Popular misconception: Marx, with Lenin and Stalin brought about communist regime in Russia in 1917,

Marxism: dangerously subversive political ideology, discredited since end of Cold War – old-fashioned.

To those ‘in the know’, Key Ideas:

1. Materialist Conception of History

• Men (sic) must be able to live in order to make history and must therefore first satisfy their material needs. The primary historical act is necessarily the production of the material means to satisfy these needs.
• Once the prime needs are satisfied, new needs arise; the chain of material production is consequently infinite.
• Men satisfy their own material needs to reproduce their material existence, and reproduce their own kind.
• The way in which needs are satisfied corresponds to a .certain form of co-operation and organisation among men, ie. to their level of social development. The productive forces available determine moreover, the type of organisation which they may establish. Therefore 'the history of mankind’ must always be studied in connection with the history of industry and commerce'.
• The necessity of interacting with other human beings has led man to develop language as an instrument of social, productive exchange. Language and the consciousness from which it is inseparable are at the same time social products and social instruments intimately bound to the existing level of social production.

Hegelian style dialectics:

Marx saw in the proletariat (working class, possessing only ‘labour power’, which they have to sell this to live) the complete negation of bourgeois society (capitalist class, owning the ‘means of production’) and the debasement of human nature; in this negation was the force to overcome the two antagonistic elements and establish mankind at a higher level of social development.

2. Source of profit is ‘free labour’

performed by the working man who sells his labour power in exchange £or the means of subsistence and reproduction. … The exchange value of the individual worker's labour capacity is determined like every other commodity by the actual labour time necessary to produce or reproduce it… The owner of the means of production, however, acquires the use of the worker’s labour capacity for a certain fixed working day which exceeds in hours the actual time required to pay for the worker’s maintenance and reproduction. Therefore ‘Wage Labour is always composed of paid and unpaid labour’. … The result of capital’s exploitation of labour is profit, [or] ‘surplus value’.

   3. Class struggle and revolution – from Communist Manifesto (1848)

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. … The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. … With the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. … Machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. … Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.… The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Marx in Context: his life: 1818-1883, 19C Europe:

Industrial revolution, advances in science and technology, railways, steel production, agrochemicals & reaping machines – belief in progress.

Age of Revolutions: of 1848-9: Battle lines drawn between middle classes, supported by industry, and the powers of the military and the royal court … working class joined the rebellious bourgeoisie against the despotic rulers. As in earlier revolutions, the middle class, frightened by the prospect of social upheaval, sought the protection of the detested military … secret of standing armies in Europe … bourgeoisie forced to choose between renouncing power to despots or to working class.

Marx pins his hopes on various revolutions: ‘greatest’: Paris June 1848, pessimistic re German revolution 1848, England lever for serious economic revolution 1869, Russia most hopeful 1877.

What is Marxism?

‘I am no Marxist’ 1882 – objecting to name-worship as fetishism, contrary to principle of self-emancipation.

‘Marxism’ as label for Lenin/Stalin ideology, legitimating their interpretation.

‘Marxism’ referring to his work as new gospel, eg Socialist Party of Great Britain, founded 1904.

‘Marxism’ as tool in academia, trend or approach to study of society, literature etc.: Louis Althusser ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’; Pierre Macherey: ideology in ‘gaps and silences’ in a work of literature; Georg Lukács: his critique of Modernism and its ideology of Man as an ahistorical being.

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