Marxism: The Foundation of Communist Thoughts

8/14/2019 Marxism: The Foundation of Communist Thoughts

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brilliance of the famous communication expert,brilliance of the famous communication expert,Marshall McLuhan, who predicted the world willMarshall McLuhan, who predicted the world willbecome smaller until we all become part of whatbecome smaller until we all become part of whathe called the GLOBAL VILLAGE. He coined thehe called the GLOBAL VILLAGE. He coined the

term years before the birth of the Internet theterm years before the birth of the Internet themedia that allowed people from around the worldmedia that allowed people from around the worldto live as if they all belong to a village to live as if they all belong to a village communicating in real time despite the distance.communicating in real time despite the distance.

Who could have thought that what McLuhan said inWho could have thought that what McLuhan said inhis time would still be happening years after hishis time would still be happening years after hisconception of a brilliant idea?conception of a brilliant idea?


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,McLuhan, challenged the world not onlywith his brilliant mind but also withrevolutionary ideas which are still

happening until now, 123 years after hisdeath and 166 years after the publication ofhis most famous document, The CommunistManifesto, which he wrote at the age of30.


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Good morning! After talking aboutAsian Philosophy where we were introduced to thedistinctive values and ways of thinking among the

people of Asia, let me welcome you to a totallydifferent topic today the philosophy and

philosopher that challenged the whole world in the

middle of the 1800s and still challenging thedifferent classes in the society today.


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:ARXISM THE FOUNDATION

OF COMMUNISTTHOUGHTS


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Key terms and names

CapitalismLabour

Dialectical materialismHistorical materialismCommunist ManifestoAlienationClass struggleExploitation


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Key names

Karl MarxHegel

Ludwig FeuerbachFrederick Engels


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Let me begin with the ENDof this report:

THE IMPLICATIONFOR EDUCATION


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We are all educators. A closer lookat what we do would make us

realize that we are, after all, part ofthe working class.Our understanding of the roles we

play at work, as teachers, public

servants, or employees can help usfind creative ways on how to carryout our duties at work without

losing ourselves.


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Examples:

Nationalcontext

Personal level


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Tama na, sobra na.Gutom na kami!

PerfectoVersola

His home could only fit a 2m x 3mflooring made of old tabla ( )wood and a

.small antique closet

- -68 year old

,Mang Pering was among the 2 000 sugar

farm workers from the United Luisita

( ) Workers Union ULWU staged a- ,plantation wide strike on November 16

.2004


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MANILA, PhilippinesFive years afterthe bloody Hacienda Luisita

massacre, justice has yet to beserved to the victims and theirfamilies.

Hacienda Luisita massacre remembered

By Abigail Kwok.INQUIRER net

: : / /First Posted 14 05 00 11 16 2009


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,f w e w o n t d e m a n d w eo n t g e t w h a t. e d e s e r v e

International Language Study Institute

-Part time ESL Instructor

,January 5 2010

---Letter 4 conditions

,January 18 2010


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Capitalismxploitat

ion Class struggleUnderstanding Karl Marx s ideas willUnderstanding Karl Marx s ideas will

inspire us toinspire us to step backwardstep backward andand REFLECTREFLECToo n our ownn our own struggle struggle at our workplacat our workplac


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Inspire us not justtointerpret the world,but also to change theworld through

education.


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Communism

Any social system in which allproperty, or at least all productive

property, is owned by the group,or community, instead of byindividuals (Mc Fadden, 1982).

A society in which each person

should contribute according totheir ability and receive accordingto their need (Wolff, 2008).

A classless society with equal


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:// . . / / / , , , .http www time com time covers 0 16641 19480223 00 html

February 1948

ARL HEINRICH MARXather ofcommunistthoughtsphilosopher

evolutionary communievolutionary communi
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480223,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480223,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480223,00.html


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Family Background

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 inTrier, an ancient cathedral town in

the German Rhineland. Both hisparents were Jewish, thedescendants of many generationsof rabbis.

His father, Heinrich Marx, asuccessful legal official, was amoderate liberal with a deep faith

in the power of reason.


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Family Background

The relationship between father andson was close: Marx carried a

picture of Heinrich till his death,when it was buried with him.Karls mother, Henrietta Marx, who

had emigrated from Holland to

Prussia, never learned to read andwrite German(at least accdng. tosome evidence).

Karl has three sisters: Sophie, Emilie


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Educational Background

Educated at the high school in Trier,he received a liberal education with

a strong emphasis on the classics.He does not seem to have been anoutstanding pupil, and his

surviving school essays give little

hint of his future greatness.qIn 1835 Marx went to Bonn

University to study law.


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Like his fellow students, he got drunk,ran up debts, fought duels, and evenspent a night in jail for brawling.

At 17 years old, Karl concentrated onfun and games instead of studies. A taste for writing bad romantic poems

(only some of which, thankfully, havesurvived)

was made worse when he becamesecretly engaged to Jenny vonWestphalen during the summervacation of 1836. Jenny was four

years his senior, from a higher socialbracket.


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There was opposition to the matchfrom both their parents. Some of thevon Westphalens were extreme

reactionaries (Jennys brotherbecame a Prussian cabinet minister inthe 1850s), while Heinrich Marx wasafraid that his sons demonic spiritwould lead them to disaster. Willyou everand that is not theleast painful doubt of my heartwill you ever be capable of trulyhuman, domestic happiness?

This parental opposition may help toex lain wh it was seven ears before


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While on honeymoon with Jenny atKreuznachin March 1843, Marx

wrote a manuscript calledContribution to the Critique ofHegels Philosophy. It was notpublished until 1927.


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Marxs links with his family werevirtually broken off after his

fathers death in May 1838. Hedoes not seem to have got on verywell with his mother, although sheprovided him with quite large sums

of money over the years.


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Marx seems to have hoped to pursue acareer as a professional philosopher.He devoted much time to studying

the early Greek thinkers, and in April1841 received his doctorate for athesis entitled Difference Betweenthe Democritean and EpicureanPhilosophy of Nature. Althoughobscurely written, and stronglyHegelian, the thesis shows Marxsgrowing impatience with the highlyidealistic philosophy of his friend

Bruno Bauer, who sought to reduceever thin to human consciousness.


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Personal and Family Life

Had a teaching career in 1941Attempted a career in journalism; he

wrote for The Rhineland Gazetteinn 1942.Within 6 months, the government

suppressed the paper. His

journalistic career in thenewspaper field had lasted justabout 6 months.

He literally bounced around


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Marx lived by borrowing moneyfrom friends and relatives and even

pawning his wedding presents.Karl Marx and Jenny had extrememisfortune in the family. Three oftheir 6 children died within a year

of birth.The Marx family life in London was

one of extreme poverty.


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Karl Marx usually spent from 9 a.m. till7 p.m. writing in the British museum(one of the worlds largest libraries).

Referring to his major work Capital,Jenny, his wife is credited with sayingthat no one ever wrote about moneyand had so little of it as her husband.

Factually, the Marx family survivedprimarily because of the never-endinggenerosity of Frederick Engels, Karlsfriend and collaborator.


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The only time that Marx ever reallyearned any money to support hisfamily was during a ten-year periodfrom 1851-1861. Back then, hewrote for the New York Tribune (thelargest newspaper in the US with a

circulation of 200,000.) In later years, the circulation of theNew York Tribune declined. Marxssalary was cut in halfand he got

paid only for the articles chosen for


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Marx even had to write to Engels onJanuary 21, 1859, to request for

enough postage money to send themanuscript of his principal work,Capital, to the publisher.

Marxs wife died on Dec. 2, 1881.

Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883.Frederick Engels delivered the

eulogies at the graves of both Karl

Marx and his wife.


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Marxs IDEAS


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According to Aristotle, everything in theworld had a purpose.

That purpose gave the thing its place in

the world. So, for example, he arguedthat bodies were naturally at rest.Motion, change, was abnormal,something which happened whenbodies were disturbed, shaken out of

their natural places. And whendisturbed, bodies would move backto their natural places, where theywould be, once again, at rest.

This way of looking at the world servedtwo ur oses.


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First, it provided a sophisticatedversion of the Christian myth, of

the belief that the universe andeverything in it had been createdby God. For the idea thateverything has a purpose implies

that it fits into a design, a designmade by an all-powerful, all-knowing God with some particular

end in view.


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Secondly, it corresponded to thestructure of feudal society, in whicheveryone had their place, whether

nobleman, guildman or serf, a placeinto which you were born and inwhich your children would follow. Atthe apex of the feudal system stoodthe king, just as God was at the

centre of the universe. According tothis system of ideas, the stable andharmonious feudal order, in whicheveryone had their place, mirrored

the stability and harmony of Godsuniverse.

H l F b h d


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Hegel, Feuerbach andMarx

HEGEL: Thoughts create reality. =God created the world.

MARX: Thoughts reflect the worldand do NOT CREATE it.

MARX: Hegel fell into the illusion ofconceiving the real as a product ofillusion.

FEUERBACH: Religion takes whatare human powers the ability tothink, to act on and change the world,and so on --- and transfers them to an

imaginary being, God.


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Religion is the opiumof the people.


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But two developments began tochallenge this system of ideas: thegrowth of science and thegrowth of a new class. The newtraders and manufacturers, thenew bourgeoisie, derived their

power, not from the armed menthey could command or the landthat they owned, but from their

control of money, capital, and


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The new science was materialistic.Its theories involved no purpose,no design, no God.

Souls, angels, devils and God himselfeverything that lacked a body,that had a purely spiritual

existencedid not exist at all.


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Marx: LABOUR IS THE ESSENCE OFMAN AND THE BASIS OF SOCIETY(Callinicos, p. 66).

Man is a labouring animal. It is justin his work upon the objectiveworldthat man proves himself to

be a species being. This productionis his active species life.Throughthis production, nature appears as

his work and his reality


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MARX: The animal is immediately one with its

.life activity It does not distinguish.itself from it It is its life

.activity Man makes his life activityitself the object of his will and of

.his consciousness He has consciouslife activity Conscious life

activity distinguishes manimmediately from animal life activity( ). CW iii 276


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The Beehive analogy

A beehive is a case of a highly organised division oflabour in which each bee has its allotted task tofulfill in the hives economy. But the bees work isrepetitive. It has not changed for many millions ofyears. What a bee can do is limited in advance to avery narrow range of activities determined by itsgenetic make-up.

Human beings are not subject to this limitation. Theycan change, and improve on, their methods of

production. They are able to do this because oftheir superior mental equipment. Human beingspossess the power of reflection. They can, in otherwords, step back from what they are doing,and compare it with other ways of achievingthe same objective. They can thus criticiseand improve on what they are doing. Theycan even think up new goals to pursue


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MY OWN THOUGHTS: As humanbeings, we have the power to reflect.Perhaps we have the same goals;

However, although our goals are thesame, we have our own differentways of accomplishing them. Andreflection on what we already did inthe past would guide us in choosing

the path that we want to take in orderto accomplish these goals. Thats thegood thing about men, according toKarl Marx. We are not like bees

which do their tasks repetitivelyever sin le da .


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Marx is careful to stress thatconsciousness is inseparablefrom the productive activity inwhich human beings engage.

MARX: It is not consciousness of men

, ,that determines their being but on,the contrary their social being whichdetermines their consciousness

(Callinicos, p. 64).


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If follows that human beings arefundamentally social creatures. Itdoesnt make any sense toconceive of people as existingoutside society.

If production is the most

fundamental human activity, itfollows that when we analysesociety, we should give most

attention to the way in which


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Materialism

Materialism, the belief thatthoughts reflect the world, anddoes not create it, lay at the basisof his creation of history.

hat is history?hat is history?


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MARX:

The history of allhitherto existing society

is the history of classstruggle.


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MARX: Human beings are first andforemost, PRODUCERS.

Their production has two aspects,

material and social. Firstly, it is the activity through whichmen and women seek to meet theirneeds by acting on and transformingnature. This implies a certain

organisation of producti on, thepossession of the appropriate tools,and so on.

Secondly, production is a social

process, in which people cooperateto roduce the thin s the need.


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Labour, he writes, is first of all aprocess between man and nature, aprocess by which man, through his

own actions, mediates, regulates andcontrols the metabolism betweenhimself and nature.

Changes in the labour process enableus to produce more efficiently, and

thereby to expand our control overnature.

To understand what Marx meant by therelations of production we have to

distinguish between two senses inwhich roduction is social.


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First, work is necessarily a socialactivity since it depends upon thecooperation of a number ofindividuals in order to achieve acommon goal. In this respect, therelationships between individuals

are determined by the materialconstraints of producing in acertain way. The allocation of tasks

to the producers will reflect the


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Relations of production are, in classsociety, not relations betweenindividual and individual, butbetween worker and capitalist,between farmer and landlord, etc.


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Marx arguesthat we cannotunderstand the

nature ofproduction, and

therefore thenature of

society,

withoutexamining who

controls themeans of

production (p.

85).


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Marx argues that we cannot understand the nature ofproduction, and therefore the nature of society,without examining who controls the means ofproduction. For two reasons. First, once we havegot beyond the most primitive forms of agriculture,

no labour process can take place without means ofproduction. Indeed, even slash and burn agriculturedepends on having relatively free access to land.

Secondly, the distribution of the means of productionprovides the key to the division of society intoclasses. For there is no inherent necessity in thelabour process which requires that the producers,those who do the actual work, should control themeans of production, the tools and raw materialswith which they work.


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Class society rests on exploitation,that is, on the appropriation ofsurplus labour by a minority who

control the means of production.However, in the early phases ofhuman development, what Marxcalled primitive communism, inwhich the means of productionwere owned in common, there waslittle or no surplus labour. Almost

all the working day was taken up


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It was only thus, through thecreation of a working class owningnothing but their ability to work,

their labour power, that thecapitalist mode of production coulddevelop.


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Exploitation in this case depends, inthe first instance, on the propertyowners economic power, and noton his monopoly of violence.Because there is no physicalcompulsion involved, because the

worker is legally free, and his orher agreement to work for thecapitalist is apparently quite

voluntary, exploitation is here


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MY OWN THOUGHTS: When myemployer said, Those who want togo may go. Bukas ang pinto sapaglabas nyo.

Some would even say, If you dontlike it here, then you may leave.

This is concealed exploitation.


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ALIENATION

For a moment, though, leave asidethe exploitation. Leave aside theendemic poverty, leave aside thecyclical crises. There remains thefact that capitalism pervertshuman nature. Marx called thisperversion "alienation."


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What does this mean? Keep in mindthat creative, social labour iswhat makes us human in thefirst place -- work, in other words.Under capitalism, however, wedon't have any real control over

our work. So the very thing thatmakes us human, is the thing thissystem takes from us.


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Firstly, the fact that labour is external to theworker -- i.e., does not belong to his essentialbeing; that he, therefore, does not confirmhimself in his work, but denies himself, feels

miserable and not happy, does not developfree mental and physical energy, butmortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence,the worker feels himself only when he is notworking; when he is working, he does not feelhimself. He is at home when he is notworking, and not at home when he isworking. His labour is, therefore, notvoluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is,therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but amere means to satisfy needs outside itself.

Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by


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Capitalist crisis is not just animpersonal economic process. Itmeans mass unemployment in therich countries, and famine andepidemics in many parts of the

Third World.


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Communism can onlyhappen whencapitalism collapsed.


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What Marx meant was this: Workers, according to theview he is attacking, are too debased and corruptto do anything about capitalism.This situation willchange only under socialism, which will create anew sort of human being, one that no longer suffers

from the defects of people under capitalism. Butthis seems a counsel of despair. How will socialismever be achieved ifcapitalism is able to prevent themasses from recognising that their interest lies inits abolition? Only if an enlightened minority ofsocialists who are somehow exempt from the

conditioning of capitalism transform society for themasses. This apparently highly materialist viewthus collapses into idealism, since it supposes thatthere are people who have risen above thepressures of bourgeois society, and therefore abovethe class struggle .


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Workers are not simply passivelyshaped by society. Capitalism,because it is a form of society based

on exploitation, that is, on thecontradiction between capital andlabour, gives rise to the classstruggle. The effect of this struggle isto transform the working class.The

pressure of the battle with theemployer forces workers to organisecollectively, and to behaveincreasingly as a class conscious of

its interest in transforming society.The ex erience of stru le


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The class struggle is also decisive inestablishing socialism. Marx did notbelieve that capitalism would

collapse under the pressure of itscontradictions. The victory of theworking class was in no senseinevitable. The outcome of hisdialectic, unlike Hegels, wasnot predetermined in advance.Everything depended

ultimately on the


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Men make their own history, butthey do not make it just as they

please; they do not make it undercircumstances chosen by

themselves, but under

circumstances directlyencountered, given andtransmitted from the past.


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IALECTICALMATERIALISM Matter is self-

sufficient

Matter needs no Godto create it.

It needs no God, as aPrime Mover, tobestow any and all

forms of motion,such as life, upon it.

It needs to God, as anintelligent designer,to account for the

order in the

ISTORICAL MATERIALISM Focused on class

struggle and

exploitation in pastand present societyand on the mannerin which society is

irresistibly evolvingtoward idealcommunist society.


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IALECTICAL MATERIALISM

Atheistic both in itscontent and itspurpose

ISTORICAL MATERIALISM

The heart and soul ofmoderncommunism


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Thank you!

Marxism: The Foundation of Communist Thoughts

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