Marxism – Eulogy and Detraction
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Marxism. Eulogy and Detraction
In East Marx is no longer referred
to as he is held responsible for the totalitarian catastrophe. In West he is still disputed but, almost always, his views are no longer connected to all that they have determined. Some read Marx particularly for the “evil” he is assumed with, for the horrors of communism. Others, read him just for political reasons. I read Marx so as to be completely able to demonstrate that Marxism may still represent an adequate way of dealing with some of today’s “social superstructures”, as Marx himself named them: literature, religion, law etc. That Marxism as an intellectual perspective may still provide a wholesome counterbalance to our propensity too see ourselves and the writers that we read as completely divorced from socio-economic circumstances. That Marxism may also counterbalance the related tendency to read the books and poems we read as originating in an autonomous mental realm, as the free products of free and independent minds…
In order to achieve such a goal, one must get to the essence of things and imperiously provide the adverse standpoints on the matter. Therefore, both eulogy and detraction of Marxism will be referred
to in the following lines.
Marxism is first of all a complex political doctrine, also dealing with economy, philosophy or even religious issues. Based upon the writtings of the German born sociologist Karl Marx (1818-1883) and, to a smaller extent, of his companion Friederich Engels (1820-1895), this set of revolutionary “theses” had — surprisingly perhaps for many contemporaries — an unprecedented impact upon the thinking of the age.
Thus, as far as the political aspect is concerned, Marx and Engels are falsely considered the founders of socialism and all its variants. However, what today is called socialism was developed during the previous century by the French ideologists Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and their folowers. It is true though that socialism, non-political in both Saint-Simon’s and Fourier’s visions, was decissively influenced by the reformist dimenssion Karl Marx provided it with, reffering to his forerunners as “utopic socialists”. (Florence Braunstein & Jean-Francois Pepin, Les Grandes doctrines, 1995:71) In short, the aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribuЬtion, and exahange. Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming thc existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in. It looks for concrcte, scientific, logical explaЬnations of the world of observable fact. (Its opposite is idealist phiЬlosophy, which does believe in the existence of a spiritual `world elsewhere and would offer, for instance, religious explanations of life and conduct). But whereas other philosophies merely seek to understand the world, Marxism (as Marx famously said) seeks to change it. Marxism sees progress as coming about through the struggle for power between different social classes. This view of history as class struggle (rather than as, for instance, a succession of dynasties, or as a gradual progress towards the attainment of national identity and sovereignty) regards it as motored by the competition for economic, social, and political advantage. The exploitation of one social class by another is seen, especially in modern industrial capitalism, particularly in its unrestricted nincЬteenth-century form. The result of this exploitation is alienation, which is the state which comes about when the worker is `deskilled and made to perform fragmented, repetitive tasks in a sequence of whose nature and purpose he or she has no overall grasp. By contrast, in the older `pre-industrial or `cottage indusЬtry system of manufacture, home and workplace were one, the worker completed the whole production process in all its variety, and was in direct contact with those who might buy the product. These alienated workers have undergone thc process of reification, which is a term used in Marxs major work, Das Kapital, but not developed there. It concerns the way, when capitalist goals and questions of profit and loss are paramount, workers arc bereft of their full humanity and are thought of as `bands or `the labour force, so that, for instance, thc cffects of industrial closures are calculated in purely economic terms. People, in a word, become things. (Peter Barry, Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 1995:156-157)
Class struggle is thus present in Marxist theories about economy — the Marxist economy — which, above all, represent a fierce critique of the bourgeois capitalism, doomed to disappear
for it stands for man’s exploiting man and thus for social inequality. But also for that, according to Marxists, everything in society, as in nature, is in motion and in continuous
evolution. Here is what Marxist so proudly called “dialectical materialism” in order to philosophically emphasize that everything is what it is and what it is becoming. Compared with Hegelian idealism, Marxist materialism is trend which underlines the material world (the world outside of consciousness) as the foundation and determinant of thinking, especially in relation to the question of the origin of knowledge. For materialism, thoughts are “reflections” of matter, outside of Mind, which existed before and independently of thought. According the Marx:
“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” (Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Selected Works. Volume One, 1969:13)
Out of these leading Marxist assumptions there emerged other theoretical approaches to various fields of society, of culture, such as laws, religion, literature etc. They all have been and will always be subject of exaggerate praise on one hand, or of groundless critique on the other.
French philosopher, educator, journalist, and author, one of Frances most prominent political thinkers, Raymond Aron built his entire reputation upon criticising what he thought of as “the opium of the intellectuals” — the evil of Marxism.