Marxism

The Marxism is the current policy claiming ideas of Karl Marx (and to a lesser extent of Friedrich Engels). Politically, the Marxism rests on the analysis of the History and the participation in the real movement of the class struggle, for the abolition of capitalism. Karl Marx considered indeed that “ the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves ”. It should be noted that Marx itself has several times said, in the last years of its life: “ Me, I am not Marxist ”, showing his will to dissociate certain car-proclaimed “Marxists” with whom Marx was in disagreement.

The thought of Marx

Marx, observer of the evolution of the human society

The concept of Social class was not invented by Marx. It was employed by the founders of the political economy (Smith, Ricardo) and in the tradition of the political Histoire French (Tocqueville). For traditional English, the criteria of identities of a class lie in the origin of the incomes: to the three types of incomes, the land Revenue, the Profit, and the wages, correspond the three large groups of the Nation, the landowners, the contractors and the workers. Among French thinkers, the term of class is Politique. For Tocqueville, the classes exist as soon as the social groups clash for the control of the company. Marx thus borrows from the classical economists the implicit idea of the classes like factor of production and from the historians the classes and their conflict as producer of history.

For Marx, the social classes are registered in social reality. Their fights determine the social change as a durable phenomenon. The classes result from a very major general mechanism of the work, which developed at the same time as the private appropriation of the means of production. Classes emergent when the differentiation of the tasks and the functions ceases being random to become hereditary. There is a tendency to Polarization between two antagonistic classes. The Antagonisme between the classes is the engine of any transformation which affects the operation of the social organization and modifies the course of sound Histoire. According to Marx the production process capitalist creates two positions: that of the exploitor and of exploited. The individual behaviors and the class action suits are explained by these positions in the reproduction of the system. The conflict of class is a cultural feature of the company. The conflicts are the principal engine of the great social changes. Marx is interested in the endogenous factors of the changes, i.e. those which are born from the operation even of the company.

Productive forces, social reports/ratios of production and mode of production

Each company can be characterized at one time given by its mode of production.

A mode of production is a unit consisted the productive forces and the social reports/ratios of production. With each stage of the social evolution, the Mode of production translates a state of the company. The mode of production is social because without the productive forces, it would not know being question of production. The mode of production cannot thus be reduced to its only technical side. The productive forces gather the instruments of the production, the labor force of the men, the objects of work, the knowledge and the techniques in strengths, the organization of work. At the time of these production activities, the men tie between them social relations. The mode of production is one of the fundamental concepts of Marx. The succession of the modes of production can be schematized in the following way: primitive Communisme one passes to the mode of production Esclavagiste, Féodal, Capitaliste, and finally Socialiste/Communiste (the two terms are then synonymous). In the communist company, the productive contribution will be able to apply the principle summarized in the formula: " Of each one according to its means with each one according to its besoins". While developing, the productive forces enter more and more in contradiction with the social reports/ratios of production which do not evolve/move at the same rate/rhythm. Beyond a certain threshold, the system is blocked. One time of social revolution begins which has as a function to make disappear the reports/ratios from old production to allow the development of reports/ratios in conformity with the level reached by the productive forces.

Accumulation of the capital, work and surtravail, alienation

The primitive accumulation of the capital is defined like the creative process of the conditions to the birth of capitalism. The production of the Capitalisme supposes two prerequisites. It is about the existence of a social category, formed men deprived of means of production and constrained of selling their labor force and accumulation of essential richnesses to create companies of the capitalist type. It is necessary thus that the requirements with the birth of two fundamental classes of the capitalist company are met.

Accumulation takes a great importance as of the advent of the Industrial revolution. The distinction between work and labor force is in the center of the analysis of the distribution. What sells the Ouvrier is its labor force. Its remuneration is established on a level which corresponds to the expenditure socially necessary to ensure its renewal. It is goods as another whose value is determined by the quantity of social work which request production. What is here advanced is moreover founded on the theory aristotelician of the goods which distinguish the practical value (what the object for that represents which makes use of it) of the exchange value (what the object makes it possible to acquire). In the process of exchange there are consequently an inversion of the exchange value and practical value; thus, the currency of exchange is goods which have as a practical value only its exchange value. The diagram of Adam Smith of the law of supply and demand in addition gives an account of the existence of an added-value to the product of which the capitalist benefits and the worker wages. It is around the benefit of the added-value that takes shape the proletarian class struggle because as capitalist wish to attract it with oneself; Marx will show that the worker is in right full sound to claim the benefit of this added-value as her is the practical value of work even. What the capitalist does, it is thus to do work goods which are less expensive than than it pays. However the labor force has as a characteristic to give more work than its maintenance does not require any. The appreciation is the additional value produced by the employee whom the capitalist adapts free and legally. The increase in this appreciation for the capitalist can be obtained by the prolongation of day's work or the increase in its intensity. The appreciation is the form of the spoliation of the proletarian in capitalist mode. The profit is the modified form of the appreciation which appears like a surplus. It is the research of the profit which constitutes the principal mobile of capitalism. The activities are developed only if they are profitable and profitability is function of the rate of profit obtained (relationship between the profit and the whole of the funded capital). The Accumulation of the capital involves a long-term fall of the rate of profit from where a trend fall of the rate of profit. It is an index of the historical limits of capitalism. If the purpose of modernization is clarifies the increase in appreciation, there is an increasing substitution between the " work mort" and the " work vivant". However there is only the alive work which is creator of value. Dead work being the capital becoming animated only via the labor force. On-accumulation of the capital (excess of accumulation) will rise impoverishment from the working class. Capitalism is victim of its own logic. It is less and less able to manage its contradictions and is forwarded to an inescapable crisis.

The Marxist theory of work

The work is not only the transformation of a natural data (because one could then also find it in the animals), it implies before a a whole faculty of representation . The way in which Marx will give an account of this activity is completely aristotelician as it starts with the representation of an end, showing by there that the end is at the same time principle . Work is thus initially an understanding representation which includes/understands the finality of the object and differs in that from the animal (the squirrel preserves hazel nuts by instinct and not by representation without that it would have already built freezers with hazel nuts). The product of human work (redundant expression in addition) must thus exist ideally in the representation of the worker, in other words work ideally aims an object which would fulfill a function perfectly.

In Chapter VII of the Capital , Marx thus includes this diagram aristotelician in which it does of the worker that which is subordinated to the end that it itself gave. Work is thus such as the individual is identified and recognized in what it did: by acting, while working, the man implements faculties which are clean for him, discovers its capacity of conceptualization and can improve by there its production capacity. The intelligence is thus revealed by this activity as a man brings up to date in his work of faculties which are clean for him, which induces a process of identification: in the products of work, the individual consequently finds a share of his identity. As work takes part in the identity of the individual , one can say well that work is not only to have it (i.e to produce) but also to be it, in that there is thus well a properly ontological dimension with work.

Therefore Marx carries the charge to the industrial and capitalist mode of production to alienate the workers . Indeed, the worker does not have any more, in this case there, of understanding representation of what it does since it is unaware of the finished product and thus it of it why of his activity. The stake identificatoire is thus cancelled here since the only stake is that of remuneration. What is human becomes by there animal, concerned with a reflex, of a mechanical automatism (cf the film “Modern times” of Charlie Chaplin). In this direction, one can include/understand the abolition of slavery, not for moral concern but well for economic concern because it was more expensive to maintain the men in control within the framework of slavery than in that of wage-earning (cf the film “Queimada” of Gillo Pontecorvo with Marlon Brando). Thus, freedom was given only to give the opportunity to the workers to believe men whereas they are used only with fine primitives and thus animal. The individuals were let be men to only make them adopt an animal behavior.

The class struggle

For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “ the history of all the human society until our days is only the history of the Class struggle ” (even if in a note they reconsider this assertion).

Marx defines the essential components which constitute a social class. The position of the individual in the reports/ratios of production (worker or exploitor) is according to him the principal element which allows the definition of the social class. At the same time, Marx considers that so that there is truly a class, there must be a class consciousness: conscience to have jointly a place in the company. Marx noticed that it is not enough that many men are side by side on the same economic plan so that a class consciousness is formed. According to Marx, the central actors of the class struggle are, at the time capitalist, the middle-class and the Prolétaire S. socialism (or Communism) constitutes for him the state of the company removed from divisions in social classes, and thus a company without class struggle.

Marxism: analyzes relative taking account of the circumstances

The methods of analysis of Karl Marx are based on the study of the economic and social History. One can think that it would be contrary with this method to seek to apply to the letter what Karl Marx proposes, without taking account of the modifications structural of the company. On the contrary, it would be appropriate, while taking as a starting point its texts, to analyze the economic situation and policy of our time and to seek to cure its defects. It thus seems contradictory to regard the Marxist thought as doctrines, i.e. a thing solidified in time, whereas it sees in the History an evolution. The Marxism analyzes by observing the situation material, political, economic and social. But this situation varies during time and according to the place, and this is why the Marxists vary their analyzes according to time, of the place, the circumstances, and also of their political sensibility.

Currents

During the 20th century, the Marxism was divided into several currents, some moving away some very strongly:

the Leninism (of which the Trotskisme)
the Luxembourgisme
the Communism of councils
the Social democracy
the Opéraïsme
the libertarian Marxism
the autonomous Marxism
the Communism-workman
the Left Communist

“Marxism” of State

Above all, it is advisable to specify that since 1844 Marx distinguishes and defines two types of Communisms (cf manuscripts of 1844, “Private property and Communisms”). The first, that the models will incarnate that we know, is regarded as “the ignominieuse form of the private property” (definite in particular by the concept of “proprietée private general”). The second type of Communism is that allowing the realization of the individual (to be noted that Marx specifies that if the means of producing must be collective, he affirms well on the other hand the inviolable sphere of the individual whom the advent of the change of social model must devote besides). Marx affirmed since 1861 with the congress of Vienna the threat which Russia would constitute if it tried Communism; it tried to destroy its influence by the principle of self-determination of the people.

Dictatorship S with the planned economy informant to aim at the introduction of the Communisme asserted Marxism. The majority of the Marxists in 2006 do not recognize a bond between these modes and the thought of Marx (it was not always as follows: on the contrary, in particular after the Second world war, the majority of the “Marxists” - Stalinist - claimed itself of the USSR, even if several Marxist currents were opposed to this mode). It should be recalled that one can read in the Manifeste of the Communist party :

To gradually tear off all the capital with the middle-class That will not be able to be naturally made, at the beginning, that by a despotic violation of the property right and middle-class mode of production, i.e. by measurements which during the movement, exceed themselves and are essential like means of upsetting the entire mode of production. These measurements, of course, will be extremely different in the various countries. However, for the most advanced countries, following measurements could rather generally be applied:

Expropriation of the land and buildings and assignment of the ground rent to the national expenditure.
strongly progressive Tax.
Abolition of the right of heritage.
Confiscation of the goods of all the emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of the credit between the hands of the State, by a national bank, whose capital will belong to the State and who will enjoy an exclusive monopoly.
Centralisation enters the hands of the State of all the means of transport.
Multiplication of the national factories and the instruments of production, clearing and improvement of land according to a collective plan.
obligatory Work for all; organization of industrial armies, particularly for agriculture.
Coordination of the agricultural activity and industrial, measurements tending to remove the opposition city-countryside gradually.
public and free Education of all the children, abolition of the child work in the factories such as it is practiced today. Coordination of education with the material production.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took their distance with this precise passage following the Commune of Paris, in the foreword with the Manifeste of 1872, unfortunately, this relativisation was not until retractation and its impact on the later history was weak. The disputed means would thus appear in a writing of Marx that the parties of the Komintern (wrongly or rightly) retained the most.

Independent of these writings, the philosopher André Glucksmann developed in his work the cooker and the man-eater the thesis that such dictatorships constituted Conséquence S “necessary and foreseeable” by the Marxist model itself, within the exact framework of the Class struggle, and simply adapted to this novel mode of production. He adds that the dictatorship can only generate one new dominant class, the Nomenklatura, the apparatus of the party.

Random links:

Substantive patent law | BTR-60 | Gigthis | Saint-Felix-in Otis | Masters of tennis masculine 1993