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Marxism.pptxMarx, Marxism and World Politics
Marxism
Marxism offers the third major theory of IPE
It offers an integrated system of concepts and propositions, and corresponding vision of politics
It is based on a particular theory of capitalism as a productive system of class exploitation, and of the world economy and state-system as an unequal system of imperialism
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Objectives
Review the ideas of the ‘young’ Karl Marx
Learn the key concepts of Marxism: dialectics, alienation, historical materialism, mode of production, forces and relations of production, classes, crisis, the state
Understand the Marxist theory of imperialism
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*****Notes for Live Lecture*****
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*****Preparation Notes*****
Karl Marx, 1818-1883
German intellectual, journalist and working-class activist
Born in Trier, Germany
Earns a Doctorate in law and philosophy
But never obtains a university position
At 28 became editor of a liberal-socialist paper, based on Cologne, Germany
Shut down for advocating democratic rights and social justice, and for criticizing European monarchies
Refugee in Paris (France), Brussels (Belgium), and eventually London (United Kingdom)
The Young Marx
Marx began his intellectual career with a focus on Greek and German philosophy
From the Greeks, he took the notion of dialectics:
Relational view of the world and its parts
Relations form a whole or ‘totality’ or ‘system’, which in turn shapes the ‘parts’ of reality
Contradictions between the parts can lead to revolutions of the ‘whole’
The Young Marx
As a young man, Marx was also engaged with the dialectical philosophy of the German thinker, Hegel, who believed that human history moved through the dialectic of ideas
Society is organized around particular ideas, but new ideas emerge which contradict the old ideological framework
The clash of these ideas leads to an ideational revolution, to a new paradigm for organizing society
Thus, history is the progressive movement of rationality, ideas and logic
The Young Marx
Marx said Hegel was right to apply dialectics to human history and social analysis – human history does move through relational contradictions and revolutions!
But Hegel’s dialectic was grounded in ideas alone and thus went astray – it remained idealist
Ideas are not independent motors of history, but expressions of material realities
Our ideas about the world, our sense of rationality and logic, are connected to and reflections of our material circumstances of life
Dialectics must therefore be materialized
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The Young Marx
To move beyond Hegel and the limits of idealist philosophy, Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels write a book called The German Ideology
In this text they spell out historical materialism as their method of analyzing historical change, society, politics, economics and culture
The Young Marx
Historical Materialism
Human history depends first and foremost on the production of material life
The way in which production has been organized, though, has changed over time
Human history has been partitioned into modes of production, and each mode of production is constituted by forces and relations of production
The Young Marx
Historical Materialism
Furthermore, the relations of production have been class relations, involving struggles over ownership and control over social surpluses
The dialectic of human history, then, is class conflict over the production of material life, and human culture and consciousness is always a reflection of material reality
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The Young Marx
Marx’s theory of historical materialism was an expression of the historical conditions of his own life!
In Germany, Marx edited a newspaper which supported the widespread extension of democratic liberties and social justice for the poor
After his newspaper is suppressed, Marx flees to Paris in 1843, and encounters a vibrant working-class movement that had forming during the Industrial Revolution
That working-class movement had also learned a lesson from the French Revolution (1789-1799)
true democracy requires social equality, and that the new inequalities of capitalism limit or degrade the meaning of democracy
The Young Marx
After arriving in Paris, Marx leaves behind philosophy and turns to the study of Political Economy, reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and others, and writing copious notebooks
In his Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts (1844), he says that:
political economy had treated private property as an assumed fact
had not linked the dynamics of capitalism to the existence of private property
Marx says both private property and the dynamics of capitalism can be traced back to the alienation of labor
The Young Marx
Alienated labor is an objective, systemic feature of capitalism
It is rooted in the fact that, under capitalism, the vast majority of people lose control of their own means of subsistence or means of production, and have to sell their ability to work as a ‘commodity’ on the market
In this context, alienation takes four principal forms:
From the products of labor
From the process of labor
From our “species being” or human nature
From humanity
The Young Marx
Marx’s conclusion
Overcoming the entire structure of alienation in modern society, including “all relations of servitude,” requires the emancipation of labor, i.e. socialism
Put differently, the dis-alienation of labor means abolition of private ownership of the means of production
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is the next text through which we will explore Marx’s thought
In it, he brings together, or synthesizes, his work on dialectics, historical materialism, political economy, alienation, and communism
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Published during the 1848 Revolutions for Democracy and Social Reform across Western Europe
Although it is part of his ‘early’ work, and is a political manifesto more than scientific analysis, it represents one of the most important texts of human history, and laid the foundation for Marxism as a critical theory and political project
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Importantly, it foregrounds the centrality of class struggle to human history, social organization, and political contestation
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Organized around several important questions…
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How did the bourgeoisie (the owners of capital) originate as a class?
From the chartered burghers of feudalism
These were the privileged citizens of European medieval towns, freed from feudal service, and engaged in town business or civil service
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How did the bourgeoisie (the owners of capital) originate as a class?
It monopolized the new technologies of the industrial revolution to develop manufacturing systems of production
It also facilitated European colonialism, and came to control the new markets for goods imported from the colonies
It builds up enough private wealth to challenge the old ruling classes of feudalism (the landlords and royal families)
Eventually, from the French Revolution (1789) onward, the bourgeoisie plays a revolutionary role in overthrowing feudalism and monarchy
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
Uprooted feudalism
Created new technologies, systems of production, and forms of state power
Undermined all past ideologies and social relations
Generates an immense mass of material wealth and civilization
Creates new intellectual life, a world culture of intellectual inquiry
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
Creates a world market of trade and production
Conquers nature
Develops cities and rescues the rural population from the ‘idiocy of rural life’
Consolidates and centralizes political power over national territories
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade….The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
But what are the contradictions of capitalism?
There are two structural realities generating crisis under capitalism
First, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production
Capitalism, by virtue of its technological dynamism, creates a productive capacity that goes far beyond the ability of workers to consume the totality of goods on offer
This results in periodic crises of overproduction
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
But what are the contradictions of capitalism?
The second contradiction is rooted in class formation – the conflict between the working-class (proletariat) and the bourgeoisie (or capitalist class)
“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
It develops in tandem with the bourgeoisie
Composed of property-less wage laborers, who sell their labor as a “commodity” to the capitalist class
In the factory system, they become an “appendage of the machine”
Factory work immiserates the working-class, and workers lose their unique human capacities to labor creatively and intelligently
Paid subsistence wages, and suffer from poverty
Marx describes wage labor as a new form of slavery – to technology, to the capitalist state, to bosses, and to the bourgeoisie as a class
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
But workers come to command a collective class agency for resistance
First, capitalism simplifies the class structure of previous modes of production
Society increasingly polarizes between two major classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
Second, the growing centralization of capitalist production brings together the working-class into massive factories
Third, the class experience of workers comes to be equalized – even divisions of gender, age and nation disappear says Marx
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
At first, workers employ individualistic modes of resistance to capitalist wage labor
But gradually, the find collective modes of activism
Eventually, progressive intellectuals join their cause and, with their grasp of the “march of history,” offer political leadership and support
Inevitably, the working class develops a common class consciousness around the necessity of communism – creating a classless society based not on private markets and alienated labor but on working-class control of production
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Why is Revolution necessary?
“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Why is Revolution necessary?
Because “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
Summary: The Communist Manifesto
Capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production
Develops the forces of production
Destroys and transforms all old forms of social relationships
Creates immense material wealth and intellectual richness
Creates an expansionary world-system
Summary: The Communist Manifesto
But, capitalism is prone to economic crises – over-production!
And, all its achievements rest on exploited human labor
Thus, capitalism is a new mode of class exploitation
True democracy requires equality and the abolition of class exploitation
Fortunately, capitalism creates the working-class, which is the majoritarian class and the historical agent of collective emancipation
Communist revolution is necessary because class war defines the economy, and the state is an institution of class rule
Summary: The Communist Manifesto
In short, in the Manifesto, Marx synthesizes a theory of capitalism as a mode of production based on class exploitation
Question: does Marx’s analysis of capitalism in the mid-1800s still have resonance today, in our world of globalization, rapid technological change, and growing social conflicts over inequality and wealth?
Classical Marxism
After Marx’s death, his intellectual and political followers – the Classical Marxists – developed his ideas (1880s-1920s)
Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Nikolai Bukharin, amongst others
They develop the Marxist theory of world politics and economics as a system of imperialism
Their theories of imperialism were designed to explain the world economic and political dynamics of their time – the emergence of giant monopoly corporations, the colonization of the Third World, and the drive to World War 1
Classical Marxism
In the lead up to WW1, two factions emerge – a reformist faction, and a revolutionary one…
Classical Marxism
Karl Kautsky led the Reformist wing of European Marxism
Leading theorist of the German Social Democratic Party
Editor of Neue Zeit
Like fellow German Marxist, Edward Bernstein, Kautsky argued that capitalism could be reformed gradually into socialism without the need for revolution
This becomes the political basis for social democracy or “Evolutionary Socialism”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm
Classical Marxism
Karl Kautsky
Extends social democracy to global politics and economics through his theory of ultra-imperialism
Capitalist globalization leads to economic integration between nations and renders war unprofitable and thus politically irrational for capitalist business
Dynamics of corporate concentration might extend across borders, creating transnational corporate entities with no interest in war between states
Economic integration can underpin international institutions, e.g. League of Nations
Capitalism creates a basis for world peace, which socialism will inherit without the need for revolution
Classical Marxism
Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Rosa Luxemburg criticize Kautsky from the standpoint of Revolutionary Marxism
They argue that Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism left the international working-class movement unprepared to oppose World War 1, as demonstrated by the German Social Democratic Party’s endorsement of the war
They also argue that, while an international combination of capitalist industry was a theoretical possibility, Marxists needed a theory of capitalism as it actually existed at the time – one that had already produced economic, political, and military rivalries and conflict
Classical Marxism
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
Leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, and political leader of the Russian Revolution (1917)
Head of Government of the Soviet Union from 1917-1924
In 1917, his revolutionary strategy rested, in part, on a unique Marxist theory of imperialism
Classical Marxism
Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
A new stage of capitalism, 1870-1914
Monopolization
Merger of banking and industrial capital creates finance capital
Stagnation results from monopoly, surplus profits created
Export of capital
Colonialism
Capitalism and Colonialism
Eric J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (NY: Vintage, 1989)
“The economic and military supremacy of the capitalist countries had long been beyond serious challenge, but no systematic attempt to translate it into formal conquest, annexation and administration had been made between the end of the eighteenth and the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1914 it was made, and most of the world outside Europe and the Americas was formally partitioned into territories under the formal rule or informal political domination of one or other of a handful of states: mainly Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA and Japan.”
Capitalism and Colonialism
Eric J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (NY: Vintage, 1989)
“This partition of the world among a handful of states, which gives the present volume its title, was the most spectacular expression of that growing division of the globe into the strong and the weak, the ‘advanced’ and the ‘backward’, which we have already noted. It was also strikingly new. Between 1876 and 1915 about one-quarter of the globe's land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among a half-dozen states. Britain increased its territories by some 4 million square miles, France by some 3.5 millions, Germany acquired more than 1 million, Belgium and Italy just under 1 million each. The USA acquired some 100,000, mainly from Spain, Japan something like the same amount from China, Russia and Korea. Portugal's ancient African colonies expanded by about 300,000 square miles; Spain, while a net loser (to the USA), still managed to pick up some stony territory in Morocco and the Western Sahara.”
Classical Marxism
Colonizing Africa
1884 Berlin Conference, divides territory among European colonial powers.
1870, only 10% of Africa colonized; 1914, 90%.
Belgium’s King Leopold II colonized Congo for ivory and rubber, killing 10 million through slavery and forced collection quotas
See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost
Classical Marxism
Lenin’s, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Imperialism wasn’t a policy of misguided governments, but a systemic reality of capitalism
In particular, it was an expression of economic competition between large-scale corporations from different nation-states
WW1 was a war between different blocs of national monopoly capital for control of world markets, and especially for control of colonies
England and France had colonized most of the world, but rising imperialist states, such as Germany, were denied global reach – hence the war between them.
Revolutionary socialists must turn the world war into class wars
Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
Made three contributions to the theory of imperialism
First, that capitalism must, because of crisis tendencies of over-production, constantly expand into non-capitalist spaces
Second, that ‘primitive accumulation’ (the dispossession of producers from the land and their owns means of subsistence) is a permanent dynamic of capital accumulation on a global scale
Third, that colonial violence and militarism are necessary tools of capital accumulation
Relatedly, military spending by the state becomes a field of accumulation for the arms industry
Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital.”
Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy”
Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day. From the point of view of the primitive societies involved, it is a matter of life or death; for them there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the finish—complete exhaustion and extinction. Hence permanent occupation of the colonies by the military, native risings and punitive expeditions are the order of the day for any colonial regime. The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation.”
Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“In addition, militarism has yet another important function. From the purely economic point of view, it is a pre-eminent means for the realisation of surplus value; it is in itself a province of accumulation.”
SUM: Marxism and Imperialism
The context of world politics is provided by processes of capital accumulation on a global scale
The competitive struggle between a plurality of centers of capital accumulation is a constitutive dimension of world politics
SUM: Marxism and Imperialism
Militarism and geopolitics are not autonomous from capitalism; they are political expressions of economic competition and class exploitation
The world system of capitalism – one of competition, war, inequality and exploitation – is one of imperialism
Peace between nations – and social security – requires anti-capitalist transformation globally
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