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Marxism is an ideology that derives from Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) critique of capitalism. As the third child in a middle-class Jewish family, Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and wrote his dissertation, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in 1841. Aristotle, who Marx referred to as that “towering genius,” would play an inspirational role for many of his ideas on nature. Aside from these ancient thinkers, many modern thinkers also exercised a profound influence on Marx’s thinking. Of these, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was unquestionably the most important to framing Marx’s critical social theory.

Marx’s great achievement, in this respect, was to reformulate Hegel’s dialectic (Aufhebung), which held that freedom was an idea whose concrete realization was manifested in the struggle to reconcile the contradiction or difference between one’s given knowledge of the world (subject) and the objects in the world (institutions, property, and rules). In this way, Marx theorized about the workers’ consciousness and material struggle to overcome the conditions of social deprivation and to establish the beginnings of a communist society.

Neo-Hegelianism And History

In the after math of Hegel’s death, a great struggle would ensue over the meaning and legacy of Hegel’s ideas. The result was the creation of a new philosophical movement in the 1830s and 1840s called Young Hegelianism, featuring such thinkers as Moses Hess, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, and Bruno Bauer. The more conservative Young Hegelians argued for the compatibility of reason and religion that would reinforce the liberal bourgeois state. In The Essence of Christianity (1989), for instance, Ludwig Feuerbach argued that human imperfections were unique to the species, and the essence of humanity was the infinite joy that came with being conscious of oneself as the object of God’s graces. Religion in this sense objectivized the human consciousness by providing a source of feeling that was needed to overcome the narrow tendencies or limitations associated with the human species (e.g., pride, glory).

Marx, however, largely dismissed these religious underpinnings of materialist thought, arguing that the essence of a human was what he or she produced. His famous dictum that “religion is the opium of the masses” suggested that religion had no place in the substratum of the workers’ consciousness (of their own needs). Indeed, much like the state, religion remained a (culture) tool of the bourgeois class to oppress the proletariat (workers). It thus induced the proletariat to participate passively and preconsciously in their oppression, while at the same time it deflected attention away from the more crucial objective: the active promotion of a unified workers’ consciousness.

For Marx, neither value explained the actual production of the commodity. Nonetheless, the purpose of theory was not simply to interpret society, but, as he famously stated in German Ideology (1845), “to change it.” To this day, the motto remains an important feature of social action and historical materialism, the latter referring to how social and economic relations have evolved through various modes of production (i.e., feudalism, capitalism, and socialism). Driving this evolutionary process have been the many episodes of class conflict or the antagonism between labor and capital, whereby the bourgeoisie used its ownership of the means of production (property, capital, interest, and rent) to force the proletariat to work without due compensation.

The exploitation of workers, then, was not simply a fact of life in capitalist society; it also constituted the overlooked, yet vital consequence of the free market ideology of liberalism. Adam Smith (1723–1790), for instance, theorized that a free market was based on the maximum allocation of resources, or the unhindered exchange between buyer and seller (laissez-faire).Thus, if the seller and buyer, in this case, were allowed to trade freely on the market, the market would yield an optimal price for goods and services.

In his critique of liberalism, Marx theorized that surplus value was generated from the false exchange of the value of commodities, or rather how the price of commodities failed to register the actual value of labor power. His social theory of value was based on the structural forces of the base (economy, production, capital) that determined the content and value of the superstructure (culture, religion, rights, and laws). Marx expressed these material elements/divisions in terms of worker (self-) alienation or the worker’s separation from the production process. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx argued that the bourgeoisie used its ownership of the means of production to isolate or marginalize the proletariat from what the proletariat produced. More often than not, this involved lost compensation (surplus value) or work wages, which Marx referred to in terms of relative and absolute surplus value. According to Marx, the only way to emancipate the worker was to dissolve collectively the very class arrangement that allowed the bourgeoisie to exploit the worker. Communism, as he states in the Communist Manifesto, “deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: All that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.”

Alienation And Labor Power

Nonetheless, while the Marx of the 1840s focused on the alienation of the production process, the older, more mature Marx turned to scientific thought to formulate his systematic critique of capitalism. In Capital, Marx (1867/1978) distinguished between the use value of labor (“production activity of definite kind and exercised with a definite aim,” 309) and exchange value to explain the relationship between surplus value and the fetish of commodities. As the political intellectual leader of the Communist Party, Marx would help to found and organize the First and Second International movements of workers, the platforms/agendas for the international struggle of workers. The First International (1848–1889), for example, met annually to discuss and adopt new goals for advancing the workers’ movement and was born from the revolutionary and reactionary events of 1848. Marx fought vigorously to defend his radical and, at times, uncompromising views of the revolution, often referring to the competing views of revisionists and anarchists, such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, as petit bourgeoisie. Such angry dismissals represented the many tensions not only between and among socialists but also within Marxism itself.

No one tension was perhaps greater than the role of national culture. Marx, in fact, believed that cultural factors should not determine the content of the worker’s revolutionary goals. As noted above, his distinction between base (economics) and superstructure (culture) was designed to show how the meaning of the latter could be reduced to the former. Still, it would be remiss to say that Marx sought to oppose tout court the constitutive role of national culture. If nothing else, his views on the Jewish question and, even more important, his ambivalent position on the question of Irish independence, suggest that he had remained sympathetic to certain cultural factors throughout most, if not all, of his life.

Marx’s tacit acceptance of nationalism would inform many of Lenin’s views, which he expressed in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914). Lenin, for instance, believed that the rights of nationalities needed to be framed as a tactical right of workers, albeit much to the dismay of Rosa Luxemburg, who remained steadfast in her denial that national or cultural rights could be subsumed under Marxism. The debate, however, became an important focal point of the Second International (1889–1914) and would turn on the issue of whether nationalism could play a practical role in advancing the goals of the revolution. In particular, the issue pitted the leading Austro Marxists of the early twentieth century, namely Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, who argued that the proletariat had a right to cultural autonomy, against Lenin himself, who contended that all worker nations possessed an equal right to secession.

Lenin criticized Bauer’s views of cultural autonomy, insisting that workers needed to organize into homogeneous national units. In his Critical Remarks on the National Question (1916), Lenin argued that the tactical alliances between workers and the local/national bourgeoisie were necessary to promote the right to self-determination of oppressed nations of workers, and that all national movements of workers were entitled to the right to secede from their oppressors. His views on the right to national self-determination thus remained a crucial part of his thinking on capitalism, especially with regard to his thesis that imperialism represented the last stage of capitalism.

Marxist-Leninism

Lenin’s thesis on imperialism contains four main tenets:

The most powerful nation-states had divided the world into areas of colonial or territorial possession.
Financial or lending capital had led to the rapid overseas expansion or the monopolization of overseas resources.
Cheap labor was sought overseas to generate greater profits.
A worldwide revolution would result from continuing global expansion of capital and colonialism.

Marxist-Leninism, or Lenin’s view on self-determination and imperialism, would resurface at the third meeting of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly (1948), where the Soviet bloc members insisted on an equal right to self-determination of all colonial peoples, while the Western bloc states maintained that the right of self-determination in the colonies was neither justiciable nor enforceable.

In 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 1514, which recognized the colonial peoples’ right to determine their political destiny. This, however, did not immediately end the colonial wars at the time, including the French Algerian War (1954–1962). One of the most brilliant leaders and thinkers of the Algerian resistance, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), brought together many of Lenin’s ideas with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to formulate a third world revolutionary model predicated on the idea of the absolute means of violence, or the synthesis of armed resistance and self-determination of all colonial subjects. The Third International (1919) was defined largely in terms of the right to self-determination of the oppressed, colonial peoples.

Still, the new Marxist-Leninism orthodoxy was not without its critics. In fact, not long after Lenin’s victory, some Marxist thinkers would return to Hegel’s holism or notion of totality to challenge the reductionism and positivism of orthodox Marxism. Western Marxism, as the reformist movement would come to be known, featured the contributions of Georg Lukàcs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci and was one of the first intellectual movements to break with or to criticize Lenin’s victory and the state of Marxist-Leninism in the early 1920s. More than anything, the movement constituted a vital link between the first-generation theorists of the Frankfurt school and Marxism. Lukàcs’s return to Hegelianism, for instance, posited that orthodox Marxism had relied on the inert immediacy of facts to validate its laws and concepts. Lukàcs sought to relate these facts to a broader, more dynamic understanding of society as a whole. Much like Lukàcs, Gramsci sought to revise Marxism by demonstrating that civil society, rather than being subordinate to the state, was in fact autonomous from the state. His solution to class/ cultural conflict or the dialectical tensions between the state and civil society was to formulate a counterhegemonic civil society (historical bloc).

Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (Frankfurt school), which was established in the mid-1920s and which many consider the second stage of Marxism, built upon these ideas by theorizing about the themes of political and social oppression, in particular, totalitarianism and consumerism. The three most noted thinkers—Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—understood that power of technical or instrumental reason constituted a distinctive feature of twentieth-century society, and that the totalitarian state (Nazism) represented its most virulent political form (ideological). An equally oppressive form of instrumental logic was consumerism, or the manipulation of cultural life and values by the so-called culture industry. In these two contexts, instrumental logic and reason had subverted the political consciousness.

The purpose of critical theory, then, was to expose the reification of societal relations, that is, to examine the social genesis of facts and the ideological dynamics of political structures. In his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” for instance, Horkheimer argued that positivist science, which treated facts and values as separate, was based on a false objectivism that obscured the social content of facts and ideas. This would be a theme that would later inform Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1947 work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and their rejection of the liberating potential of the Enlightenment principles of freedom and rationality. By championing the negativity of dialectical thought, Adorno and Horkheimer believed that they were exposing the totalizing elements of instrumental reason. Whether there was a constructive lesson to be learned here, however, was never quite clear. As has already been suggested, Adorno was never a self-proclaimed political thinker, nor did he wish others to appropriate his own ideas. This might explain why he and Horkheimer preferred to expose the totalizing elements of society without offering an alternative that could unite theory with social action. Ultimately, their negative critique raised the following question: How were the oppressed to resist the status quo power that had fully colonized their own consciousness?

Jürgen Habermas’s answer to this question was to resituate reason in an intersubjective, communicative framework. For him, to recover the lost, critical elements/dimension of reason was to uncover its cognitive dimension: communicative reason. In his view, when we struggle to reach mutual consensus, we also apply or draw from our existing cultural understandings of the world. These cultural understandings exist prior to and are communicated through our exchange of ideas, thereby reflecting a repository of cultural understandings. Habermas refers to this repository as life world: a holistic and creative social force that is constantly shaping our views and determining how we rationalize.

This rationalization process can take many forms, but generally, it reflects the differentiation of systems functioning or the implementation, enforcement, and reproduction of rules, norms, and principles through institutions and political structures. When existing social institutions or mechanisms fail to respond to our interests and needs, this unleashes what some contemporary Marxist thinkers have referred to as a second stage of Marxism.

But the critical and innovative framework of the Frankfurt school also contained a dark side or deep skepticism concerning social progress. This would prove, in many ways, self-prophetic. Rather than endorsing a critical social theory of emancipation in the twentieth century, the first generation of Frankfurt school theorists would end up embodying the very nihilism that it sought to overcome. This negativity, combined with Habermas’s revisionist account of Marx’s theory of social value, would ultimately dampen interest in the Frankfurt school.

The Paris student riots of 1968, however, marked the resurgence of Marxism. By this time, Marxist thinkers had returned to the state to address its structural determinants (power and ideological function). Most notable of these thinkers were Louis Althusser, Ralph Miliband, and Nicos Poulantzas. For them, the question was not so much that the state would disappear but rather how Marxists had failed to realize the functional role of the state in advancing the interests of workers. As this structuralist turn suggested, Marxist thinkers had not explicated the relationship between the state and societal transformation. Accordingly, Marxist thinkers first needed to rethink the changing design and purpose of the state with regard to building social solidarity or a socialist society, because it was precisely the welfare state that had absorbed so much of the energy of the radical left. This statist trend would also be complemented by the rise of Marxism in international studies, most notably Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, one of the first systematic theories of the international division of labor, which addressed the accumulation of capital in the metropole, semiperiphery, and periphery.

Poststructuralism And Global Politics

Another challenge facing Marxist thinkers at this time was whether the social determinism of Marxism had eroded the radicality of Hegel’s thought. Here the central question was whether the historical determinism of dialectical thought had undermined the capacity to locate (the margins of) the meaning of difference or the radical contingency of social arrangements. Indeed, by the 1970s and 1980s, the advent of poststructuralist would mark an important departure from many of the fundamental tenets of Marxism (i.e., Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault), including the workers’ consciousness, class division, and dialectical materialism, hence the Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationality, and dialectics. In valorizing difference and decentering the meaning of truth and the subject, therefore, poststructuralism sought to destabilize the universalist meaning of political structures. Critics have argued that this strategy works against the social empowerment of groups; that it disempowers the very oppressed groups whose difference and identity it sought to valorize.

Whether or not the politics of difference signaled the growing fragmentation of the radical left, it is important to stress the resilience of Marxist ideas. Indeed, while it could be said that the fall of the Soviet Union has diminished the prominence of Marxism, it has not undermined Marxism as a source of thinking in international politics per se. In fact, Marxism has continued to have a profound impact on the developing world with development theory and with the works of Raul Prebish, Gunthur Franck, and Fernando Cardoso. Most important, Marxism continues to play an important role in defining the underlying issues of trade, health, poverty, and debt relief in the developing world. The rise of Hugo Chávez, the socialist populist leader of Venezuela, illustrates, for the most part, the continued importance of drawing on Marxist ideas to address the effects and structural problems of global capitalism and Western imperialism. What this should suggest is that Marxism remains influential in the developing world; that its spirit, as Jacques Derrida would later state in his political writings, still pervades society.

Bibliography:

Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Cummins, I. Marx, Engels, and National Movements. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge, 1995.
Kolakowski, L. Main Currents of Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Lenin,V. I. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings. Edited by Henry M. Christman. New York: Dover, 1987.
Luxemburg, R. The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. Edited by Friedrich Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1867.
Nimni, E. Marxism and Nationalism: The Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis. London: Pluto Press, 1991.
Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

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