Marxism

Summary

Marxism offers both a diagnosis of capitalism’s core problems, exploitation, alienation, and recurring systemic crisis, and a framework for building a society organized around human need rather than profit. A diagnostic tool is only as valuable as the cure it points toward.

Marxism is the scientific attempt to observe how we got to where we are in society, what the contradicting social forces are that are currently operating on each other in society, and then, with that data, try to figure out how to set the conditions where these conflicts no longer exist.

Marx and Engels took Hegel's concept of dialectics and turned it on its head. They said that it is not ideas that bring about change in the world, but the world, or society, that brings about change in ideas.

Timeline

1. 1844

   Engels studies the working class

   Friedrich Engels gives a firsthand account of the living conditions he observed in different English cities and shows how industrial capitalism was producing new material trauma.

2. 1848

   The Communist Manifesto

   Marx and Engels publish a concise political statement tying capitalism, class conflict, and international working-class politics together.

3. 1864

   First International

   The International Workingmen's Association forms as a broad organization of socialist, labor, anarchist, and republican currents.

4. 1867

   Capital, Volume I

   Marx analyzes how profit is extracted from the value that the laborer creates through their work.

5. 1871

   Paris Commune

   Workers and radicals briefly govern Paris, and Marx later treats it as a major lesson in proletarian political power.

6. 1889

   Second International founded

   Socialist and labor parties across Europe and beyond unite to coordinate international action, establish May Day, and advance Marxist politics, until it fractures under the pressures of World War I.

7. 21st c.

   Renewed interest after crises

   Financial crashes, austerity, climate breakdown, burnout, and labor organizing renew interest in Marxist political economy and socialist strategy.

History

To dismantle the capitalist system, we first have to define exactly what we are building to replace it. We have to define socialism. Not as a utopian buzzword, but as a concrete, structural alternative.

The modern political movement that emerged in 19th-century Europe was a direct reaction to European industrial capitalism. This is a Eurocentric history because it traces that direct reaction. But while the political ideology of socialism is recent, the biological drive for human cooperation is ancient and universal.

Long before Europe industrialized, indigenous societies across the globe successfully organized themselves around the same principles of creating cooperative, communal social systems. To understand how to dismantle the modern capitalist state, we first have to understand the specific material trauma that birthed the political movement to destroy it.

The word “socialism” is only about 200 years old, and it began to be used in the 1830s to describe a system different from capitalism. With the inventions of heavy machinery and the factory, the way people in Britain and France made their living, and thereby the way they lived their lives, was dramatically and suddenly changed.

After only a few generations, life went from being rural farming for most people to populations concentrated in dense urban cities: black smoke billowing through the air, animal waste soaking the streets, entire families living in one-room, badly constructed structures with no furniture, and pig pens beside these living structures in cities where the buildings and animal pens were wall to wall.

The Pivot to Marx and Engels

The views of people like Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen in the early days of socialism are described as being either utopian or reformist by the next early thinker on the subject, who is also known as the most influential socialist thinker in history: Karl Marx.

After getting his PhD in philosophy, Karl Marx worked as a writer. Marx was very interested in the philosopher Hegel's concept of dialectics, which describes emergence as something that occurs from opposing forces conflicting with one another. By this, something new is created.

Marx was already a supporter and advocate for a better world, and was already good at analyzing problems in the world, but when he met Engels, the same one who wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, he began to develop the ideas he was most famous for.

They forged a friendship and intellectual partnership for the rest of their lives, working out ideas together and developing socialist theory. Because Marx and Engels were two great thinkers who collaborated on many key texts of Marxist theory, if I say Marx, then most often what I mean is Marx and Engels. It is a shorthand for their collaborative partnership.

The Engine of History: Dialectical Materialism

Marx came along and pointed out what he said were the flaws in both utopian and reformist socialist theory. It all started with his and Engels' theory of dialectical and historical materialism.

Hegel believed the world progressed through the development of ideas or concepts, which, when they emerged, transformed society and brought about change. Marx and Engels took this idea and turned it on its head.

They said that it is not ideas that bring about change in the world, but the world, or society, that brings about change in ideas. When applied to society, this means that the changes we go through in our society, from small incremental changes like the gaining of rights to things as big as the change from monarchy to capitalist democracy, are all the result of a change in material conditions.

To be truly scientific, Marx understood that we cannot start with abstract, empirically unobservable notions. We have to start with actually observing our material reality if we want to change our material world, then we can create the hypothesis.

This concept that our material reality is what shapes our ideas, and that the contradicting material forces in society are what give rise to the emergence of new ideas and ways of life, is dialectical materialism. Taking this approach to analysis and applying it to the study of the history of society is what was then named historical materialism.

Class Struggle and Historical Materialism

Using historical materialism in their analysis, Marx and Engels discovered that the big transitions in history, when large groups of people fundamentally changed the way they lived their lives, were always the result of the dialectics reflected in class struggle.

Class struggle was and is the struggle between the ruling class, those who hold power to dictate the organization of society, and the exploited classes.

Socialism, to Marx and Engels, was not just trying to make a perfect society how you thought it should be. It was a scientific attempt to observe how we got to where we are in society and what the contradicting social forces are that are currently operating on each other in society, and then, with that data, try to figure out how to set the conditions where these conflicts no longer exist.

To do that, Marx believed that the overarching socioeconomic system had to be overthrown by the working class, which would then abolish the right of one person to own the factory that many people work in and profit from all their labor.

The Anatomy of Exploitation

Marx believed the economic system of capitalism created a new class struggle between the proletariat, which was the industrial working class, and the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists who usually by inheritance owned the factories.

The working class, who had no capital and no factories of their own from Daddy, had to use the only capital they had: their body. They had to sell themselves as cogs in the machine of those who won the birth lottery.

Marx observed that while the new form of production in factories alienated the laborer from the fruits of it, separating the worker from the products of their labor, it also made work much more social.

Instead of scattered big family farms where you would work the land by yourself or with only close relatives, now workers met and interacted with their community every day. This social aspect of the new relations of economic production is contradicted by the fact that the outcomes of their collective effort are being siphoned off by one person at the top.

For the capitalist, how much they make is directly linked to how little they can pay their workers, because the profit of the capitalist is extracted from the value that the laborer creates through their work.

This is the dialectics of class struggle. Marx believed that only by the workers dismantling the old socioeconomic system, which was built from its foundation and coded into its laws the domination of the ruling class over the rest of the populations, could the disparities of wealth, and the suffering they create, be systemically eliminated.