships - is a political act. Socialism cannot be realized
without a revolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its
peculiar aims, its soul comes forward, then socialism casts aside its political
cloak. 25
-
Man must recognize his own forces s social forces, organize them and thus
no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political
forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be completed.
(215)
-
From the political point of view the state and any organization of society
are not two distinct things. The state is the organization of society.
In so far as the state admits the existence of social abuses, it seeks
their origin either in natural laws that no human power can control or
in the private sector which is independent of it or in the inadequacy of
the administration that depends on the state...
-
The state cannot abolish the contradiction which exits between the role
and good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means
at its disposal on the other, without abolishing itself, for it rests on
this contradiction. It rests on the contrast between public and private
life, on the contrast between general and particular interests. The administration
must therefore limit itself to a formal and negative activity, for its
power ceases just where civil life and work begin.
Critical notes on 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform,' 1844
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If the modern state wished to do away with the impotence of its administration,
it would have to do away with the contemporary private sphere for it only
exists in contrast to the private sphere. 215
1844 Manuscripts
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Communism is completed naturalism is humanism and as completed humanism
is naturalism. It is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man
and nature and between man and man. It is the true solution of the struggle
between an essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between
freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution
to the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution. 242
The Holy Family, 1844-5
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History...does not use man to realize its own ends, as though it were a
particular person: it is merely the activity of men pursuing his own objectives.
31
-
Ideas never lead beyond the established situation, the only lead beyond
the ideas of the established situation. Ideas can accomplish absolutely
nothing. To become real, ideas require men who apply a practical force.
(")
-
If man is by nature social, then he develops his true nature only in society
and the power and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power
of the single individual but by the power of society. (", 32)
-
If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morals, man's
private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.
(", 126)
-
the working class would set up 'an association which excludes class division
and which will have no political power properly speaking'. (240)
The German ideology, 1946
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He [man] begins to distinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins
to produce his means of subsistence, a step required by his physical organization.
By producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself. 33
-
What they [individuals] are, therefore, coincides with what they produce,
and how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material
conditions which determine their production. ("34).
-
that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history. (",
128)
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The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse
of men, the language of real life.
-
Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse,
alter, along with their actual world also their thinking and the products
of their thinking. (", 152)
-
...definite individuals who are productively active in a specific way enter
into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation
must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification
and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with
production. The social structure and the state continually evolve out of
the life process of definite individuals, individuals...as they work, produce
materially, and act under definite material limitations, presuppositions,
and conditions independent of their work. (209)
-
The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their
'will', their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually
determine each other - this is the real basis of the State and remains
so at all the stages at which division of labor and private property are
still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals. (160)
-
Each new class which puts itself in place of the one ruling before it,
is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aims, to represent its
interest as the common interest of all the members of society...The class
making a revolution appears from the very start...not as a class but as
a representative of the whole society. (182)
-
The extension of trade, the establishment of communications, led the separate
towns to get to know other towns, which had asserted the same interests
in the struggle with the same antagonist. (189)
-
In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed
and it was a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new
distribution of labor to other persons, whilst communist revolution is
directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with
labor,
and
abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because
it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in
society, is not recognized as a class, as is in itself the expression of
the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society;
and both for the production on a mass scale of this Communist consciousness,
and for the success of the caus itself, the alteration of men on a mass
scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical
movement, in a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not
only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but
also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed
I riding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society
anew. (229)
-
In revolutionary activity, the changing of oneself coincides with the changing
of circumstances. (225)
-
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity
or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary
practice. (230)
The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
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Are men free to choose this or that form of society for themselves? By
no means. 35
-
Social relations are intimately bound up with productive forces. In acquiring
new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing
their mode of production, their manner of making a living, they change
all their social relations. (", 36)
-
Because of the simple fact that every succeeding generation finds itself
in possession of the productive forces acquired by the previous generation,
which serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises
in human history, a history of humanity which takes shape is all the more
a history of humanity as the productive forces of man and therefore his
social relations have been more developed. (", 129)
Communist Manifesto, 1848
-
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is
the condition for the free development of all. 45
-
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.
-
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition
to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of contending classes. (opening
words).
-
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and
his social life?
-
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production
changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
(123)
-
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare
that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing
social conditions. (", 46)
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The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. (218)
-
The proletariate, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir,
cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official
society being exploded into the air. (231)
-
When in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, the public power will lode its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one
class for oppressing another. (239)
Address to the communist League, 1850
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But they (the proletariate) themselves must do the upmost for their final
victory, by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are...
47
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
-
In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence
that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from
those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter,
they form a class. 192
-
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
(232)
Marx to Weydemeyer, 1852
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What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes
in only bound up with particular historical phases in the development
of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariate, (3) that this dictatorship itself
only constitutes the transition of the abolition of all classes
and to a classless society. 193
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1857
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...is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are all
identical, but that they are all members of one entity, different aspects
of one unit. 65
Grundrisse, 1857
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The assertion that free competition is the final form of the development
of productive forces, and thus of human freedom, means only that the domination
of the middle class is the end of the world's history... 68
-
capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond deification
of nature and the inherited self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs
confined within well defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional
way of life. It is destructive of all of this, and permanently revolutionary,
tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces,
the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation
and exchange of natural and intellectual forces. ("69)
-
...an altered means of distribution will derive from an altered new basis
of production emerging from the historical process. ("72)
Preface to A critique of Political Economy, 1859
-
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes
of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation
of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic
form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense
of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions
of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing
in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the
solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the
prehistory of human society to a close. 164
-
In the social production which 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 productive relations constitutes
the economic structure of society - the real foundation on which rise legal
and political superstructures, and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines
the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes
of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,
but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces
of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property
relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development
of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation
the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.
-
No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which
there is room in it, have developed, and the new higher relations of production
never appear before the conditions of their existence have matured in the
womb of the old society...the problem itself only arises when the material
conditions necessary for its solution already exist or at least in the
process of their formation. (233)
Theories of Surplus Value, 1862
-
from the specific form of material production arises in the first place
a specific structure of society, in the second place a specific relation
of men to nature. Their State and their spiritual outlook is determined
by both. Therefore also the kind of their spiritual production. 165
Inaugural Address, 1864
-
like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and
inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its
toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart. 178
-
that the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working
class themselves...that the economic subjugation of the man of labor to
the monopolizer of the means of labor...lies at the bottom of servitude
in all its forms of social misery, mental degradation and political dependence.
That the economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great
end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means.
That all efforts aiming at this great end have hitherto failed from want
of solidarity between the manyfold divisions of labor in each country,
and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes
of different countries....for these means the undersigned...have taken
the steps necessary for founding the International Working Men's Association.
(I. Berlin, 185)
Results of the Immediate Process of Production, 1865
-
Thus a total economic revolution is taking place. On the one hand, this
process creates first of all the real conditions of the domination of capital
over work, perfects them and gives them an adequate form; on the other
hand it brings to birth, within the productive forces of labor and the
conditions of production and circulation developed at the expense of the
workers, the real conditions of a new mode of production, abolishing the
antagonistic form of the capitalist mode of production and thus creating
the material basis of a new social life, a new type of society. 234
Capital I, 1867
-
Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate,
and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material
reactions between himself and Nature...by thus acting on the external world
and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops
his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.
170
-
The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization
of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by
the producers. (178)
-
- It is not the articles made, but how they made, and by what instruments,
that enables us to distinguish different economical epochs. 180
-
Wherever a part of society possesses a monopoly of the means of production,
the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labor necessary for his own
maintenance an extra quality of labor in order to produce the means of
subsistence for the owner of the means of production. (1976:344 Penguin)
Capital II, 1869
-
The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted
consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production
to develop the productive forces in such a way that only the absolute power
of consumption of the entire society would be their limit. 88
-
Trade always has, to a greater or lesser degree, a solvent effect on the
pre-existing organizations of production, which in all their various forms
are principally oriented to use-value. But how far it leads to the dissolution
of the old mode of production depends first and foremost on the solidity
and inner articulation of this mode of production itself. And what comes
out of this process of dissolution, i.e. what new mode of production arises
in place of the old, does not depend on trade, but rather in the character
of the old mode of production itself. (1981:449 Penguin)
Drafts for The Civil War in France, 1871
-
The Commune does not do away with the class struggles, through which the
working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and, therefore,
of all class rule (because it does not represent a peculiar interest. It
represents the liberation of 'labor', that is the fundamental and natural
condition of individual and social life which only by usurpation, fraud
and artificial contrivances can be shifted from the few upon the many),
but it affords the rational medium I which that class struggle can run
through its different phases in the most rational and human way. It could
start violent reactions and as violent revolutions. It begins the emancipation
of labor - its great work of the state parasites, by cutting away the
springs which sacrifice a immense portion of the national produce to the
feeding of the state monster on the one side, by doing, on the other, the
real work of administration, local and national, for workingmen's wages.
It begins therefore with an immense saving, with economical reform as well
as political transformation. 194
-
great strides may be made at once through the communal form of political
organization and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves
and mankind. 235
The Alleged Splits in the International, 1872
-
By anarchy all socialists understand this: once the aim of the proletariate
movement, the abolition of classes, is attained...the state power disappears
and governmental functions are transformed into simple administrative functions.
220
Speech in Amsterdam, 1872
-
in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the
lever of our revolutions; it is to force that it will be necessary to appeal
for a time in order to establish the reign of labor. 234
Marx on Bakunin, 1875
-
Where the mass of the peasants are still owners of private property, where
they even form a more or less important majority of the population, as
they do in the states of the Western European continent, they have not
yet disappeared and been replaced by agricultural wage laborers, as in
England; in this cases the following situation arises: either the peasantry
hinders every workers' revolution and causes it to fail, as it has done
in France up till now; or the proletariate (for the landowning peasant
does not belong to the proletariate and even when his own position causes
him to belong to it, he does not think to belong to it) must as
a government inaugurate measures which directly improve the situation of
the peasant and which thus win him for the revolution; measures which in
essence facilitate the transition from private to collective property in
land so that the peasant himself is converted for economic reasons; the
proletariate must not, however, come into open collision with peasantry
by, for example, proclaiming the abolition of inheritance or the abolition
of property; this latter is only possible where the capitalist landlord
has expropriated the peasant and the real worker of the land is just as
much a proletarian wage laborer as the city worker, and thus has directly
the same interests. 235
Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
-
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed
on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist
society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually,
still stamped with the birth marks of he old society from whose womb it
emerges. 249
Circular Letter, 1879
-
For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate
driving riving power of history, and in particular the class struggle between
bourgeoisie and proletariate as the great lever of the modern social revolution;
it is, therefore, impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish
to expunge this class struggle from the movement. 205
From McLellan (1995)
-
Thus the way men produced their means of subsistence conditioned their
whole social, political and intellectual life. At a certain stage in their
evolution the forces of production would develop beyond the relations of
production and these would act as a fetter. Such a stage inaugurated a
period of social revolution. These productive forces had to develop to
the fullest extent possible under the existing relations of production
before the old social order would perish. (74)
-
the nature of economic crises...he [Marx] traced to the basic contradiction
between the necessity of a capitalist economy to expand its production
without taking into account the level of consumption that alone could make
it feasible.
-
In all fields the common idea was that man had forfeited to someone or
something what was essential to his nature - principally to be in control
of his own activities, to be the initiator of the historical process. In
the different forms of alienation some other entity obtained what was proper
to man. P.108
-
It is man's nature, according to Marx in the Paris Manuscripts, to be constantly
developing, in co-operation with other men, himself and the world about
him. 110
-
the exploitation and inequality which were inherent in the relations of
production were concealed by the appearance of free exchange in the sphere
of circulation, concentration on which gave rise to the typically capitalist
ideology of freedom, equality and so forth. (155)
-
Marx thought that revolutions had occurred when one class had been able
to identify its own interest with those of society as a whole. (182)
-
Class, like the state or alienation, was a transitory phenomena portrayed
to its fullest extent in capitalist society. (182)
-
the development of capitalist society was rapidly simplifying the situation
by producing two and only two classes: bourgeoisie and proletariate. (183)
-
Thus the criterion for belonging to a class is one's position in the prevailing
mode of production. (183)
-
What he [Marx] did claim was that the gap in resources between those who
owned the means of production and those who did not would widen. (183)
-
These groups [the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants] seem to render the
neat division of the communist manifesto inapplicable, for these two groups
obviously merge into bourgeoisie and the proletariate according to how
many workers they employ or how much land they own. (184)
-
Marx though that politically the peasants were a reactionary group and
was unwilling to group them with the urban proletariate: the most recent
peasant movements in Western Europe had had feudal or monarchist inclinations.
(184)
-
Thus Marx's definition of class seems to vary greatly, not only with the
development of his thought but even within the same period. Marx often
uses the term, in common with the usage of his time, as a synonym for faction
or group. (185)
-
A class always viewed its own interests as opposed to those of other groups
and had to be organized politically to fight for them. (185)
-
Thus Marx has many criteria for the application for the term 'class' and
not all of them apply all the time. The two chief criteria are relationship
to the prevailing mode of production and a group's consciousness of itself
as a class with its attendant political organization. (186)
-
Marx set out to show that it was an illusion to suppose that the state
had a universal character capable of harmonizing the discordant elements
of civil society and uniting them on a higher level. (207)
-
The form of government that Marx recommended, in contrast to Hegel, was
one where there was no separation between civil society and the state and
which directly corresponded to the 'essence of socialized man.' (207)
-
Thus Marx viewed the state, like religion, as a statement of man's ideal
aims and also a compensation for their lack of realization. (208)
-
In the course of history each method of production gave rise to a typical
political organization furthering the interests of the dominant class.
(209)
-
This essence is communal creativity, the fact that man controls the process
of his self creation and his relationship to nature, all of which is part
of Marx's concept of work. In the future communist society everyone will
be a worker: 'with labor emancipated every man becomes a working man, and
productive labor ceases to be class attribute. 242
-
For according to Marx, communism sat on the shoulders of capitalism and
you cannot arrive at communism unless you had gone through that particular
purgatory. (253)
-
The collapse of Communism has taken with it three important doctrines.
The first is that of dialectical materialism which offered a total interpretation
of the world in a metaphysical, philosophical sense: laws governed everything
from the change of quantity to quality in matter right up to the date of
the next revolution. The all encompassing metaphysic based upon a crude
materialistic interpretation of the world was never taken terribly seriously
by most thinking people. But nevertheless it was something which - as rather
more simplistic versions of religion have been - was widely propagated
and presumably accepted by millions of people. 253
-
any reform which relies either on moral rhetoric or on the law simply,
or in the widening of political rights alone is unlikely to get down to
the basis of the problem: the lack of economic power of a large proportion
of individuals in society and the atomization and anomie that capitalism
produces and reproduces. 254
-
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please,
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
(Marx, 139)
-
the dialectic "includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition
of the existing state of things at the same time also the recognition of
the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking-up; it regards every
historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore
takes into account its transient nature no less than it momentary existence;
because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical
and revolutionary. (Wrote in 1872, 140)
-
The disappearance of the state as such is reserved for the time when 'all
the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly', and the exercise
of 'political' power is no longer necessitated by economic pressure. 240
Engels, F. (1877) Anti-Duhring: Selected Works
-
But when we see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy,
the bourgeoisie and the proletariate, each have their special morality,
we can only draw the one conclusion, that men, consciously or unconsciously,
derive their moral ideas in the last resort from the practical relations
on which there class position is based - from the economic relations in
which they carry on production and exchange. 248
-
We maintain on the contrary tat all former moral theories are the product,
in the lat analysis, of the economic stage which society had reached at
that particular epoch. 249
-
A really human morality which transcends class antagonism and their legacies
in thought becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only
overcome class contradictions but has even forgotten them in practical
life. 249
-
Before the original conception of relative equality could lead to the conclusion
that men should have equal rights in the state and in society, before this
conclusion could appear to be something even natural and self-evident,
however, thousands of years had to pass and did pass. 250
-
The idea of equality, therefore, both in its bourgeois and its proletarian
form, is itself a historical product, the creation of which required definite
historical conditions which in turn themselves presuppose a long previous
historical development. 254
-
The more the products of the commune assumed the commodity form, that is,
the less they were produced for their producers' own use, and the more
for the purpose of exchange, the more the primitive natural division of
labor was replaced by exchange also within the commune, the more inequality
developed in the property of the individual members of the commune, the
more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and
the more rapidly the commune developed towards its dissolution and transformation
into a village of small peasants. 267
-
all political power is originally based on an economic, social function,
and increases in proportion as the members of society, through the dissolution
of the primitive community, become transformed into private producers,
and thus become more and more separated from the administrators of the
general functions of society. 277
-
The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production,
and with production the exchange of its products, is the basis of every
social order. 279
-
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation
of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation,
at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that
produces its
own product in the form of capital. 289
-
The expansion of the market cannot keep pace with the expansion of production.
The collision becomes inevitable, and, as it can yield no solution so long
as it does not burst the capitalist mode of production itself, it becomes
periodic. 289
-
the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange; the productive
forces rebel against the mode of production, which they have outgrown.
290
Lenin, V. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalsim
-
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism
We should have to say that the imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
689
-
Imperialism is capitalism in the stage of development in which the domination
of monopolies and finance capital has taken shape; in which the export
of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of
the world by the international trusts has begun, and in which the partition
of all the territory of the earth by the greatest capitalist countries
has been completed. 690
-
[Kautsky] "Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism.
It consists in the striving of every industrialist capitalist nation to
bring under its control and to annex larger and larger agrarian
regions, irrespective of what nations inhabit them." 691
-
the most deep rooted economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. 700
-
[Sartorius von Waltershausen] The creditor is more firmly tied to the debtor
than the seller is to the buyer. 702
Berlin, I. (1963) Karl Marx: His Life and Environment,
New York: Time.
-
He [Marx] concluded that the history of society is the history of man seeking
to attain to mastery of himself and of the external world by means of his
creative labor. 6
-
progress is constituted by the succession of victories of one class over
the other, and that man alone is rational who identifies himself with the
progressive class in his society, either, if need be, by deliberately abandoning
his past and allying himself with it, or if history has already placed
him there, by consciously recognizing his situation and acting in the light
of it. 6-7
-
Moral, political, economic, conceptions and ideals alter with the social
conditions from which they spring: to regard any one of them as universal
and immutable is tantamount to believing that the order to which they belong,
in this case the bourgeois order - is eternal. 8
-
If the class war is real, these interests are totally incompatible. 8
-
The manifestoes, professions of faith and programmes of action to which
he appended his name, contains scarcely any references to moral progress,
eternal justice, the equality of man, the rights or individuals or nations,
the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization, and other such phrases
which were the stock and trade (and had once genuinely embodied ideals)
of the democratic movements of his time; he looked upon these as so much
worthless cant, indicating confusion of thought and ineffectiveness in
action. 8-9
-
To denounce the process itself - the painful conflicts through and by which
mankind struggles to achieve the full realization of its powers - was for
Marx a sort of childish subjectivism, due to a morbid or shallow view of
life, to some irrational prejudice in favor of this or that virtue or institution;
it revealed attachment to the old world and was a symptom of incomplete
emancipation from its values. 10
-
For while his realism, his empiricism, his attacks on abstract principles,
his demand that every solution must be tested by its applicability to,
and emergence out of, the actual situation, his contempt for compromise
or gradualism as modes of escape from the necessity of drastic action,
his belief that the masses are infinitely gullible and must at all costs
be rescued, if necessary by force, from the knaves and fools who impose
upon them, make him the precursor of the severer generation of practical
revolutionaries of the next century: his rigid belief in the necessity
of a complete break with the past, in the need for a wholly new social
system as alone capable of saving the individual, who, if left to himself,
will lose his way and perish, places him among the great authoritarian
founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who interpret
the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing
and destroying all that conflicts with it. 16
-
His intellectual system was a closed one, everything that entered was made
to conform to a pre-established pattern, but it was grounded in observation
and experience. 17
-
he did more than any other man to hasten the process, seeking to shorten
the final agony which precedes the end. 18
-
Reason is always right. To every question there is only one true answer
which with sufficient assiduity can be infallibly discovered, and this
applies no less to questions of ethics or politics, of personal and social
life, than to problems of physics and mathematics. Once found, the putting
of a solution into practice is a matter of mere technical skill; but the
traditional enemies of progress must first be removed, and men taught the
importance of acting in all questions on the advice of disinterested scientific
experts, whose knowledge is founded on reason and experience. Once this
has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium. 32-3
-
Man is an object in nature, and the human soul, like the material substance,
is swayed by no supernatural influences and posses no occult properties;
its entire behavior can be adequately accounted for by means of ordinary
verifiable physical hypotheses. 33
-
in ordinary argument between two opponents, when, in the conflict between
two partial falsehoods, new truth is discovered, itself only relative,
itself assaulted by a counter-truth, the destruction of each by the other
leading once more to a new level in which the antagonistic elements are
transfigured into a new organic whole - a process which continues without
end. He called this process dialectical. 46
-
Reform must spring from historically prepared soil; otherwise it is doomed
to failure, condemned in advance by the forces of history which move in
accordance with their own logic in their own time and at their own pace.
47
-
Whereas competition evokes the worst and most brutal qualities in men,
co-operation, besides promoting greater efficiency, moralizes and civilizes
them by revealing the true end of communal life. 95
-
The only possible region in which to look for the principles of historical
motion must be one that is open to scientific, that is empirical, inspection.
104
-
The status of an individual is determined by the part which he plays in
the process of social production, and this in turn directly depends upon
the character of the productive fores and their degree of development at
any given stage. 105
-
Labor transforms man's world, and himself too, in the course of its activity.
106
-
Immense institutions, social, political, cultural, have been created to
conserve their possessions in the hands of their present owners, not indeed
by deliberate policy, but arising unconsciously out of the general attitude
to life of those who govern a given society. 109
-
Alienation occurs when the results of men's acts contradict their true
purposes, when their official values, or the parts they play, misrepresent
their real motives and needs and goals. This is the case, for example,
when something that men have made to respond to human needs - say, a system
of laws, or the rules of musical composition - acquires an independent
status of its own, and is seen by men, not as something created by them
to satisfy a common social want (which may have disappeared long ago),
but as an objective law or institution, possessing eternal, impersonal
authority in its own right, like the unalterable laws of Nature as conceived
by scientists and ordinary men, like Gd for a believer. 114
-
The monopoly of the means of production held by a particular group of men,
enables it to bind its will on the others and to force them to perform
tasks alien to their needs. Thereby the unity of society is destroyed,
and the lives of both classes become distorted. 115
-
The most oppressive of all, in Marx's demonology, is bourgeois economic
science, which represents the movement of commodities or of money - indeed
the process of production, consumption and distribution - as an impersonal
process, similar to those of nature, an unalterable pattern of objective
forces before which men can only bow, and which would be insane to resist.
116
-
Alienation - the substitution of imaginary relations between, or worship
of, inanimate objects or ideas for real relations between, or respect for,
persons - will come to an end only when the final class- the proletariate
- defeats the bourgeoisie. 117
-
All frustration, for Marx, is the product of alienation - the barriers
and distortions that are created by the inevitable war of classes, and
shut out this or that body of men from the harmonious co-operation with
one another for which their nature craves. 118
-
The 'True Socialists' [Grun ad Hess] opposed the doctrine of the necessity
of open class war on the ground that it blinded the workers to those rights
and ideals for the sake of which they fought. Only as treating men as equal
from the beginning, by dealing with them as human beings, that is, by renouncing
force, and appealing to the sense of human solidarity, of equal justice
and the generous sentiments of mankind, could a lasting harmony of interests
be obtained. 120
-
Marx this was the oldest, most familiar, most outworn of all the rationalist
fallacies. He had met it in its worst form in the belief of his own father
and his contemporaries that in the end reason and moral goodness were bound
to triumph, a theory which was utterly discredited by events during the
dark aftermath of the French Revolution. 121
-
Whatever his opinions, a man's actions were inevitably guided by his real
interests, by the requirements of his material situation; 122
-
But these others, who proclaim their solidarity with the workers, and assume
that there always exists universal interests of mankind as such, common
to all men - that men have interests independent of, or transcending their
class affiliation - spread error and darkness in the proletarian camp itself,
and thus weaken it for the coming struggle. 123
-
True freedom is unattainable until society has been made rational, that
is, has overcome the contradictions which breed illusions and distort the
understanding of both masters and slaves. 129
-
The scientific study of historically evolving economic relations, and of
their bearing on other aspects of the lives of communities and individuals,
began with the application of Marxist canons of interpretation. 130
-
the Hegelian thesis, according to which the state, eve in its present condition,
constitutes the most progressive and dynamic function of a collection of
human beings assembled to lead a common life. 172
-
Marx, as was made evident from his address to the Central Communist Committee
in 1850, considered himself to have erred seriously in supposing that an
alliance with the radical bourgeoisie was possible and even necessary before
the final victory of the proletariate. 174.
-
Men, emancipated at last from the tyranny both of nature and of their own
ill-adapted and ill-controlled and therefore oppressive institutions, will
begin to develop their capacities to the fullest extent. 203
Ollman, B. (1976) Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in
Capitalist Society, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
The theory of alienation is the intellectual construct in which Marx displays
the devastating effect of capitalist production of human beings, on their
physical and mental states and on their social processes of which they
are a part. 131
-
as a grand summing up, as Marx's conception of man in capitalist society,
the theory of alienation can only be set out after its constituent elements
have been accounted for. 131
-
For Marx, unalienation is the life man leads in communism. 132
-
Marx refers to alienation as "a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be"
(1844 Manuscripts, 170).
-
all classes are considered alienated in the ways and to the degree that
their members fall of the communist ideal. 132
-
Alienated man...has been reduced to performing undifferentiated work on
humanly undistinguishable objects among people deprived of their human
variety and compassion. ... There is little that remains of his relations
to his activity, product and fellows which enable us to grasp the peculiar
qualities of his species. 134
-
Marx presents alienation as partaking in four broad relations which are
so distributed as to cover the whole of human existence. These are man's
relations to his productive activity, his product, other men, and the species.
136
-
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? Marx offers the following
reply. "First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does
not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does
not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy,
does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his
body and ruins his mine." 136 (73-74).
-
[Above] Marx is describing a state where the relations between activity
and man's powers exist at a very low level of achievement. 137
-
[In] Communist society...man's productive activities engages all his powers
and creates ever widening opportunities for their fulfillment. In this
manner, work in communism is an affirmation of human nature, while capitalist
labor is its denial... 138
-
the relations of man's capitalist productive activity to man's species
itself, to his body and mind, to his subjective feelings when doing labor,
to his will to engage in labor, to the capitalist, too his own human and
animal functions and to what productive activity will be like under communism
equal alienated labor. 140
-
man is alienated from his product because the activity which produced it
is alienated. 141
-
"the product is but the summary of the activity, of production... In the
estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement,
the alienation, in the activity of labor itself. (73) 141.
-
"The worker put his life into the object" (84) 141
-
through alienated labor man not only engenders his relationship to the
object and to the act of production as powers that are alien and hostile
to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to
his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands
to these other men. Just as he begets his own product as a loss, as a product
not belonging to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not
produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges himself
from his own activity, so he confers the stranger activity which is not
his own...a man alien to labor and standing outside it...the capitalist,
or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor" (79-80) 148
-
pulling in opposite directions, at the command of competing interests,
their relations are necessarily antagonistic. 149
-
Species...is the category of the possible denoting the particular those
potentialities which mark man off from other living creatures. 150
-
communist man and species man are identical. 150
-
"In tearing away from man the object of his production...estranged labor
tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms
his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body,
nature, is taken from him" (76) 150
-
For Marx, "the productive life is the life of the species" (75). Such activity
is the chief means through which the individual expresses and develops
his powers. 151
From Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Fromm
and Erich (eds.) (1963), Marx's Conception of Man, NY.
Huaco, G. (1999) Marx and Sociobiology, Lanham, MD: University
Press of America.
-
Philosophical propositions, such as metaphysical, ontological, or epistemological
claims, are inherently unverifiable by any empirical evidence. 1
-
Marx describes the capitalist market as "a naturally evolved totality fragmenting
into a circle of particularities." (1857-61, CW 29: 468)
-
Intersubjectivity is a characteristic of primary group activities, and
it is pointless to bemoan the fact that a society cannot be a community.
3
-
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking
is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must
prove the truth…of his thinking in practice." (1845-47, CW 5:3) 4
-
one of the meanings of the word 'materialism' in Marx, will be to remind
us that theories can only be verified (or falsified) by empirical facts.
4
-
history allows for short-term correlations but not for scientific laws
which will always be valid. 8
-
"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of the
relationships and conditions in which these individuals stand to one another."
(1857-61, CW, 28: 195) 9
-
Changes in society produces changes in culture, and changes in culture
produce changes in society. 9
-
"all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence
of things coincided." (Marx, 1894, Capital III: 797)
-
"Real Sciences "seek to uncover the essence which lies hidden behind commonplace
appearances, and which mostly contradicts the form of commonplace appearances
(as for example, in the case of the movement of the sun about the earth)."
(1861, CW 34:86) 10
-
"the sole bond holding" human "together is natural necessity, need and
private interests, the preservation of their property and their egoistic
selves." (1843, CW 3:164) 14
-
"Only when the real, individual main re-absorbs in himself the abstract
citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being
in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation…only
then will human emancipation have been accomplished."(1843-44, CW 3:168)
15
-
It is clear that Marx would like to transform societies back into communities,
if only that were somehow possible. 15
-
Marx argues that 'human nature' (or 'the essential nature of each individual")
is membership in what Marx calls 'the true community" or "the human
community." However, in the world of urban industrial capitalism, a
"commercial society" ruled by "exchange and trade," people
live in arrangements which are the opposite of a true community. 15
-
"To say that man is estranged from himself, therefore, is the same thing
as saying that the society of this estranged man is a caricature of his
real community, of his true species-life, that his activity therefore appears
to him as a torment, his own creation as an alien power, his wealth as
poverty, the essential bond linking him with other men as an unessential
bond, and separation from his fellow men, on the other hand, as his true
mode of existence." (1843, CW 3:217) 15
-
boring work, social isolation, and poverty are understood as consequences
of the loss of community. 16
-
It is not difficult to specify Marx's conception of a real community. It
is one which "the producer" has "immediate enjoyment" of his product and
uses it to satisfy "personal needs." Furthermore, work "is for him the
enjoyment of his personality and the realization of his natural abilities
and spiritual aims." (1843, CW, 3:220). 16
-
In a real community, "the direct, natural, and necessary relation of a
person to person is the relation of man to woman." This is the "natural
species-relationship." (1843, CW 3:295). Therefore, a real community is
a warm primary group of significant others. 16
-
In what kind of social world would it be the case that all people are happy
in their work and use it to develop their "physical and mental energy"?
In what kind of social arrangement would work satisfy the intrinsic human
needs of workers and be something other than a means to earn a living?
These are the features of Marx's lost ideal community. 18
-
Marx says that "estranged labor turns...Man's species-being…into a being
alien to him, into a means for his individual existence." (1843, CW, 3:277).
-
since community (or species-being) is the "essential being" (1843,
CW 3:276) or core of human nature, it follows that human living in society
are alienated from the core of their human nature. 19
-
What is peculiar about Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844, is that in this work, the two great themes of loss of community
and economic exploitation come together for the first time. 19
-
Behind all this [desire for community] is a probable source in Freud's
insight about a universal human desire to return to the womb. 20
-
families share a common gene pool. The caring and generous behavior is
a real community is probably an unconscious defense of a shared gene pool.
21
-
While the French centralized and, therefore, abbreviated the reign of terrorism,
the Spaniards, true to their traditions, decentralized and, consequently,
procrastinated it. Conforming to Spanish tradition, the revolutionary party
was not likely to prove victorious by subverting the throne (Marx and Engels,
1854-55, CW 13:659) 147
-
Technology is described by Marx as "machines, locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs…the objectified power of knowledge." Above 29:92 25
-
"Science, which compels the inanimate members of the machinery, by means
of their design, to operate purposefully as an automaton, does not exist
in the worker's consciousness, but acts upon him through the machine as
an alien force, as the force of the machine itself." (M&E, 1857-61,
CW 29:83) 25
-
As of 1850, Marx did not mean abolition; all he meant was reduction of
state power. 28
-
the government is the "social organ for the maintenance of social order."
(M&E 1874-83, CW 24:82 28
-
Why does Marx want to get rid of what he calls the "state parasite"? Because
it had grown "independent of society." Marx wants to replace this state
parasite with a decentralized and idealized version of representative democracy.
This is very clear in his description and praise of the Paris Commune in
1871. 30
-
First, in 1871, Marx still believed in an egalitarian economic order. Second,
Marx believed in representative democracy. He would have no use
for versions of participatory democracy or direct democracy which had been
advocated by anarchist thinkers. 31
-
The level of development of the forces causally explains the character
of the ownership relations. 33
-
Slave ownership in the Roman Empire discouraged labor-saving devices, and
thus held back an increase in technology. 35
-
"the characteristic 'figure' of a crisis in a mode of production is not
one in which vigorous (economic) forces of production burst triumphantly
through retrograde (social) relations of production, and promptly establish
a higher productivity and society on their ruins. On the contrary, the
forces of production typically tend to stall and recede within the existing
relations of production; these then must themselves first be radically
changed and reordered before new productive forces can be created. (Perry
Anderson, 1974:204) 37
-
"Since we may assume that…a nomadic way of life, is the first form
of existence; that the tribe does not settle on a certain site but that
it grazes off what it finds there and moves on--men are not settled by
nature (unless perhaps in such an exceptionally fertile region that they
settle on a tree like the monkeys; otherwise they are roaming like wild
animals)." (M, 1857-61, CW 28:400) 42
-
Anthropologists tell us that the hunters and gatherers worked an average
of three hours a day, and had a diet rich in proteins, fruits, and vegetables.
42
-
If the entire working day (available working time) of a man (any man) were
only sufficient to feed himself (and at best his family as well),
then there would be no surplus labor, surplus value, and
surplus
produce. (1861-63, M, CW, 33:369) 43
-
Why did nomadic hunter-gatherer society end and why did it change into
traditional class society? Marx points to two factors: 1) "the increase
in population" and 2) "the impact of war and conquest." (M, 1857-61, CW,
28:410) 43
-
"A conquering people divides the land among the conquerors and in this
way imposes a definite mode of distribution and form of landed property,
thus determining production. Or it turns the conquered into slaves, thus
making slave labor the basis of production." (M, 1857-61, CW, 28:33). 44
-
Capitalist industrial class society raises the standard of living for most
classes and groups, and doubles the average life span (from 35 years to
70 plus). The producers are neither peasant farmers, nor serfs, nor slaves,
but largely urban "formally free" workers who own their physical and mental
labor power (M, 1861-64, CW, 34:95, 100, 118). 47
-
industrial capitalism creates the first society that becomes an enemy of
nature. "For the first time nature becomes an object for men, nothing more
than an object of utility. It ceases to be acknowledged as a power in itself"
(M, 1857-51, 28:337); and "The view of nature attained under the dominion
of private property and money is a real contempt for and practical debasement
of nature." (M&E, 1843-44, 3:172) 48
-
On September 8, 1872, Marx gave a speech in Amsterdam in which he said
that in the United States and Britain change toward socialism will be peaceful
and not by violent revolution (M&E, 1871-1874, 23:255). 49
-
This clearly indicates that Marx's final view was that industrial capitalism
that is also a representative democracy will change by peaceful means.
In his day, capitalist industrialism and representative democracy were
present only in Britain and the United States. Today, they exist throughout
the entire urban-industrial world. So, if violent revolution is not on
the historical agenda for the urban-industrial sector of the planet, what
does the future hold? The answer is automation. 49
-
"In England, strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and application
of new machines. Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by
the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor. The
self-acting
mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, put out of action
the spinners who were in revolt. If combinations and strikes had no other
effect than that of making the efforts of mechanical genius react against
them, they would still exercise an immense influence on the development
of industry." (M&E, 1845-1848, 6:207) 49-50
-
"A development of productive power which reduced the absolute number of
workers, i.e. in fact enabled the whole nation to execute its total production
in a smaller period of time, would bring about revolution, because it would
demonetize the majority of the population." (M, 1861-63, 33: 142) 50
-
The survival of capitalist industrial society depends of effective consumer
demand from
within the industrial world. 51
-
"a principle may appear "sound" on the part of the economist and the classes
of which he is the theoretical mouthpiece, and may, nevertheless, not only
prove contrary to all the laws of human conscience, but like a cancer,
eat into the very vitals of the whole generation." (M&E, 1858-60, 16:191)
51
-
"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever
does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he
may be: a statesmen, a businessman, an official, or a scholar." (Nietzsche,
1984, [1878]: 171, para. 283) 52
-
Basically, Marx wanted public or "common ownership of the means of production"
(M&E, 1874-83, 24:85), and he wanted a planned economy or a "society
organized as a conscious and planned association" (Marx, 1962, [1895] Capital
III: 645). 56
-
Unfortunately the idealized original human community is long gone and never
to return. 56
-
"The development of culture and of industry in general has ever evinced
itself in such energetic destruction of forests that everything done by
it conversely, for their preservation and restoration appears infinitesimal."
(M, [1893] 1961, Capital II: 244) 59
-
"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies
taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors,
its usufructuaries, and…they must hand it down to succeeding generations
in an improved condition." (M, 1962 [1895] Capital III: 757) 59
-
The short-term real threats of world-wide overpopulation seem to be (a)
an increase in crowding, poverty, and a lowering of the quality of life
in both the industrial and non-industrial areas; (b) the extermination
of the rain forests and plant life; (c) the extermination of non-human
animals. 60
-
If all human, worldwide, were limited to having a maximum of two biological
children per couple, then world population would return eventually to a
level, where it could be stabilized by having allowable births match the
number of deaths. This would provide a margin for the survival of other
life forms. 61
-
The immediate problem facing urban-industrial societies are such as to
require powerful and effective central governments. In this context, Marx's
hope and expectation that the political state and political domination
would disappear sometime in the future, can be seen to be little more than
an anarchist illusion. 61
-
What remains of the rain forests can only be saved by some rather extreme
and drastic measures: the countries of the industrial societies would probably
have to engage in concerted military intervention to place entire areas
of the planet off-limits to further human encroachment. 62
-
"Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, overexcitement,
crises and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring
cycles, with the up and down of wages resulting from them, as with the
constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those
variations in wages and profits, the working classes of Britain, and of
all Europe, would be heart-broken, a weak minded, a worn out, unresisting
mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the
slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome." (M&E, 1853-4, 12:169) 67
-
reducing the economic matrix (e.g., reducing the size of the underclass)
would reduce that particular type of criminal activity. Specifically, Marx
rejected Bakunin's romantic notion that a criminal brigand is some kind
of revolutionary hero (M&E, 1871-4, 23:519-555) 68
-
If the cause of racism is conquest and colonialism, then it can only be
undone by decolonization or economic restitution. However, in the long
run, prospects are less sanguine. Given the predatory aggression of the
human species, which Marx acknowledged (M, 1936 [1867] Capital I: 785),
we will always have warfare. If we have warfare, we will have conquest
and colonialism in one form or another. If we have conquest and colonialism,
then the recurrent ideology of racism is likely to be with us for the foreseeable
future. 69
-
"The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy
is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding
of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with
the understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived." (M&E,
1843-4, 3:46-47) 70
-
ideology is "mental production as expressed in the language of politics,
laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people (M&E, 1845-7,
5:30, 36)." 77
-
The fact that Marx starts his analysis of ideology with a focus on written
and spoken language, tells us that for him, ideology is a trans-individual
cultural group phenomenon. 77
-
ideology is more than an aspect, feature, or dimension of written and spoken
language, ideology is an aspect of cultural discourse. 79
-
Since scientific knowledge is one of the four forces (in the hidden structure
of society), it follows that it is excluded from ideology. However, this
only applies to pure scientific knowledge that can be expressed in mathematical
notation. To the extent that scientific knowledge is expressed in verbal
or written language, it too becomes part of the phenomenon of ideology.
78
-
Marx is saying that Darwin organized his scientific data with the help
of a vision of society, projected on to nature. 78
-
Isomorphism may be defined as the deployment of a pattern of the phenomenal
surface of society, and the replication or reflection of that same pattern
in some sector of culture. 82
-
for Marx, ideology is a feature, aspect or dimension of written or spoken
language. It includes non-linguistic forms such as painting or sculptor,
but it excludes pure scientific knowledge. 83
-
It is the old illusion that changing existing relations depends only on
the good will of people, and that existing relations are ideas. The alteration
of consciousness divorced from actual relations -a pursuit followed by
philosophers as a profession, i.e., as a business--is itself a product
of existing relations and inseparable from them. 85
-
"The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt,
abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of
the rabble." (M&E, 1845-8, 6:231)
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The world of external reality remains independent, indifferent, and more
powerful and longer-lasting than human beings. Marx would reject Nietzche's
exaggerated linguistic determinism. Language does not create all of reality.
Language does not create truth or subject and object. 86
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For Marx, conceptual thought is internalized language: "Ideas do not exist
apart from language" (M, 1857-61, 28:99). Marx is right for we do think
in a language. However, his further claim that "language is as old as consciousness"
(M&E, 1845-7, 5:43-44), is very doubtful. 87
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"Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously,
it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling
him to remain unknown to him, otherwise it simply would not be an ideological
process." (Feuer et. M&E, 1959:408)
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If the thinker becomes conscious of what was previously unconscious, then
his thinking is no longer "an ideological process." 89
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There are two main problems with the use of the term false consciousness
as a definition of ideology. First, it shifts the locus on attention from
the class or group to the individual. Second, it shifts attention from
the external, objective world shared with others, to the internal, subjective,
private, introspective domain whose contents cannot be inspected by others.
This second problem is fatal. It contradicts Marx's definition of ideology
as something in socially shared written or spoken language (and non-verbal
forms of cultural discourse), and therefore as something external
which can be examined by others. 90
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Conservatives are critical of the social present and would like to return
to the past. Liberals feel that the social present can be fixed with a
few minor changes. Left-wing radicals are critical of the past and of the
present and focused on the future. 94
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men, developing their material production and their material intercourse
alter, along with the actual world, also their thinking and the products
of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life
that determines consciousness. (M&E, 1845-7, 5: 36-7). 97
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Since the Turks are an Islamic people, and predestination identifies Calvinist
Christianity, Marx is saying that puritan Protestant Christianity favored
capitalist industrialism, while Islam does not. 106
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Let us take, for example, the relation of Greek art, and that of Shakespeare,
to the present time. We know that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal
of Greek art, but also its basis (M&E, 1857-61, 28:47). 110
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The beginning of a high culture seems to be made up mostly of believers,
the end of civilization seems to be made up mostly of atheists. 111
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The population abandons the countryside and crowds into gigantic world-cities
where it demands bread and circuses (or welfare and entertaining spectacles).
117
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Marx wanted an industrial society without poverty and without economic
exploitation. He believed that surplus transfer from producers to owners
could be stopped if the market were replaced by economic planning and if
capitalists were eliminated by replacing them with government ownership
of the means of production. We know that these proposals are failures because
they produce bureaucratic stagnation in the economy and give overwhelming
power to the central government. Nevertheless, the possibility of creating
an industrial society without poverty and without economic exploitation
remains. We could retain a market and could retain competitive entrepreneurs
but outlaw most economic inheritance. 122
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Stop and reverse the human population explosion by setting limits on human
reproduction. Set limits to economic inheritance and confine it to direct
descendants. Use most of the recovered surplus to eliminate poverty. I
call this democratic socialism. Someone else may call it a reformed and
humanized capitalism. Both are right. 122
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Marx had a philosophy, but it was unoriginal and relatively unimportant.
What is important is his testable social theory (i.e., his model of society
and culture and associated hypotheses), and this is a work of a genius
which towers above the competition in the last two centuries. 123
Barbalet, J. (1983) Marx's Construction of Social Theory,
London: Routledge and Kegal Paul.
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man's alienation is a consequence of the nature of civil society, and emancipation
from alienation requires the total transformation of civil society, which
its democratization is incapable of achieving. 129