A Basic Introduction to Marxism
Marxism is a variant of Hegelian Idealism that presents itself as materialist
Simply put, Marxism is a way to analyse society, both in the past and in the present. It's a mix of ideas about economics, a way of thinking about the physical world, and a way to understand history. This approach was created by Karl Marx, who was very thorough and used social scientific methods to dig deep into these topics.
Marx used a method called the dialectic for his analysis. In dialectical analysis, progress is seen as a clash between two things, which eventually either find an integration or destroy each other. This idea originally came from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Hegel is an orthodox name in the world of philosophy, specifically idealism, which is about seeing the world as a reflection of human thoughts or, as Hegel called it, the 'Ideal'. He aimed to counterpose and synthesise ideas to reach a state of “perfect” knowledge or the “absolute ideal.”
A simple way to picture this, even though Hegel himself didn't use these exact words, is the idea of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The thesis is the initial idea; the antithesis challenges that idea; and the synthesis finds a way to resolve the conflict. There's also a fourth option, the negative dialectic, where the thesis and antithesis don't find a resolution: take Marx’s famous line in the Communist Manifesto;
“The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggles…ending either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes..”
Marx, as the saying goes, flipped Hegel on his head. While Hegel used the concept of dialectic for understanding human knowledge and aimed for perfecting it, Marx applied the same concept to the struggle between social classes and real-world conditions.
Marx believed that;
“Men’s ideas are the direct emanations of their material state.” Or, to use another quote from him, “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite.
To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.”
With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
He used it to understand how society has changed and evolved through different periods in history. Marx's philosophy is grounded in the real, physical world — concretely materialist — it's based on the idea that everything in the world is made up of physical stuff, and how this matter interacts with each other. So, it doesn't include (and often outright denies) idealism, metaphysical ideas, and theological concepts.
To truly understand Marxism, we need to look beyond just the theory and philosophy, and look at what it actually says about history. In the Marxist viewpoint, as written earlier, history is seen as a series of battles between different social classes. Earlier periods in history grew out of the ones that came before them. These periods had their own internal conflicts that eventually led to their downfall. The most recent example of this is how the feudal system of the Middle Ages changed into the capitalist system we have today.
Feudalism grew until the tension between the two social classes could not be reconciled. The practice of trading goods (mercantilism) turned into widespread production of goods for sale, and the middle class — made up of people like farm workers and skilled laborers — became the new wealthy, or the bourgeoisie.
Guilds were broken up, kings were overthrown, different types of goods started being produced, laws about owning property were introduced (in the form of "forced enclosures"), and old traditions were done away with. The strict rules about obedience and respect for authority were replaced with social interactions hidden behind commodity exchange — the buying and selling of goods.
The traditional symbols of feudalism, like kings, queens, and responsibilities based on one's social status, started to disappear. This process took longer in some places like Russia than in others. When these roles couldn't be completely removed immediately, they were either reduced to mere symbols or were made practically useless, as happened in Britain. All of this happened together with the growth of industrialisation — the development of productive forces.
The Industrial Revolution was the spark that set this change in motion. The struggle between social classes became more intense towards the end of feudalism, and this was sped up by the quick breakdown of traditional boundaries and systems caused by advancements in technology. The fast creation of complicated machines and tools made the old ways of dividing work, and the exclusive practices of trade associations, unsustainable. The tools used to produce goods and services in society broke through old social structures like a hot knife through butter.
Marxist Economics
The next part of getting to grips with Marxism is about understanding the economic aspects. While I won't delve deep into this topic right now, I'll provide a quick summary. In the economics of Marxism, how they measure the worth of goods (the value of things when swapped or traded) is based on the average amount of (socially) necessary labour-time that's generally needed to make these goods as commodities.
So, the worth of a thing grows as it gets tougher to produce (because it needs more time to create). But this doesn't mean that if one worker takes an extra hour on a job, the product becomes more valuable. That's not how it works. It would matter only if the usual time needed to produce something rises significantly, like from about half an hour to two hours. This idea of exchange-value is about the average labour time, not the labour time spent by each individual worker.
So how are the prices of things set? They're swayed by their exchange-value. But costs don't always match exactly with exchange-value. Market prices tend to fluctuate around the production cost, which in turn shifts around the exchange value. The law of value can also be influenced by other factors, like the balance of supply and demand. This law is more about averages, and it just gives a reference price. The way exchange-value works, and the social system that keeps it (and the production of commodities) going, is often called the 'law of value'.
Before the next topic, it is crucial to understand the Marxist conception of the state.
“…people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy….” (Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of “The Civil War in France” [Karl Marx, 1871])
The Three Stages After Capitalism
The key aspect of Marxist theory is what comes after capitalism. It's often divided into three main parts:
The dictatorship of the proletariat, or the proletariat organised as the ruling class
This isn't a fully communist phase. It's a stage that's still influenced by old society's habits, as often described by Marxists. In this part, the working class turns into a sort of governing body, forcefully keeps the bourgeoisie and other counter-revolutionaries of change in check, and sets up the building blocks for communism. These building blocks include getting rid of class divisions, changing how value is determined, and ending forced work.
The lower phase of communism, or socialism
This phase doesn't have any class divisions and the government gradually becomes irrelevant. Some people think that during this stage, workers would be given labor notes based on how many hours they've worked. However, others argue against this, saying that the ways we produce goods are advanced enough to distribute goods without any need for a complex system to handle it.
The higher phase of communism, or the final stage of human development
In this phase, we've fully reached the goal of communism. There's no difference between work and play, or between brainwork and physical work. People are driven by their own passions, and the availability of different activities (and ways to engage in them) makes everyone feel connected and involved. It's a society without governments, class divisions, or money.
Building on the ideas of materialism and Marxist study, the Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, took these theories further. Lenin made firm the concept of the vanguard, which means gathering the most class-conscious members of the working class, in a team with the mission of guiding everyone else through the revolution — an idea Marx only touched briefly upon.
On Vladimir Lenin
Lenin believed that is was unlikely that the masses could become entirely class-conscious (aware of their situation and relation to the mode of production), and therefore it was necessary for the vanguard to take the form of a tightly-organised and philosophically-theoretically uniform party.
Lenin thought that it was unlikely for all the workers to fully understand their position and how they connect to the way goods are produced. So, he felt that the leading group, or vanguard, should form a closely knit, theory-driven team.
Leninist theory considers this to be a natural step, since communists are the workers most aware of their situation. This leading team comes from the workers themselves, during the struggles between classes. It is just one of the many teams that can form in such a situation. It's really important to point out that Lenin didn't support the idea of having just one political party in his theories, even though his actions sometimes didn't match this belief. It was actually Stalin who later pushed for the one-party state idea.
Lenin also added an important idea to Marxism: he saw imperialism, or Nation States expanding their power and influence, as the peak of capitalism. This is similar to how mercantilism — trading goods for profit — was seen as the height of feudalism, which was the system before capitalism. As capitalism starts to fall apart, the people in power get more desperate and end up using Nation States as rough tools to get more economic benefits.
As explained in Lenin’s work “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism”:
“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as a parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
Marxist theory certainly covers a lot more ideas from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and even goes beyond them. But this gives you the basic idea.
On Theory (And Ghosts)
“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”
This straightforward yet key insight from Vladimir Lenin feels more relevant now than ever before. Today's social and economic conditions leave everyday people feeling stuck and uncertain about what the future holds. We're faced with pressing but often distant-seeming issues like climate change, the emergence of extreme right-wing politics, the rise of nationalism, and the increasingly heated but blurry lines between major political parties (like Democrats vs. Republicans, or Labour vs. the Tories). Therefore, it's really important for us to take a close, thoughtful look at what's happening in our world right now.
The common goals of working people around the world have become splintered and divided to the point where it seems impossible to pull everyone back together. We can't keep clinging to old ideas any more than we can simply vote for a completely equal society. Over time, out-of-date plans and theories fade away and lose their power. We can't expect a new party championing traditional workers' rights or Trotskyism, or any other old-school worker-focused movement, to suddenly spring up and fix everything.
The reason for this is fairly simple: the old workers’ movement is dead, the social relations from whence it sprung have either faded, mutated, or altogether changed. We cannot cling to these ghosts lest we become the sort of revolutionaries that Marx described in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”:
“And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”
We need to shake off the inertia of our current, worn-out economic system of late-stage capitalism. We must band together, support each other, and create new revolutionary theory, through Marxist analysis, that accurately describes our material and imaginal conditions and addresses the present and distant courses of action.
If you, the reader, aren't a Marxist in these principles and are rolling your eyes at what I'm saying, I have two pieces of advice for you: keep reading and learning, and never stop fighting for your freedom and for what you truly want out of life.