Meaning Marxs Works - Literature review Example

Karl Marx When Karl Marx died in 1883, few would have thought that his monumental prolific works would lead to the shaping of the great Bolshevik revolution in 1917 in USSR, which would polarize the world thereafter into two camps: Socialism and Capitalism.  Marx’s works were in response to the grave exploitation that the workers (proletariat) were facing by the capitalists (bourgeoisie) in European cities during the first wave of industrialization (industrial revolution) in the nineteenth century.   Charles Dickens’s popular novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) pictures in what it meant living as workers in factories in Paris and London up to the period leading to the French revolution. (A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)  As Salerno sums it:  “During the nineteenth century, many European cities experienced an array of physical and social problems brought on by the industrial revolution and the decline of feudalism.  Cities were filled up with peasants forced from rural areas by real estate speculators and landlords.” (Salerno, 43) Narrow urban streets with sewers became a frequent site for disease and devastating poverty.     The movement to think scientifically without prejudice to any religious or moral doctrine that started with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and corresponding beginning of the renaissance movement in Europe led to many scientific inventions in its stride.  (The History Guide)  The invention of steam engine by James Watt (1736-1819) has had the greatest and immediate impact in leading to the industrial revolution in Europe in the eighteenth century.  By the end of eighteenth century, European cities like Venice, Paris, and London already had highly-efficient educational system in terms of universities, libraries, and an environment that promoted learning.  (The History Guide)  This was an ideal setting for philosophers like Hegel, Comte, Darwin, and Spencer to make their observations and influence the relatively-affluent learned people in these educational sites, searching for enlightenment through knowledge. By the time Marx was to make his own contribution in the field of social and political science, evolutionary theories led by Darwin and Spencer ruled the day.  Together with challenging their implied philosophy, Marx was to use economics as his weapon for social change: confronting popular economists like Smith and Ricardo on many grounds.  (Salerno, 47)  Darwin’s vision of world was one of ceaseless interactions leading to evolution and adaptation.  The drivers to these were quest for survival and reproduction.  (Caroll)  For Marx, the history of the human mankind is a history of struggle for material position and power.  (Salerno, 47)  Perhaps Marx narrowed it down to struggles faced by oppressed people, which were industrial labors during his time.    When it comes to Spencer, there are interesting similarities and dissimilarities.  For Spencer, the drivers to evolution were realization of some good ideals.  His theories were progressive and teleological.  The change is occurring because of realization of a good goal. That is, it is has in it the concept of “archetype” put forward by Aristole; an ideal form with an unchanging virtues or qualities or essence.  (Caroll).   We find a semblance here with Marx.  Marx too proposed that the world is getting better and better and capitalism is just the step before socialism.  (Salerno, 47)   Spencer visualized a superior social order that would come into existence by gradually eliminating social undesirables and perfectly synchronizing symbiotic interactions in a population of maximally efficient players.  In rough parallel to the idea of natural selection, he envisions the gradually perfecting human population by elimination of relative under performers. (Salerno, 30) Thus, when it comes to offering remedy, Spencer and Marx are totally different.  While Spencer’s ideas are ideal breeding grounds for racial discrimination, Marx’s solution is one, which takes into account the capability of weaker class to rise to the occasion and make changes.  Marx believed that the key to social change is to be found in changes in the modes of production, which in turn, induced him to undertake a deep study of political economy, in order to identify factors that govern changes in the modes of production.    Marx’s optimism in the power of then weak and exploited labor class to make changes and progress is empirically found true after enactment of various labor legislations in the later part of the nineteenth century and more prominently in the twentieth century throughout world that were the results of struggle by them and which did give them a fair say.  Though it has ups and downs and even tough time in the very land where it was seen as a huge initial success ---USSR after the Bolshevik revolution--- nevertheless impact of Marx’s philosophy was not just limited to erstwhile United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR); its true success is more evident in many democratic capitalist countries where labor rules were made taken into account their uniqueness as human beings.    As a philosopher and social scientist, the idea of dialectical materialism consisted of his point of reference.  “Marx wanted to make philosophy more real, to give it purpose and consequence.  By this he meant to make it more grounded in the affairs of everyday life and everyday social relations.”   (Salerno 46-47)  Also, “Hegel was much more ideological and psychological in their orientation to theory.”  (Salerno 47)  As Salerno puts it: “For him, the dialectic that contributes to the evolution of thought and being is neither an inherently psychic nor spiritual phenomenon., it is rather a historical-material process.”  (Salerno, 47)  For Marx, the history of the world is a history of struggle for material position and power.  (Salerno, 47)    Marx transformation of value into price was his first step towards trying to measure the labor value in monetary terms.  The transformation is of great importance for Marx, as he believed that values depict the actual relationship while prices of production conceal the exploitation that is inherent in it. (Marx, 805-881) Though Marx is considered to be a classical economist, for his work is within the overall classical frame, and though he used abstract deductive logic like the classical shcolars before him, his analysis is different from the rest.  He brought in non-economic factors into his analysis, and so his approach is more holistic, for he was keen to analyze social change over time.  Shifting the focus of attention from the landlords and capitalists, Marx highlighted the class conflict between capitalists who owned the means of production, and workers who had only services to offer.  He argued that this in turn led to the exploitation of workers in a capitalist economy.  Like Adam Smith and Ricardo, he believed that labor alone could create value, but he brought in the concept of exploitation of workers, and believed that labor theory of value brought out what is concealed in a capitalist system:  the exploitation of labor.  He redefined concepts like commodity, (Marx, 424) constant capital, (Marx 389) variable capital, (Marx 649) surplus value,( Marx 652) the rate of exploitation, (Marx 751-800) and the organic composition of capital.  (Marx, 600-652)  He developed an ideology on which communism is based.  His approach was holistic, analyzing economic as well as non-economic forces, in order to get an insight into the basic causes of social change.    However, Marx’s work consisted of psychological analysis.  His works on the process of alienation, (Salerno, 47) and his concept of fetishism (Salerno 49-50) has important implications for the later development of Frankfurt School for Social Research that seek to relate individual human knowledge and experiences with the surrounding social organization.  Perhaps one needs to be realistic while judging Marx as a philosopher and Marx as an economist.  His disagreement with Hegel was perhaps because Marx was too discontented with exploitation of laborers that was going on during his time.  He could not allow himself to delve solely into the luxuries of individualism and so called existentialism that focuses on the individual and more interested in the subjective experiences of the same material condition. (Bill p.12)  This appears realistic as psychological and other pursuits come only after one has satisfied the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Marx connected himself with the sufferings of exploited labor around him, and this may have compromised on those who have accused that Marx’s study somewhat lacks on individual psychological experiences.  But on the positive side, it paved way for a new school of thought that related human knowledge and experiences with their immediate social surroundings.  As Bill sums it:  “The Marxist perspective in philosophy of science forced recognition of the manner in which the product of the scientific endeavor, knowledge itself, was determined by the human interests.  What Habermas and the earlier Frankfurt School for Social Research formed in the earlier 1920s, attempted to deal with was the fact of a value-laden science, and the fact that those values appeared to originate in a structured social organization in which the social class was the dominant organizer.”  (Bill, 14)  Today, the thoughts of Marx are all pervasive, often understood and misunderstood by many.  It is not fair to see him as a harbinger of so called socialist ideas that were against capitalism.  On the contrary, he believed in making things happen, instead of just passing it to genetics and inheritance and do nothing about it.  For instance, ‘The Lathomecomer’ exposing the plight of small and weak Hmong community in the hands of first the Chinese and then exploited during and after the Vietnam War speaks how over the years such economically-disadvantaged races had been sidelined when it comes to enjoying the benefits of all-round progress made globally.  Had Marx and other social revolutionaries not called for the need to change the labor exploitation that were in place during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they would have continued to be exploited the same way on the basis of so-called comparatively weaker human breed in then popular Spencer’s doctrine. (The Latehomecomer) This Marx’s believe in the power of people to start from scratch is well appreciated in US and other progressive countries.  It also justifies the immigration policy of countries like USA, Australia, and France that takes a humanitarian approach to the problem of racial discrimination and make efforts to give them a fair social environment to shape their good future.  (Yang)       Works Cited 1. Bill, Warren.  Philosophical Dimensions of Personal  Construct Psychology.  Routledge.  New York. NY.  2002.  2. Caroll, Joseph. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection/ Charles Darwin. Broadview Press Limited. Canada. 2003. Retrieved on 13 November, 2009 from http://books.google.co.in/books?id=eTfRotZTXI0C&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=natural+selecton,+Darwin,+Spencer&source=bl&ots=rX35NTX1Zb&sig=Sh0tJrBqH2iso5hLp_IRA7IKYOM&hl=en&ei=M77WSqy_D4LosQOKirTTAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=&f=false  3. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. ReadHowYouWant.com, 2009 4. Marx Karl.  Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy  (1857-61)  Penguin 1973  Translated by: Martin Nicolaus;  Scanned by: Tim Delaney, 1997;  Retrieved on 13 November, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/  5. Salerno, Roger A.  Beyond the Enlightenment:  Lives and Thoughts of Social Theorists.  Praeger Publishers.  USA.  2004.   6. The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England.  The History Guide.  Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History.    Lecture 17. Retrieved on 13 November, 2009 from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/intellect.html   7. Yang, Kao Kalia.  The Latehomecomer:  A Hmong Family Memoir.  Coffee House Press Books.  Canada.  2008.  Read More