Marxism

Discussion

What is Karl Marx?

(1913) by Alexander Bogdanov

"What did Marx do? He changed the point of view. He looked at society from the point of view of those who produce, from the point of view of the working class, and everything turned out to be very different. It turned out that the center of life and development of the society was found there, that this was the Sun on which depended the ways and the movement of human beings, groups and classes.

Marx was not a worker; but through the power of his mind he was able to fully understand the position of the worker. And he found out that with this transition everything immediately changed its contours and forms. The powers of things and causes of events were revealed to the human eyes in a way that was not possible from the old point of view. Reality, truth, even the everyday appearance of things changed and became something different, often something opposite to what it was before.

Yes, even the way things appear to us! What can be more obvious for a capitalist than the fact that he feeds the worker? Does he not provide the worker with the work and the salary? But for the worker it is no less obvious that they are the ones who feed the capitalists with their labor. And in his discussion of surplus value Marx demonstrated that the first view was an illusion, an appearance that was similar to our everyday perception that Sun moved around Earth, but the second view was the truth.

Marx discovered that all human thought and feeling received different direction and were formed differently depending on the class to which these human beings belonged, that is, depending on their position in relation to production. Different interests, habits and experiences lead to different conclusions. What is reasonable for one class is ridiculous for another, and conversely what is just, lawful and normal for one class is injustice and misuse of power for another. What appears as freedom to one class, looks like slavery to another. The ideal of one class causes horror and disgust of another class.

Marx summed it up thus: “it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Or, in other words, thoughts, aspirations and ideals are determined by the economic situation. It is with the help of this idea that he transformed social science and philosophy. It is on this idea that he founded his great doctrine of the class struggle and its role in the development of society. He studied the path of this development and showed where it leads and which class would create the new organization of production, what this organization would look like and how it would end the division of classes and their long struggle.

Marx was not a worker. But it was in the working class that the great teacher found the foothold for his thought, the point of view that allowed him to penetrate the depth of reality and to help him discover his idea. The essence of this idea is the self-consciousness of the working proletariat. That is why Marx more than any other thinker belongs to the proletariat." (http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1951-what-is-karl-marx)

Marxism as a Way of Seeing

Peter Gabel:

"Marxism does a brilliant job of presenting historical events through a theory, a way of seeing, that fits the facts of these events. In Marx’s own works and the many works that have followed in his tradition, we see the myths of various historical periods penetrated by a critical way of seeing that shows the shaping power of underlying economic factors, the hidden organization of society adapted in each epoch to the production and distribution of material goods under conditions of material scarcity. As soon as this organization produces a surplus, it is appropriated by the class of people that has gained power within a particular means of production, generating a struggle for survival between classes that is obscured by universal myths and rationalizations—ideologies—that legitimize the status quo and cover up what’s really going on. In the Marxist framework, its way of seeing, everything is accounted for: economics, law, religion, culture, gender roles, racism, conquest and domination of other cultures, everything.

But Marxism is nevertheless wrong, not because it cannot explain events, but because the superimposition of this way of seeing on historical events is not true to what we might call the social being of the events as they really are, in their being. Yes, there is a formation of classes, there is a competitive division of labor, there is appropriation of the economic surplus in unjust ways, there are masking ideologies that rationalize unjust social relations and transform might into right… but this turns out not to be taking place because of the material struggle for survival but because of a Fear of the Other that has been injected into history and reproduced across generations in ways not reducible to material factors alone, or even primarily. Yet if you come to believe in the Marxist way of seeing, if you are understandably seduced by how brilliantly it fits the facts while appealing to your instinctive sense that the world, as it is, is profoundly unjust, then you will be led in wrong directions by it—for example, you may think that an economic revolution that reorganizes productive relations is the key element to overcoming injustice and fulfilling human possibilities. Since coercion may be involved in such a process, that mistaken way of seeing—adopted with the best of intentions—may lead to tragic and even terrible consequences.

Nothing that I say should be understood to minimize the human suffering manifested in the history of class society—the suffering from poverty, material inequality, exploitation of economic resources and human labor, and the illegitimate hierarchies through which rulers in each historical period have dominated the ruled. Nor do I mean to minimize the human need for food, shelter, and other elements of basic material survival which continue to cause suffering for much of the world’s population—for example, the 2.5 billion people who cannot obtain enough food to receive adequate nutrition each day, according to United Nations estimates. Rather what I am saying is that these forms of material suffering and injustice are manifestations of our historical legacy of our alienation from one another—that the “cause” is to be found in the social-spiritual separation expressive of an underlying failure of mutual recognition that expresses itself existentially as Fear of the Other." (Tikkun)