25 Key Points about Marxism
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1. The most important features of a society are its economic classes and their
relations to each other in
the modes of production of each historical epoch.
2. A class is defined by the relations of its members to the means of production.
3. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production, the proletariat
own only their capacity
to work. Landlords rule the land, and the peasants are less significant than
workers and are trapped in
the idiocy of rural life. The proletariat definitely includes those who produce
objects in factories with
their hands, but Marxists dither about whether it includes people who work with
their minds but are
employees and live by their salaries.
4. History is the history of class struggles among the classes in society. New
progressive classes arise
that are related to new forms of production and struggle with the old. New forms
of society arise
appropriate to the new forms of production when the new classes win power. This
doctrine is called
historical materialism.
5. The state is the means whereby the ruling class forcibly maintains its rule
over the other classes.
6. The successive stages of history include primitive communism characterized
by equalitarian hunting
and gathering, barbarism characterized by rule by chiefs, slave society with
a slave class and
agriculture, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism.
7. Most struggles in history are class struggles, even though the participants
profess other goals. For
example, protestantism reflects the rising capitalist class.
8. New classes usually win power by revolution. Revolutions are violent, because
the dying ruling class
doesn't give up power without a desperate struggle. As Marxists say about Revolution:
Socialism cannot come into existence
without revolution. For the birth of
socialism to take place the old order must
die. This requires, according to Marx, the
overthrow of the existing ruling power,
which he defines as revolution.
9. The capitalist class wins power over the feudal class by a bourgeois democratic
revolution. A
bourgeois democratic revolution is a good thing in its day, because it gets
rid of feudal personal relations
and replaces them by a cash nexus.
NOTE: This had already happened in Tokugawa Japan. What historians like
E.H. Norman, hold, then, is that the Meiji Restoration was
an incomplete revolution--"a political revolution carried out from
above which was not permitted to become a social revolution--and this in
turn rests on the thesis that in the decades following 1868, the symbolic
feudal-merchant alliance was consolidated into a ruling-class front whcih
at a certain point deliberately abandoned the attack on feudalism in order
to check the possibility of continuing revolution from below.
The revolution was incomplete because of a feudal-merchant
alliance. As Dower paraphrases Norman's ideas:
The development of a money economy eroded the traditional
social structure--first by creating a rich merchant and a new landlord-usurer
class whose de-facto power belied its de-jure status at the
bottom of the Confucian class hierarchy; secondly by forcing han
governments into the new economy through involvement in national money transactions(particularly
in the conversion of rice) and the development of han monopolies;
and thirdly, by forging a mutual interdependence between these two classes
through this very mechanism of nascent capitalism, a relationship in which
the the economic power of the merchant-landlord group and the political
prestige and experience of representatives of the feudal class complemented
and reinforced one another.
From John W. Dower, ed., Origins of the Modern State:
Selected Writings of E.H. Norman,pp. 18-20
10. Capitalism creates the proletariat who have nothing to sell but their labor
by bankrupting the artisan
classes and the petty bourgeoisie and driving them into the proletariat.
11. The proletariat wins power by a proletarian revolution. According to Marx
and Lenin, this revolution
must be violent, because the bourgeoisie won't give up power by electoral means.
12. Neither Russia nor China had undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution
when the communists seized power. The communists undertook to build socialism anyway, and some of their
rival socialists used the missing bourgeois-democratic revolution to predict that communist power would
end badly.
13. Around the end of the 19th century Edouard Bernstein argued that it was possible
to win power peacefully by winning elections. This was revisionism and the orthodox
Marxist have used revisionism as an epithet ever since. "Revisionism" came to have more general meanings
than Bernstein's actual doctrine, because it could be applied to people who denied Bernstein's doctrine but who
could be accused of not being revolutionary enough.
14. Under capitalism the progressive class is the proletariat which is destined
to overthrow capitalism and
establish socialism, which will eventually evolve into communism.
15. Historical materialism is the Marxist methodology for interpreting history.
The idea is to interpret all
relations between groups of people as class relations and to interpret all conflicts
as reflections of
class struggles. A specific sequence of historical stages is part of the doctrine.
It is (primitive
communism, barbarism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism socialism, communism).
Each stage of
history has its own ruling class which uses the state to maintain its rule.
Under feudalism the ruling
class is the nobility, under capitalism it is the capitalists, and under socialism
it is the proletariat.
Primitive communism and communism are classless. In some countries oriental
despotism happens as a
stage distinct from feudalism.
For another take on Historical Materialism, see Johanna Smith's remarks:
The theory goes like this: as a society's forces of production grow
and develop, they clash with existing relations of production which
they have outgrown; what follows is social revolution, as people
become "conscious of this conflict and fight it out" (Marx); the
result
is new and higher or more developed relations of production which
better accommodate the forces of production. Eg: growing forces of
production in feudalism outgrew feudal relations of production (the
landlord-vassal relation); various crises occurred (peasant and
merchant resistance to taxation) with the result that relations of
production became more $- than land-based.
16.The main feature of socialism is public ownership of the means of production,
distribution and
exchange.
17.Under capitalism, workers "tend" to be paid the bare amount required
for them to support their families and reproduce. This is because of competition for jobs from the reserve army
of labor, i.e. the unemployed.
18.The capitalist sells the product of the workers' labor at a price proportional
to its value, which is the socially necessary labor required to produce it.
19.The difference between what the product sells for and what the workers are
paid is surplus value and is appropriated by the capitalist.
20.Because the workers can't buy the full product of their labor and the capitalists
don't consume all the surplus value, there tend to be recessions.
21.The steady increase in labor saving machinery creates unemployment and drives
down wages. This emphasizes the tendency for there to be economic recessions.
22.The tendency to pay the workers bare survival wages leads to the increasing
immiseration of the proletariat.
23.The other classes, e.g. artisans and petty bourgeoisie, e.g. small shopkeepers,
go broke and are driven into the proletariat. Even the smaller capitalists go broke.
24.Then a socialist revolution occurs. Originally this was supposed to occur
first in the most advanced capitalist countries, e.g. Germany, Britain and the United States. It wasn't
supposed to occur first in a backward country like Russia, where a bourgeois-democratic revolution should
have happened first.
25.In the first stages of socialism the state is a dictatorship of the proletariat.,
i.e the proletariat rules the other classes by force.
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The fundamental principle of Marx and Engels' thought is thus that economic
conditions determine all social arrangements, human relationships, thought,
and values. In Marxist terminology, the economic substructure determines the
culturalìsuperstructure. Consider two propositions:
1. The so-called "free market"
2. The so-called "law"of supply and demand
Marxists say these notions, masquerading as "science," are simply
myths that serve the interests of capitalism. Obviously (to Marxists) the capitalists
control both the market (i.e., no way is it free), and also both supply and
demand (i.e., there is no neutral "law"of supply and demand). Capitalists
clearly control supply; but they also control demand by their control of media,
which they use to manipulate peopleís perceptions of their "needs."
That is, capitalists make people think they need things that they really don't
need. Then, having created "demand," capitalists can raise prices
(leaving workers' wages the same), and make more and more profits. Thus, says
Marx, the condition of the worker inevitably gets worse and worse. The more
he produces, the less he can buy.
Marx says this situation is inherently unstable, because workers will inevitably
get more and more miserable, and the economic and social gap between workers
and capitalists will grow wider and wider. The workers will eventually revolt
and seize ownership of the means of production. This is why Marx says capitalism
ìcontains the seeds of its own destruction.
Taken from Sandra LaFave's "Marxism and its Critique of Consumer Culture,"
which you can find at:
And what discussionof Marxist critiques of consumer culture would be complete
without a reference to the Simpsons. See the article on "The Simpsons as
a Critque of Consumer Culture" http://www.snpp.com/other/papers/st.paper.html