What Is Marxism? Basics of Marxist Thought
What is Marxism? I’ve had to answer this question numerous times, and each time it gets more complicated than the last, but here, I’m going to try explaining it in some simpler terms. I’m going to spare you all the complicated jargon and give a shorter answer than I’m used to. First, we need to ask ourselves one question: What does communism mean?
Society
According to Karl Marx, communism is the final stage of a society based upon economic classes. It ends in the dissolution of two important concepts: the state (or government in general) and private property. Private property is something that you use in order to create something else, that is to create a commodity that is sold on a market. So private property may be a printing press, the building where you print the item, and the ink with which you print the text. Personal property, on the other hand, is that which you use as an object of utility. In other words, you don’t sell the products of the personal property.
Communism is a political state brought on by economic conditions. To quote the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict” [1]. In other words, all societies are the result of conflicting economic interests; in the capitalist society, this is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the people who own private property for the creation of profit, and those who create profit using that private property. According to Marx, the proletariat (the workers) are alienated from the products of their labor (they do not own what they create), and subsequently, there is a disconnect between the value of the labor of the proletariat and the value of what they produce. Marx calls this “surplus value,” and this is a primary contradiction of a capitalist mode of production (a mode of production is the way in which a society produces things). This is not the only contradiction of a capitalist mode of production, but it is the most significant, according to Marx.
All modes of production, according to Marx, are made up of contradictory class relations until the establishment of capitalism. These class conflicts lead to revolution and overthrow of the outdated modes of production, such as the destruction of slavery and feudalism. However, in some cases Marx states that there cannot be such a clean cut between these different ways of producing commodities; he described how the capitalist economy in ways necessitated the institution of forced labor and servitude.
Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns, as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. [2]
He further goes to state:
Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. [2]
This means that societies which are based on a capitalist method of production may contain other modes of production, meaning that there are several class conflicts in one society. This is how societies are organized. One set of class interests conflicts with another because of how the organized society developed historically, and these conflicts are the driving force of history.
Groundwork
Alright, now we get into the nitty-gritty of the philosophy of Marx. It’s called Dialectical Materialism. What is that? Let’s turn to Marx’s criticisms of previous materialism.
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. [3]
What does that mean? Materialism should be based on how humans act, not on weird fuzzy concepts like “objective reality” which have to be defined over and over again by tired philosophers. We’re more interested in how humans act within their own society, how they behave and how this plays into the society they live in. So what do we mean when we say “sensuous human activity?”
When we talk of human activity, we are talking about human behaviors that result in production. This is the most basic of all activity; to survive. All production was at first geared towards the production of food, water, and other necessities. Then society organizes a particular division of labor, which then intertwines with the production of necessities, and leads to a mechanism of exchange. At the most basic level, the place of the person in this production is their most basic role in society.
What is a person? This question is pretty important. A person is not a separate thing from their society. They could not exist without some form of social organization. So there is nothing to consider outside of the social relations in which that person engages; they have no substance but their social relations. This means that all their activities are related to the social relations of labor in the society they live in. Of course this is a simplification, but I have discussed the concept elsewhere in more detail.
Meaning
What does Marxism mean? It means that all the world is constantly in a state of violent change. And its goal as a philosophy is to direct that change. Marx very much acknowledges this. He writes:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. [3]
What is the point of a philosophy that advocates nothing? Explaining the world is meaningless if you choose to do nothing with that understanding you have. So Marxism is by its very nature, a political and economic philosophy. We seek to understand the economic structure (or class structures) of society and in doing so to change that very structure.
The Marxist attempts to move society through exploiting their contradictions, and by exploiting those contradictions, to resolve them. According to Dialectical Materialism, the eventual resolution of contradictions is inevitable. It requires the agitation of the oppressed class, an activity which is made necessary by the conditions under which they exist in their specific mode of production.
A Marxist does not seek justice per se, although this justice will come through the resolution of the contradictions of society. Rather, they seek to resolve the contradictions and thereby to move society past the contradictions that have caused injustice, alienation, and strife.
I hope that this has explained some of the finer points of Marxism as an introduction to Marxist philosophy. There are other works by Lenin, Engels, and other Marxist philosophers that we might quote, but these are the basic concepts they will be discussing as well. I have attached a list for further reading, many books that discuss more current streams of Marxist thought and strands that I’ve applied in other essays.
[1] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, via marxists.org.
[2] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, via marxists.org (the section entitled “Fourth Observation”).
[3] Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” via marxists.org.
Further Reading
Hartsock, Nancy. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, and Other Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Elecbooks, 1999.
Marx, Karl. Capital, volumes I, II, & III. Attainable via marxists.org (vol I, vol II, & vol III).
Mao Zedong. On Practice and Contradiction. New York: Verso Books, 2017.
Lenin, Vladimir. What Is to Be Done? via marxists.org.
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, via marxists.org.
