Overview
Marxism seeks to explain social phenomena within any precondition society by analyzing the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing conditions and economic activities call to fulfill human fabric needs. It assumes that the pull in of economic organization, or mode of production, influences all other social phenomena including wider social relations, political institutions, legal systems, cultural systems, aesthetics and ideologies. These social relations, together with the economic system, pretend a base and superstructure. As forces of production i.e. technology improve, existing forms of organizing production become obsolete and hinder further progress. Karl Marx wrote: "At astage of development, the material productive forces of society come into clash with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the service example of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations reorganize into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."
These inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society which are, in turn, fought out at the level of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materializes between the minority who own the means of production the bourgeoisie and the vast majority of the population who produce goods and services the proletariat. Starting with the conjectural premise that social change occurs as result of the struggle between different classes within society who contradict one another, a Marxist would conclude that capitalism exploits and oppresses the proletariat, therefore capitalism will inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution. In a socialist society, private property—as the means of production—would be replaced by co-operative ownership. A socialist economy would non base production on the creation of private profits, but on the criteria of satisfying human needs—that is, production for use. Friedrich Engels explained that "the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves number one the producer, and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the variety of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and segment of reference of production—on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment."
Marxian economics and its proponents view capitalism as economically unsustainable and incapable of modernizing the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rate of profit by cutting employees' wages and social benefits while pursuing military aggression. The socialist mode of production would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through revolution by workers. According to Marxian crisis theory, socialism is not an inevitability but an economic necessity.
The term Marxism was popularized by Karl Kautsky, who considered himself an orthodox Marxist during the dispute between the orthodox and revisionist followers of Marx. Kautsky's revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein also later adopted use of the term.
Engels did not guide the ownership of the term Marxism to describe either Marx's or his own views. He claimed that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as real followers of Marx while casting others in different terms such(a) as Lassallians. In 1882, Engels claimed that Marx had criticized self-proclaimed Marxist Paul Lafargue by saying that if Lafargue's views were considered Marxist, then "one thing isand that is that I am not a Marxist."
The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or rather, the consistent continuation and constituent of quotation of materialism into the domain of social phenomenon, removed two chief defects of earlier historical theories. In the first place, they at best examined only the ideological motives of the historical activity of human beings, without grasping the objective laws governing the developing of the system of social relations. ... in theplace, the earlier theories did not progress the activities of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism presented it possible for the first time to analyse with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses and the reshape in these conditions.
— Russian Marxist theoretician and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, 1913
Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the a thing that is said of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
Marxism uses a materialist methodology, talked to by Marx and Engels as the materialist conception of history and later better known as historical materialism, to examine the underlying causes of societal development and modify from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living. Marx's account of the theory is in The German Ideology 1845 and in the preface A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859. all constituent atttributes of a society social classes, political pyramid and ideologies are assumed to stem from economic activity, forming what is considered as the base and superstructure. The base and superstructure metaphor describes the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, the "sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the precondition of society" and forms a society's economic base.
The base includes the material forces of production such(a) as the labour, means of production and relations of production, i.e. the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions, whereby changes to the economic base leads to the social transformation of the superstructure.
This relationship is Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production:
While historical materialism has been identified to as a materialist theory of history, Marx did not claim to have submission a master-key to history and that the materialist conception of history is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the , imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself." In a letter to editor of the Russian newspaper paper 1877, he explained that his ideas are based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe.
According to the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary socialist Vladimir Lenin, "the principal content of Marxism" was "Marx's economic doctrine." Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that "the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are ... one and the same." He believed that they did this by purporting the concept that "the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
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Alienation German: Entfremdung is the estrangement of people from their humanity, and a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and so generate alienated labourers. In Marx's view, alienation is an objective characterization of the worker's situation in capitalism—his or her self-awareness of this condition is not prerequisite.
Marx distinguishes social classes on the basis of two criteria, i.e. ownership of means of production and authority over the labour power of others. following this criterion of class based on property relations, Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of production with the coming after or as a result of. social groups:
Class consciousness denotes the awareness—of itself and the social world—that a social class possesses as living as its capacity to rationally act in their best interests. Class consciousness is required before a social class can effect a successful revolution and thus the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Without setting ideology, Marx used the term to describe the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, "ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, this is the true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him move unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces."
Because the ruling class dominance the society's means of production, the superstructure of society i.e. the ruling social ideas, are determined by the best interests of the ruling class. In ]
Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn't even know where north or south is. if you don't eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is shared between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you're lost in a forest, not knowing anything.
— Cuban revolutionary and Marxist–Leninist politician Fidel Castro on discovering Marxism, 2009
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Marx saw work, the attempt by humans to transform the environment for their needs, as a fundamental feature of human kind. ]
Through common ownership of the means of production, the profit motive is eliminated and the motive of furthering human flourishing is introduced. Because the surplus produced by the workers is the property of the society as a whole, there are no classes of producers and appropriators. Additionally, as the state has its origins in the bands of retainers hired by the first ruling classes to protect their economic privilege, it will wither away as its conditions of existence have disappeared.
According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, "Marx used numerous terms to refer to a post-capitalist society—positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free connective of producers, etc. He used these terms totally interchangeably. The notion that 'socialism' and 'Communism' are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death."
According to orthodox Marxist theory, the overthrow of capitalism by a socialist revolution in modern society is inevitable. While the inevitability of an eventual socialist revolution is a controversial debate among many different Marxist schools of thought, all Marxists believe socialism is a necessity. Marxists argue that a socialist society is far better for the majority of the populace than its capitalist counterpart. Prior to the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote: "The socialization of production is bound to lead to the conversion of the means of production into the property of society. ... This conversion will directly result in an immense add in productivity of labour, a reduction of works hours, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins of small-scale, primitive, disunited production by collective and modernization labour." The failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, along with the failure of socialist movements to resist the outbreak of World War I, led to renewed theoretical effort and valuable contributions from Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg towards an appreciation of Marx's crisis theory and efforts to formulate a theory of imperialism.