Hence, Marxism sees the contending actors as precursors to the fundamental class struggle and this struggle as the precursor to all out war and revolution. The Revolution of briefly established the Paris Commune and in terms of dialectical materialism this premature quasi-communist revolution serves as an early example of the perpetually increasing tensions between classes of individuals and the conflicts that result from the pursuit of self-interests.
Furthermore, Marxist theory helps explain the state level of analysis, which examines the manner in which states act. Vladimir Lenin offers insight as to how socialism views the interests of capitalist states and their tendencies towards conflict with other states. Lenin proposed that class struggle within states materializes into war between states because capitalist states are bound to clash in pursuit of profits and political advantage.
Subsequently, Marxism in its modern day applications allows theorists to consider the implications of the nature of the international system level and the eventuality of conflict on a global scale.
Marxism explores the super-structural causes of war within the global capitalist system, which views socio-political conflicts as events bred by the very structure of interaction among states. Lenin explains these sharp antagonisms clearly:. Peaceful alliances prepare the grounds for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.
Socio-political and economic factors may determine the likelihood of both war and peace between nations; however, these factors will always ensure conflict on some level and to some degree.
So, Marxism proposes that on an international level states interact within a global capitalist system, which causes the eventful mishap of both military aggression and reluctant economic cooperation. In hindsight, many Marxists may view Communist Russia as a socialist experiment not its realization; more like a mature and longer lasting version of the Paris Commune during the Revolution of , while other Marxists did not view the Soviet Union as absolutely Marxist in general.
Marxists may propose that Stalinist despotism of the Soviet Union had doomed international communism and any real prospects of a Marxist led Socialist state from its beginning. This new chapter makes Marxism even more pertinent in the post cold war order.
The late Francois Furet epitomizes this belief:. But the end of the Soviet world in no way alters the call for another society, and for that very reason we have every reason to believe that the massive failure of communism will continue to enjoy attenuating circumstances in world opinion, and perhaps even renewed admiration. He traces the development of different historical modes of production and argues that the present capitalist one will be replaced by communism.
Capital Volume 1 Available here. In it, he details the ultimate source of wealth under capitalism: the exploited labour of workers. Workers are free to sell their labour to any capitalist, but since they must sell their labour in order to survive, they are dominated by the class of capitalists as a whole.
And through their labour, workers reproduce and reinforce both the economic conditions of their existence and also the social and ideological structure of their society. And one of the figures most associated with these discussions is the geographer David Harvey. Sperber discusses Marx in his many roles — a son, a student, a journalist and political activist — and introduces the multitude of characters connected with him. A penetrating book, it connects the origins of racism to the structures of economic inequality.
Jacobin magazine — edited by Bhaskar Sunkara available online. Communism will free workers from capitalist alienation, in which the worker cannot imagine the product of his or her work and measure what is produced against that ideal. The contemporary forms of alienation include data processing in first world countries and deskilled factory production increasingly in third world countries. A central problem applying Marx today is whether his model of work is inapplicable to what most people today call work.
Many have criticized Marx as being limited by his nostalgia for older, cottage craft production. Capitalism then transforms use value the actual use of what is produced into exchange value what the commodity can be traded for, in a market. But in the production of a Nike shoe, where alienation occurs is less clear. For example, is advertising alienated labour? Any answer has to begin by asking, for whom, under what conditions?
That statement has deep resonance for me. So much McDonaldized, Disneyfied, Nike culture is vulgar and mean. Capitalism requires that we want more. Contrary to Marx, people do not seem especially alienated from the products of their own labour, maybe because—just as Marx observed and object to—they cannot recognize the commodities as the products of their own labour.
Yet again I come back to Marx for my own humanist critique of contemporary capitalism. What I follow Marx in fearing is that fewer people take their work seriously for what they produce. These debates are not going to end soon. On the other hand, as a pre-sociological theorist, Marx leaves us with at least two conceptualizations that reoccur throughout other theories.
One is his notion of false consciousness p. History has always been the history of class conflict, Marx argues with particular effect. Yet in the revolution against capitalism, the proletariat now the revolutionary class, just as the capitalists were once the revolutionary class against feudalism has a unique possibility. Because the means of production now can provide enough to go around, the proletariat can give up its particular class interest and take on the interest of all humanity, including the former capitalists.
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