MARXISM

INTRODUCTION

This lecture would deal with Marxism. We would tracethe roots of Marxism
how it developed from a theory originallyforwarded by KarlMarx (1818-83) one
of the greatest intellectuals of thenineteenth century. Marxwas widely known as
a political activists and hisCommunist Manifesto was oneof the most widely
circulated politicalpamphlet known in history. Friedrich Engelsworked closely
with Karl Marx and contributed to the theories. Marxism as atheory was not
rooted in anyacademic discipline. It had developed as a theoryin practice for the
labourclass. Although it has dealt largely with thesociological, economical
andanthropological issues. It entered Anthropology very late as atheory.
Initially, it was conceived as a sociological theorybecause the concept ofclass
centralto it was seen as a character of urban and western societies
only.Anthropology was initially regarded as a subject dealing with
classlesssocietiesand therefore Marxism was not seen as relevant.

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM

In order to understand the Marxian ideology, we must first understand the

philosophy and theory postulated by Karl Marx. Thewritings of Karl Marx had
inspiration from Hegel’s work, whose dialecticalmethodology was used to
propagate the theory of social change by Marx. Thoughan inspiration yet,
Hegel came under the spanner of Marx’s criticisms, latter’s ideas were more
inclined as a social and political activist. Before we move into the depths of the
theory let’s have a quick understanding of Hegel’s dialectical ideology.

Hegel had the notion that thesis and antithesis leads to a synthesis, what in
otherwords is understood as the dialectical view of the world. In Hegel’s work,
humanmind is the Creator of the material world, but it gets alienated from it and
this mindand material duality is the thesis and antithesis that seeksresolution in
unity thatcan come only from the Spirit or when mindrecognises that matter is
its owncreation and ceases to be controlled by it. This leads to alienation,
wherein themind no longer recognises the matter as its own creation.

Marx’s general idea about society is known as his theory of historical

materialism.It is historical because Marx has traced the evolution of human
society from onestage to another. It is called materialistic because Marx has
interpreted the evolutionof society in terms of its material or economic bases.
Marx’s major contributionwas his view of society; unlike other intellectuals
he did not see society as anorganism but as a hierarchical structure. The earlier
view put forward by Hegel,was that ideas were the cause of change. He
supported it by saying “I think therefore I am.” On the contrary Marx said ‘I am
therefore I think.’
For Hegel, it was consciousness which determine our experiences. His was an
ideologicalapproach unlike Marx’s materialism. For Marx human being comes
first and thencomes the ideas. Marx said that the ideas were the result
ofobjective reality. Thushe argued ‘if we want to think we need to eat first’.

Marxism as a Theory

Marx’s theory basically deals with the contradictions found in the capitalist
societyof his time. He stated that the most crucial fact is the fact ofproduction. If
humanbeing has to live, it has to eat and thus, he argues the reason one
produces. He considered production as a social process. In this system of
production human beings enter into relations which are‘independent of their
will’. It means theserelations existed before theindividuals entered into the
relations and these wouldbe continued in the future unless they are changed.
Herein, let’s understand according to Marx what is the base of society and then
we would move on to howin this society class and conflict arises.

Historical materialism

In 1859, in the preface to his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy’, Marx wrote that the hypothesis that had served him as the basis for
his analysis of society could be briefly formulated as follows:

In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that
are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of
production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and
political superstructure, 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 intellectual processes of life. It is not the
consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary
their social existence which determines their consciousness.

Raised to the level of historical law, this hypothesis was subsequently called
historical materialism.Marx applied it to capitalist society, bothin‘The
Communist Manifesto’ (1948) and Das Kapital (1867) and in other writings.
Although Marx reflected upon his working hypothesis for many years, he did
not formulate it in a very exact manner: different expressions served him for
identical realities. If one takes the text literally, social reality is structured in the
following way:
1. Underlying everything as the real basis of society is the economic structure.
This structure includes (a) the “material forces of production,” that is, the labour
and means of production, and (b) the overall “relations of production,” or the
social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution.
Although Marx stated that there is a correspondence between the “material
forces” of production and the indispensable “relations” of production, he never
made himself clear on the nature of the correspondence, a fact that was to be the
source of differing interpretations among his later followers.

2. Above the economic structure rises the superstructure, consisting of legal and
political “forms of social consciousness” that correspond to the economic
structure. Marx says nothing about the nature of this correspondence between
ideological forms and economic structure, except that through the ideological
forms individuals become conscious of the conflict within the economic
structure between the material forces of production and the existing relations of
production expressed in the legal property relations. In other words, “The sum
total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of
society” and is at the base of society. “The social structure and the state issue
continually from the life processes of definite individuals . . . as they are in
reality, that is acting and materially producing.” The political relations that
individuals establish among themselves are dependent on material production,
as are the legal relations. This foundation of the social on the economic is not an
incidental point: it colours Marx’s whole analysis. It is found in Das Kapital as
well as in ‘The German Ideology’ (written 1845–46) and ‘The Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’.

Analysis of society

To go directly to the heart of the work of Marx, one must focus on his concrete
program for humanity. This is just as important for an understanding of Marx as
are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Marx’s interpretation of human
nature begins with human need. “Man,” he wrote in the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,

is first of all a natural being. As a natural being and a living natural being, he is
endowed on the one hand with natural powers, vital powers…; these powers
exist in him as aptitudes, instincts. On the other hand, as an objective, natural,
physical, sensitive being, he is a suffering, dependent and limited being…, that
is, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, independent of him, but are the
objects of his need, indispensable and essential for the realization and
confirmation of his substantial powers.
The point of departure of human history is therefore living human beings, who
seek to satisfy certain primary needs. “The first historical fact is the production
of the means to satisfy these needs.” This satisfaction, in turn, opens the way for
new needs. Human activity is thus essentially a struggle with nature that must
furnish the means of satisfying human needs: drink, food, clothing, the
development of human powers and then of human intellectual and artistic
abilities. In this undertaking, people discover themselves as productive beings
who humanize themselves through their labour. Furthermore, they humanize
nature while they naturalize themselves. By their creative activity, by their
labour, they realize their identity with the nature that they master, while at the
same time, they achieve free consciousness. Born of nature, they become fully
human by opposing it. Becoming aware in their struggle against nature of what
separates them from it, they find the conditions of their fulfilment, of the
realization of their true stature. The dawning of consciousness is inseparable
from struggle. By appropriating all the creative energies, they discover that “all
that is called history is nothing else than the process of creating man through
human labour, the becoming of nature for man. Man has thus evident and
irrefutable proof of his own creation by himself.” Understood in its universal
dimension, human activity reveals that “for man, man is the supreme being.” It
is thus vain to speak of God, creation, and metaphysical problems. Fully
naturalized, humans are sufficient unto themselves: they have recaptured the
fullness of humanity in its full liberty.

Living in a capitalist society, however, the individual is not truly free. He is an

alienated being; he is not at home in his world. The idea of alienation, which
Marx takes from Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, plays a fundamental role in the
whole of his written work, starting with the writings of his youth and continuing
through Das Kapital. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the
alienation of labour is seen to spring from the fact that the more the worker
produces the less he has to consume, and the more values he creates the more he
devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from him.
The life of the worker depends on things that he has created but that are not his,
so that, instead of finding his rightful existence through his labour, he loses it in
this world of things that are external to him: no work, no pay. Under these
conditions, labour denies the fullness of concrete humanity. “The generic being
of man, nature as well as his intellectual faculties, is transformed into a being
which is alien to him, into a means of his individual existence.” Nature, his
body, his spiritual essence become alien to him. “Man is made alien to man.”
When carried to its highest stage of development, private property becomes “the
product of alienated labour…the means by which labour alienates itself (and)
the realization of this alienation.” It is also at the same time “the tangible
material expression of alienated human life.”
Although there is no evidence that Marx ever disclaimed this anthropological
analysis of alienated labour, starting with The German Ideology, the historical,
social, and economic causes of the alienation of labour are given increasing
emphasis, especially in Das Kapital. Alienated labour is seen as the
consequence of market product, the division of labour, and the division of
society into antagonistic classes. As producers in society, workers create goods
only by their labour. These goods are exchangeable. Their value is the average
amount of social labour spent to produce them. The alienation of the worker
takes on its full dimension in that system of market production in which part of
the value of the goods produced by the worker is taken away from him and
transformed into surplus value, which the capitalist privately appropriates.
Market production also intensifies the alienation of labour by encouraging
specialization, piecework, and the setting up of large enterprises. Thus the
labour power of the worker is used along with that of others in a combination
whose significance he is ignorant of, both individually and socially. In thus
losing their quality as human products, the products of labour become fetishes,
that is, alien and oppressive realities to which both the individual who possesses
them privately and the individual who is deprived of them submit themselves.
In the market economy, this submission to things is obscured by the fact that the
exchange of goods is expressed in money.

This fundamental economic alienation is accompanied by secondary political

and ideological alienations, which offer a distorted representation of and an
illusory justification of a world in which the relations of individuals with one
another are also distorted. The ideas that people form are closely bound up with
their material activity and their material relations: “The act of making
representations, of thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, seem to be the
direct emanation of their material relations.” This is true of all human activity:
political, intellectual, or spiritual. “Men produce their representations and their
ideas, but it is as living men, men acting as they are determined by a definite
development of their powers of production.” Law, morality, metaphysics, and
religion do not have a history of their own. “Men developing their material
production modify together with their real existence their ways of thinking and
the products of their ways of thinking.” In other words, “It is not consciousness
which determines existence, it is existence which determines consciousness.”

In bourgeois, capitalist society the individual is divided into political citizen and
economic actor. This duality represents his political alienation, which is further
intensified by the functioning of the bourgeois state. From this study of society
at the beginning of the 19th century, Marx came to see the state as the
instrument through which the propertied class dominated other classes.
Ideological alienation, for Marx, takes different forms, appearing in economic,
philosophical, and legal theories. Marx undertook a lengthy critique of the first
in ‘Das Kapital’ and of the second in ‘The German Ideology’. But ideological
alienation expresses itself supremely in religion. Taking up the ideas about
religion that were current in left post-Hegelian circles, together with the thought
of Feuerbach, Marx considered religion to be a product of human
consciousness. It is a reflection of the situation of a person who “either has not
conquered himself or has already lost himself again” (the individual in the
world of private property). It is “an opium for the people.” Unlike Feuerbach,
Marx believed that religion would disappear only with changes in society.

Analysis of the economy

Marx analyzed the market economy system in Das Kapital. In this work he
borrows most of the categories of the classical English economists Smith and
Ricardo but adapts them and introduces new concepts such as that of surplus
value. One of the distinguishing marks of Das Kapital is that in it Marx studies
the economy as a whole and not in one or another of its aspects. His analysis is
based on the idea that humans are productive beings and that all economic value
comes from human labour. The system he analyzes is principally that of mid-
19th-century England. It is a system of private enterprise and competition that
arose in the 16th century from the development of sea routes, international
trade, and colonialism. Its rise had been facilitated by changes in the forces of
production (the division of labour and the concentration of workshops), the
adoption of mechanization, and technical progress. The wealth of the societies
that brought this economy into play had been acquired through an “enormous
accumulation of commodities.” Marx therefore begins with the study of this
accumulation, analyzing the unequal exchanges that take place in the market.

According to Marx, if the capitalist advances funds to buy cotton yarn with
which to produce fabrics and sells the product for a larger sum than he paid, he
is able to invest the difference in additional production. “Not only is the value
advance kept in circulation, but it changes in its magnitude, adds a plus to itself,
makes itself worth more, and it is this movement that transforms it into capital.”
The transformation, to Marx, is possible only because the capitalist has
appropriated the means of production, including the labour power of the worker.
Now labour power produces more than it is worth. The value of labour power is
determined by the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction or, in other
words, by the amount needed for the worker to subsist and beget children. But
in the hands of the capitalist the labour power employed in the course of a day
produces more than the value of the sustenance required by the worker and his
family. The difference between the two values is appropriated by the capitalist,
and it corresponds exactly to the surplus value realized by capitalists in the
market. Marx is not concerned with whether in capitalist society there are
sources of surplus value other than the exploitation of human labour—a fact
pointed out by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(1942). He remains content with emphasizing this primary source:

Surplus value is produced by the employment of labour power. Capital buys the
labour power and pays the wages for it. By means of his work the labourer
creates new value which does not belong to him, but to the capitalist. He must
work a certain time merely in order to reproduce the equivalent value of his
wages. But when this equivalent value has been returned, he does not cease
work, but continues to do so for some further hours. The new value which he
produces during this extra time, and which exceeds in consequence the amount
of his wage, constitutes surplus value.

Throughout his analysis, Marx argues that the development of capitalism is

accompanied by increasing contradictions. For example, the introduction of
machinery is profitable to the individual capitalist because it enables him to
produce more goods at a lower cost, but new techniques are soon taken up by
his competitors. The outlay for machinery grows faster than the outlay for
wages. Since only labour can produce the surplus value from which profit is
derived, this means that the capitalist’s rate of profit on his total outlay tends to
decline. Along with the declining rate of profit goes an increase in
unemployment. Thus, the equilibrium of the system is precarious, subject as it is
to the internal pressures resulting from its own development. Crises shake it at
regular intervals, preludes to the general crisis that will sweep it away. This
instability is increased by the formation of a reserve army of workers, both
factory workers and peasants, whose pauperization keeps increasing. “Capitalist
production develops the technique and the combination of the process of social
production only by exhausting at the same time the two sources from which all
wealth springs: the earth and the worker.” According to the Marxist dialectic,
these fundamental contradictions can only be resolved by a change from
capitalism to a new system.

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

Like any other theory, Marxism has also certain criticism.The basic points are -

1) Marx’s theory overtly concentrated on ‘economic relationships’ leading to

anumber of criticisms:

a) Marxism over-emphasise the importance of economic relationships

andsuggests that this economic relationships determine all other
relationships.(family, education, friendship, religious and so forth).
b) Marxists tend to overlook other forms of (non-economic) conflict or tries to
explain these conflicts as ultimately having economic roots. Radicalfeminists,
for example, argue that the roots of male - female conflict are not simply
economic (to do with social class) butpatriarchal. Marxism – both old and
modern - has ignored the role and position of women in society.

2) The subjective interpretations of individuals are under-emphasised when

lookingat the way in which people see and act in the social world. A person’s
subjective interpretation of their class, for example, might be quite different to
their objective class position.

3) Capitalism, as an economic and political system, has proven to be more

durable and flexible than Marx maintained. In modern social systems, for
example, the advent of Communism does not appear imminent.

Concluding Remarks -

In this lecture, you have been acquainted with the basic tenets of Marxism. The
concept of materialism derived from Marxists thoughts have given impetus to
many of theanthropological works and also in many areas of intellectual
thinking. The focuson history and consideration of social change as inherent
aspect of society, recognition of exploitation, conflict and protest, the
assessment of role governanceand economy have all lent a rich nuanced depth
to anthropological writings in thepresent century.

Karl Marx's analysis of economy and society has had a major influence on
modern economic and social thought. His theories of class struggle, alienation,
and economic exploitation, as well as his ideas about the role of the state and
how to bring about a more equitable society, have been widely discussed and
debated. Marx's ideas have been adopted and adapted by various movements,
including socialism, anarchism and communism. While there is still much
debate over the relevance of Marx's theories today, his impact on modern
economics and social thought is undeniable.