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Political Science

The document discusses the life and works of Karl Marx and provides an overview of Marxism. It describes Marx's early life, influential works, and key ideas around historical materialism and class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The document also outlines Marxian economics and Marx's theories of how class conflict would lead to the demise of capitalism and a worker revolution.

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29 views

Political Science

The document discusses the life and works of Karl Marx and provides an overview of Marxism. It describes Marx's early life, influential works, and key ideas around historical materialism and class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The document also outlines Marxian economics and Marx's theories of how class conflict would lead to the demise of capitalism and a worker revolution.

Uploaded by

talk2shivamthakur
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Subject : Political Science II

State Concepts and Processes

Karl Marx and Marxism

SUBMITTED TO SUBMITTED BY
Dr. Bhanu Pratap Singh Shivam - 2351110035
Assistant professor Vishal - 2351110048
ILSR, GLAU B.A. LLB
Karl Marx: Early Life and His Books
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher,
economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist,
journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-
known works are the 1848 pamphlet The
Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and
the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the
latter employs his critical approach of historical
materialism in an analysis of capitalism and is the
culmination of his intellectual efforts. Marx's ideas
and theories and their subsequent development,
collectively known as Marxism, have exerted
enormous influence on modern intellectual,
economic and political history.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx
studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin,
and Jena, and received a doctorate in philosophy
from the latter in 1841. While in Paris in 1844,
Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts and met Engels, a lifelong friend and
collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845,
they were active in the Communist League, and in
1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, which
expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme
for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium
and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London,
where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital.
Marx's critiques of history, society and political
economy hold that human societies develop
through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of
production, this manifests itself in the conflict
between the ruling classes (known as
the bourgeoisie) that control the means of
production and the working classes (known as
the proletariat) that enable these means by selling
their labour power in return for wages.
Marx has been described as one of the most
influential figures in human history, and his work
has been both lauded and criticised. Marxism has
exerted major influence on socialist thought and
political movements, and during the 20th century
revolutionary governments identifying as Marxist
took power in many countries and
established socialist states including the Soviet
Union and the People's Republic of China.

What is Marxism?
Marxism is a social, political, and economic
philosophy named after the 19th-century German
philosopher and economist Karl Marx. His work
examines the historical effects of capitalism on
labor, productivity, and economic development,
and argues that a worker revolution is needed to
replace capitalism with a communist system.
Marxism posits that the struggle between social
classes—specifically between the bourgeoisie, or
capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers—
defines economic relations in a capitalist economy
and will lead inevitably to a communist revolution.
Generally, Marxism argues that capitalism as a
form of economic and social reproduction is
inherently flawed and will ultimately fail.
Capitalism is defined as a mode of production in
which business owners (the capitalists) own all of
the means of production (the factory, the tools and
machinery, the raw materials, the final product,
and the profits earned from their sale). Workers
(labor) are hired for wages and have no ownership
stake and no share in the profits.

Marxian Economics
Like other classical economists, Karl Marx
believed in a labor theory of value (LTV) to explain
relative differences in market prices. This theory
stated that the value of a product can be
measured objectively by the average number of
hours of labor required to produce it. In other
words, if a table takes twice as long to make as a
chair, then the table should be considered twice
as valuable. What Marx added to this theory was
the conclusion that this labor value represented
the exploitation of workers.

Class Conflict and the Demise of


Capitalism
According to Marx, every society is divided into
social classes, whose members have more in
common with one another than with members of
other social classes.
The following are some key elements of Marx’s
theories of how class conflict would play out in a
capitalist system:
1.Capitalist society is made up of two classes:
the bourgeoisie, or business owners, who
control the means of production, and
the proletariat, or workers, whose labor
transforms raw commodities into goods that
have market value.
2.Ordinary laborers, who do not own the means
of production, such as factories, buildings, and
materials, have little power in the capitalist
economic system. Workers are also readily
replaceable in periods of high unemployment,
further devaluing their perceived worth.
3.To maximize profits, business owners have to
get the most possible work out of their
laborers while paying them the lowest possible
wages. This creates an imbalance between
owners and laborers, whose work is exploited
by the owners for their own gain.
4.Since workers have little personal stake in the
process of production, Marx believed they
would become alienated from their work, and
even from their own humanity, and turn
resentful toward business owners.
5.The bourgeoisie are able to leverage social
institutions, including government, media,
academia, organized religion, and the banking
and financial systems, as tools and weapons
against the proletariat with the goal of
maintaining their positions of power and
privilege.
6.Ultimately, the inherent inequalities and
exploitative economic relations between these
two classes will lead to a revolution in which
the working class rebels against the
bourgeoisie, takes control of the means of
production, and abolishes capitalism.
Thus, Marx thought that the capitalist system
contained the seeds of its own destruction. The
alienation and exploitation of the proletariat that
are fundamental to capitalist relations would
inevitably drive the working class to rebel against
the bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of
production.
This revolution would be led by enlightened
leaders, known as “the vanguard of the
proletariat,” who understood the class structure of
society and would unite the working class by
raising awareness and class consciousness.
After the revolution, Marx predicted, private
ownership of the means of production would be
replaced by collective ownership, first
under socialism and then under communism.
In the final stage of human development, social
classes and class struggle would no longer exist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. https://
www.investopedia.com/
terms/k/karl-marx.asp
2. https://www.britannica.com/
topic/Marxism
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Marxism

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