Response Hum-07

As I read Marx’s ideology, it came down to one statement to offer a clear overview of society, class, and power, “In one word, it creates a world after its own image” (Marx and Engels).  Man, wants a society in his own image and that image consists of self-interest and economic gains in some form.

Man, wants a society that functions based on his image or what he envisions.   Karl Marx appeared to have his own self-interest in mind, not society’s.   As Marx points out, there must be a classless society to function properly.  Marx’s theories in regards to classless societies or a form of communism is never classless.   There is always a class tier within a society.  You will always have a law maker and workers.  Karl Marx and Engels note, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation” (Marx and Engels).  In a classless society, everyone is doing the same job, no one is better, including the government which controls the people.  The government or upper class have different choices while the lower class are given limited resources on the same level.  You will have someone in power, and those that are not in power.

Additionally, Karl Marx takes a position on economics or the financial gain of a society.   In other words, capitalism is attacked.   He implies power rest among the wage-labours.   There is no need for capitalism but no society is going to cut off the hand that feeds them.  Wage-labour keeps the economy running, to do so, competition is necessary.

“The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour.  Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.  The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their 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 is its own grave-diggers.  Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx and Engels).

Once you have competition, capitalism creates exploiters and those that are exploited due to wage-labour.  In other words, Karl Marx thinks capitalism as exploiters versus the exploited for example he says, “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.  These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market” (Marx and Engels).   When he references exploitation, I tend to think of the Industrial Revolution.   You had factory workers working 15 hours a day in poor working conditions, without breaks.  To survive, wage-labours had to work long hours, produce products.  If they were no longer able to produce, they were fired, and replaced within hours with men or women that would produce.

Marx’s ideologies are given weight and consideration because Marx wanted to change society and capitalistic views.  He offered solutions that could be applied.  I think of Lenin who tried to do this with the Bolsheviks’.   However, in the end there was no classless society because you had Lenin and his people with power and the people that worked for the class without power.  

In the end, with consideration from Karl Marx, which social group will accept the costs of economic restructuring without capitalism and prosperity due to self-interest; everything Karl Marx was against?

Works Cited

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. The Project Gutenberg, 2005 (EBook #61). 2017. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html>

Response Two HUM-07

I feel as if I am still crawling out from under a rock and was never well educated in what Communism really was. The vision that remains with me is something I learned in my childhood. When the Moscow Ballet came to town my mother explained to me that in Communist countries, governments forced people to do what they wanted them to do and told them what jobs they should perform. When one had a body the government felt would make a good ballerina, one became a ballerina. After the Moscow Ballet’s performance, someone defected. The ballet company did not return home with every single one of its members. I remember thinking, why would anyone be forced to do something he/she did not love and choose for him/herself? I was happy for the person who got away and found solace in our country. Communism appeared to be a strange concept in my young mind. I grew up during the Cold War. I did not pay much attention to it. As I grew older, all I thought I knew about the Communist Manifesto was that it was to be avoided at all costs and that Karl Marx was a very bad man.

Fast forward to the present time and I am enrolled in a class in which the Communist Manifesto is required reading. I have come far! (I would like to also read Das Kapitale but my online search has not yet produced a version in English.)

 Throughout what I have read, Marx seemed to be saying, “I don’t like the bourgeoisie! The bourgeoisie do this! The bourgeoisie get away with that! Down with the bourgeoisie!”

Marx offered this picture of the plight of the proletariat: “The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.” The thought that came to my mind was: They go “postal!”

I do understand what Marx envisioned for society. He focused on the flaws contained in capitalist societies and truly felt he held the solution. Initially, Communist principals look good on paper, but they never work. Communist governments control the people. No human soul thrives under that kind of control. I believe Marx is lauded, because his visions bring to my mind labor unions. Protection for the proletariat is necessary. Marx’s Communist Manifesto is nothing to be brushed aside. His intellect is worthy of validation. He makes profound statements that provoke deep thought. When I read “the charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination,” I stopped to consider what religionists and philosophers may have thought about Karl Marx. Religionists can be close-minded and bigoted and often hold a biased agenda. It would be fascinating to listen to an open debate between a communist and an orthodox Christian, Jew, or Muslim. I imagine there would be no middle ground discovered between a Communist and one from a monotheistic religion.

           Another statement intrigued me. “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 in his social life?” Changes in one person can affect another profoundly in certain given circumstances. As I pondered this, I envisioned, again, someone snapping and going “postal.” From this I gather Marx felt all the changes he mentioned should be kept within the reigns of a communist society so that no one would rise up against another. Everyone must know his/her place. Is Communism intended to control human nature? Are we creatures that require containment within a society that will keep us in line and assure our welfare so that we will not go “postal?”

One more statement that caught my attention: “When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.” A whole paper could be written around these thoughts! What do you think of this? I will return to it if anyone cares to comment on it.

Response Three HUM-07

The mere mention of the name Karl Marx is frequently enough to illicit strong reactions, both favorable and unfavorable. Undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers in all of history, Marx’ incisive critique of capitalism, and his clarion call for a proletariat revolution, remain as relevant and controversial today as they did in his own time. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s powerful and provocative Communist Manifesto—essentially the ‘mission statement’ of Communism—famously advances the materialist theory of history in which the development of all societies is characterized as the continual opposition of classes, typically, the ruling classes and the oppressed classes. Marx and Engels see contemporary capitalist and bourgeois society as having emerged out of the class struggle, and eventual dissolution, of the feudal society that preceded it. The onset of bourgeois society, say Marx and Engels, established a new, and in many ways more vicious, class antagonism—that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Marx and Engels, the industrial modes of production, and the capitalists who own and control those modes, necessarily exploit the laborers which they employ by reserving, for the bourgeoisie, the lion’s share of the wealth and capital generated by the products of those laborers. Moreover, in their unceasing and rapacious pursuit of wealth, capitalists and industrialists are compelled to expand the sphere of their operation and influence. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe” says Marx, “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (476). The result of the expansion of this sphere is a concomitant increase in the exploitation of labor, and even the exploitation of entire societies, under the pretense of ‘modernization’. Marx explains that the bourgeoisie “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves” (477). According to Marx and Engel, one of the most pernicious aspects of bourgeois society is that it imagines that its conceptions of ideas such as ‘freedom, culture, law, etc.” are somehow universal and/or neutral, rather than products of the economic conditions in which they have emerged. Marx and Engel remind the bourgeoisie that “The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you” (487). For Marx and Engel, it is the history of material production that shapes the history of ideas, not vice versa. Therefore, whatever mode of production dominates in any given historical period determines that period’s conception of ideas such as freedom, culture, etc. However, in the endless expansion and rapaciousness of bourgeois and capitalist society, Marx and Engels also see the seeds of its own destruction. The concentration of wealth in to fewer and fewer hands, and the increase in the number of exploited laborers sets the stage for the eventual overthrow, violent overthrow if necessary, of the former by the latter. Marx and Engel say “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” (478). For Marx and Engel, the victory of the proletariat is inevitable, it is nothing less than the natural outcome of the rise of capitalist and bourgeois society. Marx and Engel imagine that the victory of the proletariat will eventually result in a classless society, a society that is free of the antagonisms that plagued previous societies.

Like so many philosophers, Marx' philosophical project involves two movements, so to speak. The first movement is a critique of what already exists, in this case classical economics and capitalism á la Adam Smith, and the second movement is the advancement of something intended to take its place, in this case communism. In my personal opinion, the more important and more enduring contribution of Marx’ philosophy is the first movement. Marx’ explication of the inherent inequalities, tenuous assumptions, and exploitive tendencies of capitalist modes of production remain a crucial and necessary rejoinder to the overzealous acolytes and apologists of capitalism. Not only is Marx’ critique still valid in the present day, but the charges he levies against capitalism remain largely unreconciled. There is still no definitive response to what Marx sees as the mysterious ontology of value in capitalism—that which Marx describes as ‘commodity fetishism’. Marx’ critique also correctly predicts the kind of exploitation of labor in ‘third world’ countries we see today by multi-national corporations, as well as the anti-democratic influence of globalism, and the gradual concentration of more and more wealth in to fewer and fewer hands. 

Comments ( one page) add 5

Looking at his theories from the 21st century, which ones still hold true and which ones may be obsolete?