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16.1C: The Marxist Critique of Capitalism

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Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually be followed by socialism.

Learning Objectives

• Examine Karl Marx’s view on capitalism and the criticisms of the capitalist system
• Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions and be followed by socialism.
• Marxists define capital as “a social, economic relation” between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital.
• Revolutionary socialists believe that capitalism can only be overcome through revolution.
• Social democrats believe that structural change can come slowly through political reforms to capitalism.
• Marxists define capital as “a social, economic relation” between people (rather than between people and things).
• Normative Marxism advocates a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that would lead to socialism, before eventually transforming into communism after class antagonisms and the state ceased to exist.
• revolution : A political upheaval in a government or nation-state characterized by great change.
• socialism : Any of various economic and political philosophies that support social equality, collective decision-making, distribution of income based on contribution and public ownership of productive capital and natural resources, as advocated by socialists.
• progressive : Favoring or promoting progress; advanced.

Capitalism has been the subject of criticism from many perspectives during its history. Criticisms range from people who disagree with the principles of capitalism in its entirety, to those who disagree with particular outcomes of capitalism. Among those wishing to replace capitalism with a different method of production and social organization, a distinction can be made between those believing that capitalism can only be overcome with revolution (e.g., revolutionary socialism) and those believing that structural change can come slowly through political reforms to capitalism (e.g., classic social democracy).

Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions and be followed by socialism. Marxists define capital as “a social, economic relation” between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers. In brief, they argue that the owners of the means of production exploit the workforce.

In Karl Marx’s view, the dynamic of capital would eventually impoverish the working class and thereby create the social conditions for a revolution. Private ownership over the means of production and distribution is seen as creating a dependence of non-owning classes on the ruling class, and ultimately as a source of restriction of human freedom.

Marxists have offered various related lines of argument claiming that capitalism is a contradiction-laden system characterized by recurring crises that have a tendency towards increasing severity. They have argued that this tendency of the system to unravel, combined with a socialization process that links workers in a worldwide market, create the objective conditions for revolutionary change. Capitalism is seen as just one stage in the evolution of the economic system.

Normative Marxism advocates for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that would lead to socialism, before eventually transforming into communism after class antagonisms and the state cease to exist. Marxism influenced social democratic and labor parties as well as some moderate democratic socialists, who seek change through existing democratic channels instead of revolution, and believe that capitalism should be regulated rather than abolished.

Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

Tutor in Philosophy and Sociology, Deakin University

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In 1845, Karl Marx declared : “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Change it he did.

Political movements representing masses of new industrial workers, many inspired by his thought, reshaped the world in the 19th and 20th centuries through revolution and reform. His work influenced unions, labour parties and social democratic parties, and helped spark revolution via communist parties in Europe and beyond.

Around the world, “Marxist” governments were formed, who claimed to be committed to his principles, and who upheld dogmatic versions of his thought as part of their official doctrine.

Marx’s thought was groundbreaking. It came to stimulate arguments in every major language, in philosophy, history, politics and economics. It even helped to found the discipline of sociology.

Although his influence in the social sciences and humanities is not what it once was, his work continues to help theorists make sense of the complex social structures that shape our lives.

Read more: Explainer: the ideas of Foucault

Marx was writing when mid-Victorian capitalism was at its Dickensian worst, analysing how the new industrialism was causing radical social upheaval and severe urban poverty. Of his many writings, perhaps the most well known and influential are the rather large Capital Volume 1 (1867) and the very small Communist Manifesto (1848), penned with his collaborator Frederick Engels.

On economics alone, he made important observations that influenced our understanding of the role of boom/bust cycles, the link between market competition and rapid technological advances, and the tendency of markets towards concentration and monopolies.

Marx also made prescient observations regarding what we now call “ globalisation ”. He emphasised “the newly created connections […] of the world market” and the important role of international trade.

At the time, property owners held the vast majority of wealth, and their wealth rapidly accumulated through the creation of factories.

The labour of the workers – the property-less masses – was bought and sold like any other commodity. The workers toiled for starvation wages, as “appendages of the machine[s]”, in Marx’s famous phrase. By holding them in this position, the owners grew ever richer, siphoning off the value created by this labour.

This would inevitably lead to militant international political organisation in response.

It is from this we get Marx’s famous call in 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolutions:

workers of the world unite!

To do philosophy properly, Marx thought, we have to form theories that capture the concrete details of real people’s lives – to make theory fully grounded in practice.

His primary interest wasn’t simply capitalism. It was human existence and our potential.

His enduring philosophical contribution is an insightful, historically grounded perspective on human beings and industrial society.

Marx observed capitalism wasn’t only an economic system by which we produced food, clothing and shelter; it was also bound up with a system of social relations.

Work structured people’s lives and opportunities in different ways depending on their role in the production process: most people were either part of the “owning class” or “working class”. The interests of these classes were fundamentally opposed, which led inevitably to conflict between them.

On the basis of this, Marx predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism leading to equally inevitable working-class revolutions. However, he seriously underestimated capitalism’s adaptability. In particular, the way that parliamentary democracy and the welfare state could moderate the excesses and instabilities of the economic system.

Marx argued social change is driven by the tension created within an existing social order through technological and organisational innovations in production.

Technology-driven changes in production make new social forms possible, such that old social forms and classes become outmoded and displaced by new ones. Once, the dominant class were the land owning lords. But the new industrial system produced a new dominant class: the capitalists.

Against the philosophical trend to view human beings as simply organic machines, Marx saw us as a creative and productive type of being. Humanity uses these capacities to transform the natural world. However, in doing this we also, throughout history, transform ourselves in the process. This makes human life distinct from that of other animals.

The conditions under which people live deeply shape the way they see and understand the world. As Marx put it:

men make their own history [but] they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.

Marx viewed human history as process of people progressively overcoming impediments to self-understanding and freedom. These impediments can be mental, material and institutional. He believed philosophy could offer ways we might realise our human potential in the world.

Theories, he said, were not just about “interpreting the world”, but “changing it”.

Individuals and groups are situated in social contexts inherited from the past which limit what they can do – but these social contexts afford us certain possibilities.

The present political situation that confronts us and the scope for actions we might take to improve it, is the result of our being situated in our unique place and time in history.

This approach has influenced thinkers across traditions and continents to better understand the complexities of the social and political world, and to think more concretely about prospects for change.

On the basis of his historical approach, Marx argued inequality is not a natural fact; it is socially created. He sought to show how economic systems such as feudalism or capitalism – despite being hugely complex historical developments – were ultimately our own creations.

Read more: Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful

Alienation and freedom

By seeing the economic system and what it produces as objective and independent of humanity, this system comes to dominate us. When systematic exploitation is viewed as a product of the “natural order”, humans are, from a philosophical perspective, “enslaved” by their own creation.

What we have produced comes to be viewed as alien to us. Marx called this process “alienation”.

Despite having intrinsic creative capacities, most of humanity experience themselves as stifled by the conditions in which they work and live. They are alienated a) in the production process (“what” is produced and “how”); b) from others (with whom they constantly compete); and c) from their own creative potential.

For Marx, human beings intrinsically strive toward freedom, and we are not really free unless we control our own destiny.

Marx believed a rational social order could realise our human capacities as individuals as well as collectively, overcoming political and economic inequalities.

Writing in a period before workers could even vote (as voting was restricted to landowning males) Marx argued “the full and free development of every individual” – along with meaningful participation in the decisions that shaped their lives – would be realised through the creation of a “classless society [of] the free and equal”.

Marx’s concept of ideology introduced an innovative way to critique how dominant beliefs and practices – commonly taken to be for the good of all – actually reflect the interests and reinforce the power of the “ruling” class.

For Marx, beliefs in philosophy, culture and economics often function to rationalise unfair advantages and privileges as “natural” when, in fact, the amount of change we see in history shows they are not.

He was not saying this is a conspiracy of the ruling class, where those in the dominant class believe things simply because they reinforce the present power structure.

Rather, it is because people are raised and learn how to think within a given social order. Through this, the views that seem eminently rational rather conveniently tend to uphold the distribution of power and wealth as they are.

Marx had always aspired to be a philosopher, but was unable to pursue it as a profession because his views were judged too radical for a university post in his native Prussia. Instead, he earned his living as a crusading journalist.

By any account, Marx was a giant of modern thought.

His influence was so far reaching that people are often unaware just how much his ideas have shaped their own thinking.

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Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.

1. Marx’s Life and Works

• 2.1. On The Jewish Question
• 2.2. Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction
• 2.3. 1844 Manuscripts
• 2.4. Theses on Feuerbach

3. Economics

4.1 the german ideology, 4.2 1859 preface, 4.3 functional explanation, 4.4 rationality, 4.5 alternative interpretations, 5. morality, other internet resources, related entries.

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus. On completion of his doctorate in 1841 Marx hoped for an academic job, but he had already fallen in with too radical a group of thinkers and there was no real prospect. Turning to journalism, Marx rapidly became involved in political and social issues, and soon found himself having to consider communist theory. Of his many early writings, four, in particular, stand out. ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’, and ‘On The Jewish Question’, were both written in 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , written in Paris 1844, and the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ of 1845, remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime.

The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, was also unpublished but this is where we see Marx beginning to develop his theory of history. The Communist Manifesto is perhaps Marx’s most widely read work, even if it is not the best guide to his thought. This was again jointly written with Engels and published with a great sense of excitement as Marx returned to Germany from exile to take part in the revolution of 1848. With the failure of the revolution Marx moved to London where he remained for the rest of his life. He now concentrated on the study of economics, producing, in 1859, his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy . This is largely remembered for its Preface, in which Marx sketches out what he calls ‘the guiding principles’ of his thought, on which many interpretations of historical materialism are based. Marx’s main economic work is, of course, Capital (Volume 1), published in 1867, although Volume 3, edited by Engels, and published posthumously in 1894, contains much of interest. Finally, the late pamphlet Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) is an important source for Marx’s reflections on the nature and organisation of communist society.

The works so far mentioned amount only to a small fragment of Marx’s opus, which will eventually run to around 100 large volumes when his collected works are completed. However the items selected above form the most important core from the point of view of Marx’s connection with philosophy, although other works, such as the 18 th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), are often regarded as equally important in assessing Marx’s analysis of concrete political events. In what follows, I shall concentrate on those texts and issues that have been given the greatest attention within the Anglo-American philosophical literature.

2. The Early Writings

The intellectual climate within which the young Marx worked was dominated by the influence of Hegel, and the reaction to Hegel by a group known as the Young Hegelians, who rejected what they regarded as the conservative implications of Hegel’s work. The most significant of these thinkers was Ludwig Feuerbach, who attempted to transform Hegel’s metaphysics, and, thereby, provided a critique of Hegel’s doctrine of religion and the state. A large portion of the philosophical content of Marx’s works written in the early 1840s is a record of his struggle to define his own position in reaction to that of Hegel and Feuerbach and those of the other Young Hegelians.

2.1 ‘On The Jewish Question’

In this text Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation — essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties — and human emancipation. Marx’s reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feud and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour, which we will explore below.

2.2 ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’

This work is home to Marx’s notorious remark that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’, a harmful, illusion-generating painkiller, and it is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. Just as importantly Marx here also considers the question of how revolution might be achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about the emancipation of society as a whole.

With regard to religion, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach’s claim in opposition to traditional theology that human beings had invented God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. While accepting much of Feuerbach’s account Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach on the grounds that he has failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Feuerbach’s view appears to be that belief in religion is purely an intellectual error and can be corrected by persuasion. Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx’s view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions. At first it is ‘deviously acknowledged’ by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community. But the state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.

Of course we are owed an answer to the question how such a society could be created. It is interesting to read Marx here in the light of his third Thesis on Feuerbach where he criticises an alternative theory. The crude materialism of Robert Owen and others assumes that human beings are fully determined by their material circumstances, and therefore to bring about an emancipated society it is necessary and sufficient to make the right changes to those material circumstances. However, how are those circumstances to be changed? By an enlightened philanthropist like Owen who can miraculously break through the chain of determination which ties down everyone else? Marx’s response, in both the Theses and the Critique, is that the proletariat can break free only by their own self-transforming action. Indeed if they do not create the revolution for themselves — in alliance, of course, with the philosopher — they will not be fit to receive it.

2.3 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cover a wide range of topics, including much interesting material on private property and communism, and on money, as well as developing Marx’s critique of Hegel. However, the manuscripts are best known for their account of alienated labour. Here Marx famously depicts the worker under capitalism as suffering from four types of alienated labour. First, from the product, which as soon as it is created is taken away from its producer. Second, in productive activity (work) which is experienced as a torment. Third, from species-being, for humans produce blindly and not in accordance with their truly human powers. Finally, from other human beings, where the relation of exchange replaces the satisfaction of mutual need. That these categories overlap in some respects is not a surprise given Marx’s remarkable methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he attempts to apply a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to demonstrate that all the categories of bourgeois economics — wages, rent, exchange, profit, etc. — are ultimately derived from an analysis of the concept of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated labour is supposed to be deducible from the previous one. However, Marx gets no further than deducing categories of alienated labour from each other. Quite possibly in the course of writing he came to understand that a different methodology is required for approaching economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a very rich text on the nature of alienated labour. The idea of non-alienation has to be inferred from the negative, with the assistance of one short passage at the end of the text ‘On James Mill’ in which non-alienated labour is briefly described in terms which emphasise both the immediate producer’s enjoyment of production as a confirmation of his or her powers, and also the idea that production is to meet the needs of others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutual dependence. Both sides of our species essence are revealed here: our individual human powers and our membership in the human community.

It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx’s early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea that the alienated individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In our daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which then combine to create large-scale social forces which may have an utterly unpredicted, and highly damaging, effect. In Marx’s view the institutions of capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come back to structure our future behaviour, determining the possibilities of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to stay in business he must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether or not wracked by guilt the capitalist must act as a ruthless exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there is simply no other sane option. But by doing this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition, and to take collective control of our destiny — whatever that would mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements of Marx’s social analysis.

2.4 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’

The Theses on Feuerbach contain one of Marx’s most memorable remarks: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” (thesis 11). However the eleven theses as a whole provide, in the compass of a couple of pages, a remarkable digest of Marx’s reaction to the philosophy of his day. Several of these have been touched on already (for example, the discussions of religion in theses 4, 6 and 7, and revolution in thesis 3) so here I will concentrate only on the first, most overtly philosophical, thesis.

In the first thesis Marx states his objections to ‘all hitherto existing’ materialism and idealism. Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create — or at least transform — the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is the foundation of Marx’s later theory of history. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘Industry is the real historical relationship of nature … to man’. This thought, derived from reflection on the history of philosophy, together with his experience of social and economic realities, as a journalist, sets the agenda for all Marx’s future work.

Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use, in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a ‘third thing of identical magnitude in both of them’ to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate ‘third thing’, which is labour in Marx’s view, as the only plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.

Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx’s able expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development , the analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now (albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value. Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.

However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics , picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

4. Theory of History

Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature. Of the latter, the 1859 Preface to A Critique of Political Economy has achieved canonical status. However, The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, is a vital early source in which Marx first sets out the basics of the outlook of historical materialism. We shall briefly outline both texts, and then look at the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history in the hands of his philosophically most influential recent exponent, G.A. Cohen, who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Plekhanov.

We should, however, be aware that Cohen’s interpretation is not universally accepted. Cohen provided his reconstruction of Marx partly because he was frustrated with existing Hegelian-inspired ‘dialectical’ interpretations of Marx, and what he considered to be the vagueness of the influential works of Louis Althusser, neither of which, he felt, provided a rigorous account of Marx’s views. However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its lack of attention to the dialectic. One aspect of this criticism is that Cohen’s understanding has a surprisingly small role for the concept of class struggle, which is often felt to be central to Marx’s theory of history. Cohen’s explanation for this is that the 1859 Preface, on which his interpretation is based, does not give a prominent role to class struggle, and indeed it is not explicitly mentioned. Yet this reasoning is problematic for it is possible that Marx did not want to write in a manner that would engage the concerns of the police censor, and, indeed, a reader aware of the context may be able to detect an implicit reference to class struggle through the inclusion of such phrases as “then begins an era of social revolution,” and “the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the 1859 Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital . Nevertheless we shall concentrate here on Cohen’s interpretation as no other account has been set out with comparable rigour, precision and detail.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the ‘premises of the materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, ‘modes of co-operation’ or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.

In the sketch of The German Ideology , all the key elements of historical materialism are present, even if the terminology is not yet that of Marx’s more mature writings. Marx’s statement in 1859 Preface renders much the same view in sharper form. Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s view in the Preface begins from what Cohen calls the Development Thesis, which is pre-supposed, rather than explicitly stated in the Preface. This is the thesis that the productive forces tend to develop, in the sense of becoming more powerful, over time. This states not that they always do develop, but that there is a tendency for them to do so. The productive forces are the means of production, together with productively applicable knowledge: technology, in other words. The next thesis is the primacy thesis, which has two aspects. The first states that the nature of the economic structure is explained by the level of development of the productive forces, and the second that the nature of the superstructure — the political and legal institutions of society— is explained by the nature of the economic structure. The nature of a society’s ideology, which is to say the religious, artistic, moral and philosophical beliefs contained within society, is also explained in terms of its economic structure, although this receives less emphasis in Cohen’s interpretation. Indeed many activities may well combine aspects of both the superstructure and ideology: a religion is constituted by both institutions and a set of beliefs.

Revolution and epoch change is understood as the consequence of an economic structure no longer being able to continue to develop the forces of production. At this point the development of the productive forces is said to be fettered, and, according to the theory once an economic structure fetters development it will be revolutionised — ‘burst asunder’ — and eventually replaced with an economic structure better suited to preside over the continued development of the forces of production.

In outline, then, the theory has a pleasing simplicity and power. It seems plausible that human productive power develops over time, and plausible too that economic structures exist for as long as they develop the productive forces, but will be replaced when they are no longer capable of doing this. Yet severe problems emerge when we attempt to put more flesh on these bones.

Prior to Cohen’s work, historical materialism had not been regarded as a coherent view within English-language political philosophy. The antipathy is well summed up with the closing words of H.B. Acton’s The Illusion of the Epoch : “Marxism is a philosophical farrago”. One difficulty taken particularly seriously by Cohen is an alleged inconsistency between the explanatory primacy of the forces of production, and certain claims made elsewhere by Marx which appear to give the economic structure primacy in explaining the development of the productive forces. For example, in The Communist Manifesto Marx states that: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.’ This appears to give causal and explanatory primacy to the economic structure — capitalism — which brings about the development of the forces of production. Cohen accepts that, on the surface at least, this generates a contradiction. Both the economic structure and the development of the productive forces seem to have explanatory priority over each other.

Unsatisfied by such vague resolutions as ‘determination in the last instance’, or the idea of ‘dialectical’ connections, Cohen self-consciously attempts to apply the standards of clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy to provide a reconstructed version of historical materialism.

The key theoretical innovation is to appeal to the notion of functional explanation (also sometimes called ‘consequence explanation’). The essential move is cheerfully to admit that the economic structure does indeed develop the productive forces, but to add that this, according to the theory, is precisely why we have capitalism (when we do). That is, if capitalism failed to develop the productive forces it would disappear. And, indeed, this fits beautifully with historical materialism. For Marx asserts that when an economic structure fails to develop the productive forces — when it ‘fetters’ the productive forces — it will be revolutionised and the epoch will change. So the idea of ‘fettering’ becomes the counterpart to the theory of functional explanation. Essentially fettering is what happens when the economic structure becomes dysfunctional.

Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device. The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard. If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job. However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. Elster is very critical — sometimes of Marx, sometimes of Cohen — of the idea of appealing to ‘purposes’ in history without those being the purposes of anyone.

Cohen is well aware of this difficulty, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology. In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone. The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest. Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements. Cohen calls such background accounts ‘elaborations’ and he concedes that functional explanations are in need of elaborations. But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works. Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently. Prior to Darwin, or arguably Lamark, the only candidate causal elaboration was to appeal to God’s purposes. Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight. Cohen’s point is that the weight of evidence that organisms are adapted to their environment would permit even a pre-Darwinian atheist to assert this functional explanation with justification. Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence.

At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail. Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised.

The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest. In this case ‘fittest’ would mean ‘most able to preside over the development of the productive forces’. Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. However the problem is that such an account would seem to introduce a larger element of contingency than Marx seeks, for it is essential to Marx’s thought that one should be able to predict the eventual arrival of communism. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.

The driving force of history, in Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx, is the development of the productive forces, the most important of which is technology. But what is it that drives such development? Ultimately, in Cohen’s account, it is human rationality. Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do. Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers. Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. For example, a ruling class’s absolute determination to hold on to power may have led to economically stagnant societies. Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs. This goes to the heart of Marx’s theory that man is an essentially productive being and that the locus of interaction with the world is industry. As Cohen himself later argued in essays such as ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, the emphasis on production may appear one-sided, and ignore other powerful elements in human nature. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.

Many defenders of Marx will argue that the problems stated are problems for Cohen’s interpretation of Marx, rather than for Marx himself. It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event. And it is certainly true that when Marx analyses a particular historical episode, as he does in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , any idea of fitting events into a fixed pattern of history seems very far from Marx’s mind. On other views Marx did have a general theory of history but it is far more flexible and less determinate than Cohen insists (Miller). And finally, as noted, there are critics who believe that Cohen’s interpretation is entirely wrong-headed (Sayers).

The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. On reading Marx’s works at all periods of his life, there appears to be the strongest possible distaste towards bourgeois capitalist society, and an undoubted endorsement of future communist society. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works. The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one finds.

There are, initially, separate questions, concerning Marx’s attitude to capitalism and to communism. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: (1) Did Marx think capitalism unjust?; (2) did he think that capitalism could be morally criticised on other grounds?; (3) did he think that communism would be just? (4) did he think it could be morally approved of on other grounds? These are the questions we shall consider in this section.

The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. Capitalism’s dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another. How could this fail to be unjust? Yet it is notable that Marx never concludes this, and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is ‘by no means an injustice’.

Allen Wood has argued that Marx took this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system. Even though one can criticize particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust (and theft under capitalism would be an example) it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. This is a consequence of Marx’s analysis of the role of ideas of justice from within historical materialism. That is to say, juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and ideas of justice are ideological, and the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure. Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement applied to those elements of the system that will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism. According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology.

Ziyad Husami, however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination in that the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice which matches communism. From this privileged standpoint of the proletariat, which is also Marx’s standpoint, capitalism is unjust, and so it follows that Marx thought capitalism unjust.

Plausible though it may sound, Husami’s argument fails to account for two related points. First, it cannot explain why Marx never described capitalism as unjust, and second, it does not account for the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of the utopian socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism. Hence one cannot avoid the conclusion that the ‘official’ view of Marx is that capitalism is not unjust.

Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Much of Marx’s description of capitalism — his use of the words ‘embezzlement’, ‘robbery’ and ‘exploitation’ — belie the official account. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G.A. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust (Cohen 1983). In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.

Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfillment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should.

Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? In the absence of any special reason to argue otherwise, it simply seems obvious that Marx’s critique is a moral one. Capitalism impedes human flourishing.

Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition. There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between scientific and utopian socialism. The utopians appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society. Marx wanted to distance himself from this tradition of utopian thought, and the key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.

This leads us now to Marx’s assessment of communism. Would communism be a just society? In considering Marx’s attitude to communism and justice there are really only two viable possibilities: either he thought that communism would be a just society or he thought that the concept of justice would not apply: that communism would transcend justice.

Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such. However it is possibly truer to Marx’s thought to say that this is part of an account in which communism transcends justice, as Lukes has argued.

If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon Hume’s idea of the circumstances of justice. Hume argued that if there was enormous material abundance — if everyone could have whatever they wanted without invading another’s share — we would never have devised rules of justice. And, of course, Marx often suggested that communism would be a society of such abundance. But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings. Again there would be no conflict and no need for justice. Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice.

Nevertheless we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerning with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light. One compelling argument is that Marx’s career simply makes no sense unless we can attribute such a belief to him. But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in section 2 above apply again. Communism clearly advances human flourishing, in Marx’s view. The only reason for denying that, in Marx’s vision, it would amount to a good society is a theoretical antipathy to the word ‘good’. And here the main point is that, in Marx’s view, communism would not be brought about by high-minded benefactors of humanity. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and the Utopian socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.

Primary Literature

• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin, 1975–.
• –––, Collected Works , New York and London: International Publishers. 1975.
• –––, Selected Works , 2 Volumes, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962.
• Marx, Karl, Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 2 nd edition, David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Secondary Literature

See McLellan 1973 and Wheen 1999 for biographies of Marx, and see Singer 2000 and Wolff 2002 for general introductions.

• Acton, H.B., 1955, The Illusion of the Epoch , London: Cohen and West.
• Althusser, Louis, 1969, For Marx , London: Penguin.
• Althusser, Louis, and Balibar, Etienne, 1970, Reading Capital , London: NLB.
• Arthur, C.J., 1986, Dialectics of Labour , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Avineri, Shlomo, 1970, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bottomore, Tom (ed.), 1979, Karl Marx , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brudney, Daniel, 1998, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1982, Marx’s Social Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Carver, Terrell (ed.), 1991, The Cambridge Companion to Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1998, The Post-Modern Marx , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Cohen, Joshua, 1982, ‘Review of G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History ’, Journal of Philosophy , 79: 253–273.
• Cohen, G.A., 1983, ‘Review of Allen Wood, Karl Marx ’, Mind , 92: 440–445.
• Cohen, G.A., 1988, History, Labour and Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, G.A., 2001, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence , 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Desai, Megnad, 2002, Marx’s Revenge , London: Verso.
• Elster, Jon, 1985, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Geras, Norman, 1989, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice,’ in A. Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Hook, Sidney, 1950, From Hegel to Marx , New York: Humanities Press.
• Husami, Ziyad, 1978, ‘Marx on Distributive Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 8: 27–64.
• Kamenka, Eugene, 1962, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Kolakowski, Leszek, 1978, Main Currents of Marxism , 3 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Leopold, David, 2007, The Young Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lukes, Stephen, 1987, Marxism and Morality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Maguire, John, 1972, Marx’s Paris Writings , Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1970, Marx Before Marxism , London: Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1973, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought , London: Macmillan.
• Miller, Richard, 1984, Analyzing Marx , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Peffer, Rodney, 1990, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Plekhanov, G.V., (1947 [1895]), The Development of the Monist View of History London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Robinson, Joan, 1942, An Essay on Marxian Economics , London: Macmillan.
• Roemer, John, 1982, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class , Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press.
• Roemer, John (ed.), 1986, Analytical Marxism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rosen, Michael, 1996, On Voluntary Servitude , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Sayers, Sean, 1990, ‘Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen’, in S.Sayers (ed.), Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader , London: Routledge.
• Singer, Peter, 2000, Marx: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sober, E., Levine, A., and Wright, E.O. 1992, Reconstructing Marx , London: Verso.
• Sweezy, Paul, 1942 [1970], The Theory of Capitalist Development , New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Wheen, Francis, 1999, Karl Marx , London: Fourth Estate.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 2002, Why Read Marx Today? , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1984, Understanding Marx , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Wood, Allen, 1981, Karl Marx , London: Routledge; second edition, 2004.
• Wood, Allen, 1972, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1: 244–82.

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Chapter 1: Karl Marx on Capitalism

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This chapter introduces two key characteristics of capitalism as analysed by Karl Marx in his book Capital . The first is the accumulation principle, driven by the fact that in capitalist markets money is not merely a means of exchange but means and end in one, for the sake of capitalist firms’ profit maximalization in competitive markets. The second key feature of capitalism that Marx observed was the asymmetry in the relationship between capital and labour: capital hires labour and not the other way around. The lesson is that both features can be changed in a market-based economy, for example through cooperative firms and a larger role for the community economy next to markets.

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The Troika was the name used for the three institutions responsible for managing the euro crisis with emergency loans, austerity packages, and other policy measures forced upon the southern Eurozone countries in trouble. The Troika consisted of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

GDP measured in USD: https://data.worldbank.org/country/greece . Accessed on July 7, 2019.

Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad, “Myths, Mix-ups and Mishandlings – Understanding the Eurozone Crisis.” International Journal of Political Economy 45, 1 (2016): 46–71, Table 2.

Jörg Rocholl and Axel Stahmer, “Where did the Greek Bailout Money go?” ESMT White Paper (Berlin: European School of Management and Technology, 2016).

Rocholl and Stamer, “Where did the Greek Bailout Money go?”

Eurostat, unemployment by sex and age, annual average: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs/data/database .

https://nos.nl/artikel/607005-staatssteun-spekt-de-staatskas.html . Accessed on July 14, 2019.

CBS, “Nederland langs de Europese meetlat” (Den Haag: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2019). https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/publicatie/2019/20/nederland-langs-de-europese-meetlat-2019 . Accessed on July 15, 2020. ECB, “The State of the Housing Market in the Euro Area.” Economic Bulletin no. 7. 2018 (Frankfurt: European Central Bank, 2018). https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2018/html/ecb.ebart201807_02.en.html#toc1 . Accessed on July 11, 2019.

CBS, “Nederland langs de Europese meetlat.”

My own house was for sale for four years in this period and I had to reduce the offer price twice before I could finally sell it—luckily without a loss because I had lived there long enough to pay off half the mortgage debt.

CBS Statline: https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline . Accessed on July 9, 2019.

Frederic Mishkin and Tryggvi Herbertsson, ‘Financial Stability in Iceland’ (Rykjavík: Iceland Chamber of Commerce, 2006).

The pamphlet was published on February 13th, 1997, by a major Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant and signed by 70 Dutch economists, including myself. The title appeared to be an accurate prediction twelve years later: “With this EMU, Europe is on the wrong path”. https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/met-deze-emu-kiest-europa-verkeerde-weg~bf1ca466/ . Accessed on July 22, 2019.

They wrote this manifest quite hastily in the revolutionary year 1848, hoping that it would provide the guideline for building a new society after the revolutions that spread throughout Europe at the time. But the uprisings of the labour movement were halted by armed forces in France, Germany, Belgium and other countries. The manifesto was first published in German. For the English translation, see: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf . Accessed on July 22, 2019.

Karl Marx, Capital – A critical analysis of capitalist production , Vol. I & II (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2013 [1867]).

“Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the newly-hatched haute finance , and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective duties” (Marx, Capital , 508).

“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi je ne suis pas marxist” (Friedrich Engels, “Lettre à E. Bernstein,” 2 novembre 1882. https://www.marxists.org/francais/engels/works/1882/11/fe18821102.htm . Accessed on July 15, 2020. Marx wrote this, probably in 1880, because he disagreed with the revolutionaries who denied any reforms in favour of labour rights within the current system.

Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung 135, 15 May 1842.

He added that this also led to VOC’s role as “one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness.” (Marx, Capital , 526).

De Nederlandsche Bank, “Labour Market Flexibilisation linked to Fall in Labour Income Share” Amsterdam: DNBulletin, 1 February 2018. https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2018/dnb372062.jsp . Accessed on July 24, 2019.

See, a recent analysis of this with US data: Jared Bernstein and Keith Bentele, “The Increasing Benefits and Diminished Costs of Running a High-Pressure Labour Market” (Washington D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2019). https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/5-15-19fe.pdf . Accessed on July 24, 2019.

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2014).

This was reported by the New York Times , 1st April, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/saudi-aramco-profit.html . Accessed on July 24, 2019.

See for example the annual list of the top-100 cooperatives in the US, published by National Cooperative Bank which was set up by Congress to provide funding to cooperatives: NCB. “The 2018 NCB Coop Top 100.” New York: National Cooperative Bank, 2018. https://impact.ncb.coop/hubfs/assets/resources/NCB_Co-op_100_2018_WEB.pdf . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

https://www.thenews.coop/49090/sector/view-top-300-co-operatives-around-world/ . Accessed on August 28, 2019.

https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/cooperatives/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

https://www.rabobank.com/en/about-rabobank/results-and-reports/index.html . Accessed on June 18, 2020.

Rabobank was fined one billion US dollar for its involvement in the manipulation of LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offered rate): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rabobank-libor-idUSBRE99S0L520131029 . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/co-operative-experience/our-principles/ . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/housing/holiday-rentals/ . Accessed on June 18, 2020. In addition, Amsterdam has prohibited buying newly built houses for rent: buyers are obliged to live in the house themselves: https://www.amsterdam.nl/bestuur-organisatie/college/wethouder/laurens-ivens/persberichten/amsterdam-beschermt-koopmarkt-duur/ . Accessed on June 18, 2020.

https://vooruitproject.nl/ . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

https://bundles.nl/en/miele-washing-machine-subscriptions/ . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

See, for example, the Circular Economy Toolkit developed by the University of Cambridge: http://circulareconomytoolkit.org/Assessmenttool.html . Accessed July 15, 2020. See also a guideline by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “Towards a circular economy: business rationale for an accelerated transition.” https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/TCE_Ellen-MacArthur-Foundation-9-Dec-2015.pdf . Accessed on August 30, 2019.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Jared, and Keith Bentele. “The Increasing Benefits and Diminished Costs of Running a High-Pressure Labour Market.” Washington D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 15 May, 2019. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/5-15-19fe.pdf . Accessed on July 15, 2020.

CBS. “Nederland langs de Europese meetlat.” Den Haag: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2019. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/publicatie/2019/20/nederland-langs-de-europese-meetlat-2019 . Accessed on July 15, 2020.

De Nederlandsche Bank. “Labour Market Flexibilisation linked to Fall in Labour Income Share.” Amsterdam: DNBulletin, 1 February 2018. https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2018/dnb372062.jsp . Accessed on July 15, 2020.

ECB. “The State of the Housing Market in the Euro Area.” Economic Bulletin no. 7. 2018. Frankfurt: European Central Bank, 2018. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2018/html/ecb.ebart201807_02.en.html#toc1 . Accessed on July 15, 2020.

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van Staveren, I. (2021). Chapter 1: Karl Marx on Capitalism. In: Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57609-7_2

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You are here, plsc 118: the moral foundations of politics,  - marx's theory of capitalism.

Today, Professor Shapiro continues his discussion of Enlightenment theory of Karl Marx, focusing on the foundations of his theory of capitalism. The central question is, how is wealth created under capitalism at the micro level? For Marx, Adam Smith’s invisible hand is not entirely benevolent. His labor theory of value stipulates that living human labor-power is the only way to create new value, and therefore capitalists who shift toward capital-intensive production cannot actually create new value. Marx also assumes wages are at the level of subsistence, and that capitalists turn a profit by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers. Professor Shapiro also explores some corollary concepts to Marx’s mode of production: the class-for-itself/class-in-itself distinction, socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, and the extent to which workers are other-referential.

Lecture Chapters

• Introduction: Class Agenda and Marx's Characterization of Freedom
• Marx's Theory of Science
• The Labor Theory of Value; Exploitation and Injustice
• The Labor Theory of Surplus Value
• Relative & Absolute Surplus Value & Rate of Exploitation

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Early Life and Education

• Marx's Theories
• Marx's Written Works

Contemporary Influence

The bottom line.

• Behavioral Economics

Karl Marx: His Books, Theories, and Impact

Ariel Courage is an experienced editor, researcher, and former fact-checker. She has performed editing and fact-checking work for several leading finance publications, including The Motley Fool and Passport to Wall Street.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a philosopher, author, social theorist, and economist. He is famous for his theories about capitalism , socialism, and communism .

Marx, in conjunction with Friedrich Engels , published "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848. Later in life, he wrote "Das Kapital," which discussed the labor theory of value. (The first volume was published in Berlin in 1867; the second and third volumes were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, respectively.)

Key Takeaways

• Karl Marx was a prominent thinker who wrote on topics related to economics, political economy, and society.
• Born in Germany, Marx spent much of his time in London, where he wrote many famous works, including "The Communist Manifesto: and "Das Kapital."
• Marx often collaborated with long-time friend and social theorist Friedrich Engels.
• Marx is known for his revolutionary writings favoring socialism and a communist revolution.
• While Marxism and Marxian economics have been largely rejected by the mainstream today, many of Marx's critiques of capitalism remain relevant today.

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Born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany), on May 5, 1818, Marx was the son of a successful Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism before Marx's birth. Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, where he was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel.

He became involved in radicalism at a young age through the Young Hegelians, a group of students who criticized the political and religious establishments of the day. Marx received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841. His radical beliefs prevented him from securing a teaching position, so instead, he took a job as a journalist and later became the editor of Rheinische Zeitung , a liberal newspaper in Cologne.

After living in Prussia, Marx lived in France for some time, and that is where he met his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels. He was expelled from France and then lived briefly in Belgium before moving to London, where he spent the rest of his life with his wife.

Marx died of bronchitis and pleurisy in London on March 14, 1883, and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. His original grave was nondescript, but in 1954, the Communist Party of Great Britain unveiled a large tombstone, including a bust of Marx and the inscription "Workers of all Lands Unite," an anglicized interpretation of the famous phrase in "The Communist Manifesto": "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

Marx's Theories

Marx was inspired by classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo . While his own branch of economics, Marxian economics, is not favored among modern mainstream thought, Marx's ideas have greatly impacted societies, most prominently in communist projects such as those in the USSR, China, and Cuba. Among modern thinkers, Marx is still very influential in the fields of sociology, political economy, and strands of heterodox economics.

In general, Marx claimed there are two major flaws inherent in capitalism that lead to the exploitation of workers by employers: the chaotic nature of free market competition and the extraction of surplus labor. Ultimately, Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually destroy itself as more people become relegated to working-class status, inequality rose, and competition would lead the rate of corporate profits to zero. This would lead, he surmised, to a revolution where production would be turned over to the working class as a whole.

Exploitation and Surplus Value

Marx's work on understanding capitalism as a social and economic system remains a valid critique in the modern era. In "Das Kapital" ("Capital" in English), Marx argues that society is composed of two main classes.

Capitalists are the business owners who organize the process of production and who own the means of production such as factories, tools, and raw materials, and who are also entitled to any and all profits. The other, much larger class is composed of labor, which Marx termed the "proletariat." Laborers do not own or have any claim to the means of production, the finished products they work on, or any of the profits generated from sales of those products. Instead, labor works only in return for a monetary wage. Marx argued that because of this uneven arrangement, capitalists exploit workers.

This exploitation is the reason, according to Marx, that employers can generate profits: They extract a full day's worth of effort and production from workers but only pay them a smaller fraction of this value as wages. Marx termed this surplus value and argued that it was nefarious.

Labor Theory of Value

Like the other classical economists , Karl Marx believed in a labor theory of value (LTV) to explain relative differences in market prices. This theory stated that the value of a produced economic good can be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours required to produce it. In other words, if a table takes twice as long to make as a chair, then the table should be considered twice as valuable.

Marx understood the labor theory better than his predecessors (even Adam Smith) and contemporaries and presented a devastating intellectual challenge to laissez-faire economists in "Das Kapital": If goods and services tend to be sold at their true objective labor values as measured in labor hours, how do any capitalists enjoy profits? It must mean, Marx concluded, that capitalists were underpaying or overworking, thereby exploiting laborers to drive down the cost of production .

While Marx's answer was eventually proved incorrect, and later economists adopted the subjective theory of value , his simple assertion was enough to show the weakness of the labor theory's logic and assumptions; Marx unintentionally helped fuel a revolution in economic thinking.

Historical Materialism

Another important theory developed by Marx is known as historical materialism. This theory posits that society at any given point in time is ordered by the type of technology used in production. Under industrial capitalism, society is so ordered, with capitalists organizing labor in factories or offices where they work for wages.

Prior to capitalism, Marx suggested that feudalism existed as a specific set of social relations between lord and peasant classes related to the hand-powered or animal-powered means of production prevalent at the time.

Marx's Written Works

During his lifetime, Karl Marx wrote and published no less than fifteen complete multi-volume books, along with numerous pamphlets, articles, and essays. He could often be found writing in the reading rooms at London's British Museum.

Perhaps his most famous work, "The Communist Manifesto" summarizes Marx and Engels's theories about the nature of society and politics and is an attempt to explain the goals of Marxism and, later, socialism . When writing "The Communist Manifesto," Marx and Engels explained how they thought capitalism was unsustainable and how the capitalist society that existed at the time of the writing would eventually be replaced by a socialist one.

"Das Kapital" was a full and comprehensive three-volume critique of capitalism. By far the more academic work, it lays forth Marx's theories on commodities production, labor markets, the social division of labor, and a basic understanding of the rate of return to owners of capital. Marx died before the third volume was finished, which was published posthumously by Engels based largely on Marx's notes. Today, many of the ideas and critiques of capitalism remain relevant, such as the emergence of monopolistic mega-corporations, persistent unemployment, and the general struggle between workers and employers.

The exact origins of the term "capitalism" in English are unclear, and certainly, Marx was not the first to use the word "capitalism" in English. However, he contributed to the rise of its use and interest in the concept.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word was first used in 1854 in the novel "The Newcomes" by author William Thackeray, who intended it to mean a sense of concern about personal possessions and money in general. While it's unclear whether either Thackeray or Marx was aware of the other's work, both men meant the word to have a pejorative ring. Adam Smith also famously wrote about the capitalist economic system in his 1776 masterpiece "The Wealth of Nations," and Marx was well aware of Smith's writings.

Marx's work laid the foundations for future communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. Operating from the premise that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, his ideas formed the basis of Marxism and served as a theoretical base for communism.

Nearly everything Marx wrote was viewed through the lens of the common laborer. From Marx comes the idea that capitalist profits are possible because the value is "stolen" from the workers and transferred to employers.

Marxist ideas in their pure form have very few direct adherents in contemporary times; indeed, very few Western thinkers embraced Marxism after 1898, when economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's "Karl Marx and the Close of His System" was first translated into English. In his damning rebuke, Böhm-Bawerk showed that Marx failed to incorporate capital markets or subjective values in his analysis, nullifying most of his more pronounced conclusions. Still, there are some lessons that even modern economic thinkers can learn from Marx.

Though he was the capitalist system's harshest critic, Marx understood that it was far more productive than previous or alternative economic systems. In "Das Kapital," he wrote of "capitalist production" that combined "together of various processes into a social whole," which included developing new technologies.

He believed all countries should become capitalist and develop that productive capacity, and then workers would naturally revolt, leading to communism whereby the workers would become the dominant social class and collectively control the means of production. But, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo before him, Marx predicted that because of capitalism's relentless pursuit of profit by way of competition and technological progress to lower the costs of production, that the rate of profit in an economy would always be falling over time.

Economic Change to Social Transformation

Dr. James Bradford "Brad" DeLong, professor of economics at UC-Berkeley, wrote in 2011 that Marx's "primary contribution" to economic science actually came in a 10-paragraph stretch of "The Communist Manifesto," in which he describes how economic growth causes shifts among social classes, often leading to a struggle for political power.

This underlies an often unappreciated aspect of economics: the emotions and political activity of the actors involved. A corollary of this argument was later made by French economist Thomas Piketty, who proposed that while nothing was wrong with income inequality economically, it could create blowback against capitalism among the people. Thus, there is a moral and anthropological consideration of any economic system. The idea that societal structure and transformations from one order to the next can be the result of technological change in how things are produced in an economy is known as historical materialism.

What Is Karl Marx's Main Theory?

Karl Marx’s theories on communism and capitalism formed the basis of Marxism. His key theories were a critique of capitalism and its shortcomings. Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself. The oppressed workers would become alienated and ultimately overthrow the owners to take control of the means of production themselves, ushering in a classless society.

What Is Karl Marx Best Known for?

Karl Marx is best known for his theories that led to the development of Marxism. His ideas also served as the basis for communism. His books, "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto," formed the basis of Marxism.

What Is Marxism vs. Communism?

Marxism is a system of socioeconomic analysis, while communism is a form of economic production that extends to government or political movements. Marxism is a broad philosophy developed by Karl Marx in the second half of the 19th century that unifies social, political, and economic theory. It is mainly concerned with the battle between the working class and the ownership class and favors communism and socialism over capitalism.

Karl Marx remains controversial, but his writings still remain relevant today. Even as mainstream economics has relegated Marxism as a heterodox school of thought, Marx did have a lot to say about the capitalistic system of production and roundly critiqued it for generating social and wealth inequalities, negative externalities, and class struggle. Ultimately, Marx's predictions about the impending collapse of capitalism and the communist revolutions that would follow proved incorrect. This has led many to discount Marx and Marxian thought. Still, Marx's insights remain influential and inspiring to others.

Marxist.org. " Capital A Critique of Political Economy Volume I Book One: The Process of Production of Capital ," Pages 1-549.

The British Museum. " The Round Reading Room at the British Museum. "

Marxist.org. " Capital A Critique of Political Economy Volume I Book One: The Process of Production of Capital ," Page 330.

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POLSC101: Introduction to Political Science

The marxist critique of capitalism.

In capitalism, private property rights are fundamental and freedom in economic interactions is paramount. Marxism and communism offer an alternative explanation of socioeconomic structures that focuses more on the exploitative potential of capitalism. How else is Marx's view of social-economic relations different than the capitalist view?

Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually be followed by socialism.

Learning Objective

Examine Karl Marx's view on capitalism and the criticisms of the capitalist system

• Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions and be followed by socialism.
• Marxists define capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital.
• Revolutionary socialists believe that capitalism can only be overcome through revolution.
• Social democrats believe that structural change can come slowly through political reforms to capitalism.
• Marxists define capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things).
• Normative Marxism advocates a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that would lead to socialism, before eventually transforming into communism after class antagonisms and the state ceased to exist.
• Revolution: A political upheaval in a government or nation-state characterized by great change.
• Socialism: Any of various economic and political philosophies that support social equality, collective decision-making, distribution of income based on contribution and public ownership of productive capital and natural resources, as advocated by socialists.
• Progressive: Favoring or promoting progress; advanced.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is an example of how many Americans are dissatisfied with the current capitalist system and seek more equal distribution of opportunity and goods.

Capitalism has been the subject of criticism from many perspectives during its history. Criticisms range from people who disagree with the principles of capitalism in its entirety, to those who disagree with particular outcomes of capitalism. Among those wishing to replace capitalism with a different method of production and social organization, a distinction can be made between those believing that capitalism can only be overcome with revolution (e.g., revolutionary socialism) and those believing that structural change can come slowly through political reforms to capitalism (e.g., classic social democracy).

Karl Marx saw capitalism as a progressive historical stage that would eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions and be followed by socialism. Marxists define capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense, Marxists seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers. In brief, the owners of the means of production exploit the workforce.

In Karl Marx's view, the dynamic of capital would eventually impoverish the working class and thereby create the social conditions for a revolution. Private ownership over the means of production and distribution is seen as creating a dependence of non-owning classes on the ruling class, and ultimately as a source of restriction of human freedom.

Marxists have offered various related lines of argument claiming that capitalism is a contradiction-laden system characterized by recurring crises that have a tendency towards increasing severity. They have argued that this tendency of the system to unravel, combined with a socialization process that links workers in a worldwide market, create the objective conditions for revolutionary change. Capitalism is seen as just one stage in the evolution of the economic system.

Normative Marxism advocates for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that would lead to socialism, before eventually transforming into communism after class antagonisms and the state cease to exist. Marxism influenced social democratic and labor parties as well as some moderate democratic socialists, who seek change through existing democratic channels instead of revolution, and believe that capitalism should be regulated rather than abolished.

Karl Marx Sociologist: Contributions and Theory

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On This Page:

Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory proposed by Karl Marx in the 19th century, and Marxists are those who ascribe to the ideas of Marxism.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher interested in exploring the relationship between the economy and the people working within the economic system.

Marx’s theory was strongly based on the struggles of the working class during the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He explained how there are power relationships between the capitalists and the workers, which are exploitative and would eventually cause class conflict.

According to Marx, the workers are those from a low social class, which he termed the proletariat, whereas those few in charge, the wealthy bosses, owners, and managers, are what he termed the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat are the individuals who perform labor that is then taken and sold by the bourgeoisie so that they themselves receive profit while the workers receive minimal wages.

Noteworthy writings of Marxism include Capital by Marx and The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Friedrich Engels. These writings describe the features of Marxist ideology, including the struggle of the working class, capitalism, and how a classless society is needed to end the class conflict.

Key Takeaways

• Karl Marx was a German philosopher who, in the 19th century, began exploring the relationship between the economy and the people who work within the economic system.
• The basic idea of Marx’s theory is that society is characterized by the struggle between the workers and those in charge. The workers are those of lower social classes, which he termed the proletariat.
• The few in charge, who are the bosses, owners, and managers of an upper social class, are what he termed the bourgeoisie. The proletariat are the individuals who perform the labor, while the bourgeoisie obtains the profits from this labor. From this system, Marx argued that the workers are exploited while those in power get more powerful and wealthier.
• The workers are viewed as slaves of the bourgeoisie, given wages for their labor that is the minimum subsidence so that they can just about survive while also depending on their labor that they cannot simply quit (Marx & Engels, 2019).
• The writings ‘Capital’ by Marx and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ written by Marx and Friedrich Engels are noteworthy pieces that lay out what is now referred to as Marxism.
• These writings discuss capitalism, which is believed to eventually stagnate due to the increased struggle between the social classes.
• Marxist ideology predicts that there will be a proletariat revolution whereby capitalism will end, to be replaced by communism.

The Basic Principles Of Marx’s Theory

Class struggle.

Marx argued that there were two social classes; the working-class laborers, known as the proletariat, and the wealthy bourgeoise, who controlled the workers.

Marx argued that there is a struggle between the social classes. While the bourgeoisie is concerned with the means of producing via the laborers, those who conduct the labor, the proletariat , want to end this exploitation.

Marx explained that there is a constant conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. While the bourgeoisie aims to make as much profit as possible by exploiting the labor of others, the proletariat is dissatisfied with this exploitation and wants to end it.

Class tensions are thought to increase with the opposing desires of those who want bigger profits and the workers who defend their right to fair pay and working conditions.

Competition in the market and the desire for bigger profits compels the bourgeoisie to further exploit their workers, who defend their rights and working conditions. These opposing desires of pushing the rate of exploitation in opposite directions create class tensions.

Over time, there is a broader division of labor and increased use of machinery to complete the labor. Marx and Engels argued that with this came an increase in the burden of toil, whether by the work hours getting longer, an increase in the amount of work in a given time, or by the increased speed of the machinery.

The workers are viewed as slaves of the bourgeoisie and the machine, given wages for their labor that is the minimum subsidence so they can just about survive while also depending on their labor (Marx & Engels, 2019).

The struggle between social classes was initially confined to individual factories. However, as capitalism matured, personal struggles became generalized to coalitions across factories and eventually manifested at societal levels (Rummel, 1977).

Marxists believe that the division between classes will widen with the exploitation of the workers deteriorating so severely that the social structure collapses and transforms into a proletarian revolution . A classless society will pursue erasing any exploitation or political authority (Rummel, 1977).

Theory of Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals have the means of control over their own property, with the motivation to make as much profit as possible.

Marx describes capitalists as those who exploit the hard work of the laborers and pay them as little as possible to ensure the highest profits. The capitalists believe they are entitled to the profits made from their workers’ labor, which Marx viewed as theft.

Marx described the capitalists as the bourgeoisie business owners who organized the means of production, such as any tools or machinery used, and were entitled to any profit made.

Marxists believe that most societies are capitalist. That such a system is accepted without the need for violence or coercion is said to reflect the fact that the capitalists have a strong influence over ideas in society (Rose, 2005).

Marx saw profit as theft since the capitalists are stealing the hard work of the laborers, selling goods and services for an enormous profit while paying the laborers as little as possible. Workers’ labor is bought and sold like any other commodity.

That such a system is accepted without the need for violence or coercion reflects the fact that the capitalists have a strong influence over ideas in society (Rosen, 2005).

Marx viewed capitalism as an unstable system that would eventually result in a series of crises. The means of exploitation built into a capitalist economic system will be the source of social revolt and ultimately lead to capitalism”s dismantling.

Marx and Engels proposed that there would eventually be a proletariat revolution caused by continued exploitation by capitalists. The workers will revolt due to increasingly worse working conditions and wages.

In The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels proposed that after the proletariat revolution, the means of production from the bourgeoisie would end and be replaced with collective ownership over economic assets. This is a move from capitalism to communism.

The result of the revolution is that capitalism will be replaced by a classless society in which private property will be replaced with collective ownership. This will mean that society will become communist. With private property abolished, the means of production will come to a common agreement, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

Communism would aim to create a classless society in which no social class would exploit the labor of the other. In a communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, enrich, and promote the laborer’s existence (Marx & Engels, 2019).

According to Marxism, the key features of a communist society are that there would be no private property or inherited wealth, steeply graduated income tax, centralized control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education (Marx & Engels, 2019).

Conflict Theory

Karl Marx is known as the developer of conflict theory . This is the idea that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of two or more groups with competing and incompatible interests. It is the theory that power struggles and dynamics drive societal change.

Marx concentrated on the conflict between the social classes: those of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat . The power the bourgeoisie hold can be found in their material resources, accumulated wealth, and social status.

As capitalism develops, there are fewer but more powerful individuals in the upper class, which creates conflict with a majority oppressed class. The two groups are in a struggle, and resources are unjustly distributed to the few.

Marx reasoned that as the social conditions worsened for the workers (e.g., through lower pay), they would develop a class consciousness that revealed that their exploitation was at the hands of the capitalist. The workers can make demands to ease the conflict, but conditions would eventually get worse again.

According to Marx, the only way to end the cycle of conflict is to bring about communism.

Theory Of Alienation

Alienation means the lack of power, control, and fulfillment experienced by workers in capitalist societies in which the means of producing goods are privately owned and controlled.

Marx described a division of labor , meaning that the production workers increasingly feel separated from their work. Workers have moved away from an artisanal approach to work when one person works on one product.

With the increase in machinery, technological advancements, and assembly lines where many people work on one product, there is a loss of meaning to individual workers (Marx, 1992).

As this division of labor increases along with the extent of production required for the market, the workers become more dependent on their labor for mere survival. As capitalist production becomes more technical, the workers’ productivity increases, but the final product of their labor is not for the worker to enjoy – it is the property of the capitalist (Prychitko, 2002).

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggest that under capitalism, the proletariat loses all individual character, becoming ‘an appendage of the machine’; thus, their work becomes alien (Marx & Engels, 2019).

The proletariat loses agency over their work lives, instead, this is determined by the bourgeoisie, including when and how long to work. Thus, the workers view their labor as something alien to them.

Marx describes alienated labor as forced and involuntary labor in which the worker finds no purpose, pleasure, contentment, or power. The worker feels isolated and insignificant, seeing their labor as purely for wages (Mukhopadhyay, 2020).

As the division of labor increases along with the extent of production required for the market, the workers become more dependent on their labor for mere survival. Their productivity increases as capitalist production become more technical, but as a result, the final product is not for them to enjoy, rather, it is the property of the capitalist (Prychitko, 2002).

Thus, the workers view their labor as something alien. Not only the object but the process of production is alien, for it is no longer a creative activity.

Marx describes alienated labor in his writings as forced and involuntary labor in which the worker finds no purpose, pleasure, contentment, or power. The worker feels isolated and insignificant, seeing their labor as purely for wages (Mukhopadhyay, 2020).

Historical Materialism

Marx proposed a theory of historical materialism in which he describes stages or epochs that societies pass through. These are primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and advanced communism.

Marx used historical materialism to attempt to explain where society has come from, why it is the way that it is, and where it is heading.

Primitive communism was a time when society was free of social class divisions, and there were simply hunters and gathers who obtained enough food for survival. Since there was not a surplus of production, there was no exploitation.

Slave society is thought of as the first stage of exploitation. This is when there was a division between the wealthy aristocrats and those who were slaves. This epoch gave way to more advanced productive forces, with the means of production being by the people who were the property of the slaveowners.

Feudalism was a dominant social system in medieval Europe, and society was divided into landowners and land occupiers. It was a system in which people were given land and protection by the nobles, who had to work and fight for them in return. Essentially, in feudalism, the landowners exploited the land occupiers.

Marx proposed that the current society is a capitalist one in which there are private property owners who exploit the labor of their workers, whom they pay as little as possible to obtain high profits. This epoch is viewed as the wealthiest in society exploiting the poorest.

Marx’s prediction for the next epoch of society is that it will be an advanced communist one. In a communist society, there would be shared resources and wealth and no exploitation.

This was Marx’s idea of a utopia in which the system benefits most people in society rather than a small minority.

Critical Theory

Marxism would come to facilitate the development of critical theories and cultural studies.

Critical theory  is a philosophical approach to culture — especially literature — that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures of power that produce and constrain culture.

The first and most notable critical theorists are the members of the Frankfurt School (Bohman, 2005).

The critical method of analysis has far-reaching academic influence. Often, critical theorists are preoccupied with critiquing modernity and capitalist society, the definition of what it means to be free in society, and the detection of wrongs in society.

Critical theorists often use a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy focusing on economic and political ideas such as commodification, reification, fetishization, and the critique of mass culture.

Stages of Societal Development in Marxism

Marxism believes that economic systems in societies go through five stages, these are:

1. Primitive Communism

Marx and Engels conceptualized society prior to antiquity as free of social class division as hunter-gatherers gathered just enough to survive. Because everyone in this system worked for subsistence, there was no surplus production, thus making exploitation impossible.

2. Antiquity

Antiquity, to Marx, represented the first stage of exploitation between two classes, as the dynamic between aristocrats and their slaves and servants characterized society.

3. Feudalism

The second stage of exploitation in Marx’s vision of society was medieval society. Divided into landowners and occupiers, the lords and landlords exploited those who cultivated their lands by taking a portion of their yield.

4. Capitalist Society

Marxism focuses most heavily on the ills of contemporary capitalist society. In this system, anyone could trade with anyone and were free to make money from their own goods and services.

However, according to Marx and Engels, this just as powerfully bred injustice through the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Marx and Engels were particularly inspired by the conditions of their era, the industrial revolution.

Karl Marx was born in what is now Western Germany, and he experienced England at the turn of the Industrial Revolution.

Witnessing first-hand the exploitation of British factory workers, the pair conducted a series of profiles of laborers and collaboratively authored The Communist Manifesto (Prychitko, 1991).

Although the ideas of Marxism seemed to take hold by the first half of the twentieth century, as the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread of communism came to define much of Eastern Europe, their association — the USSR — began to reject Marxist ideology, entering a transition toward private property rights and a market exchange system.

The societies of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and the other Soviet states shifted to a capitalist and consumerist system, and the USSR collapsed in 1991 (Prychitko, 2002).

5. Advanced Communism

After the fall of the current capitalist system, Marx predicted a utopian society involving shared resources, wealth, and equality.

Strengths of Marxism

Marx’s ideas of society are a source of many useful insights and arguments, many of which remain relevant for modern analyses of society. While some ideas may have lost some relevance, the legacy of Marxism has endured (Burawoy & Wright, 2001).

Karl Marx has remained a prominent and influential figure in the world of sociology. In particular, his ideas on conflict theory gave rise to other conflict theories that developed later, including race-conflict theory, gender-conflict theory, and intersectional theory .

These theories provide sociologists with ways to understand power, control, freedom, and exploitation in society.

Due to Marx’s understanding of capitalism, we have a better understanding of how society functions and why we may have certain ideas about labor.

Marx provided the understanding that capitalism may be the cause of why society holds these views and how it teaches us to be competitive and conformist.

Many institutions are believed to use capitalist ideology to justify inequalities. For instance, educational institutions socialize children into working hard and being obedient.

With the increase of technological advancements in the workplace and the seemingly excessive number of products in the modern world – a lot of which would be considered non-essential- supports Marx’s ideas about capitalism.

Marxism can help sociologists understand how past revolutions have occurred in capitalist societies. It is considered a social theory of vital importance for understanding the issues and possibilities of social change and social reproduction in modern societies.

While not every element within Marxism is sustainable, Marxist ideas can be built upon to challenge and transform it (Burawoy & Wright, 2001).

Criticisms of Marxism

Marxism can be criticized for being overly simplistic in the idea of society being split into two social classes. There are different levels of wealth in society, so it is more likely that there are several social classes.

Likewise, Marx’s theory ignores other factors that contribute to social inequality, such as a person’s race and religion. A person’s gender is also mostly ignored by Marxism. Feminists would suggest that gender provides a greater social division in society rather than social class.

Marxism is argued to be a doctrine with little relevance for serious social change. It is said to be ideological for mobilizing political parties and social movements but lacks scientific credibility (Burawoy & Wright, 2001). It is thought to be unlikely that there would be total social class equality in a communist society.

Further, communist ideas have been introduced in some countries and have not fared well. For instance, there was a fall of communism in the former socialist state of the USSR. Therefore, a Marxist society, while promising in theory, may not be fully sustainable unless reconstructed.

In general, there are negative connotations about those who are unemployed, considering those who take too much time off as lazy and holding the belief that more belongings make people happier.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the main goals of marxism.

The main goal of Marxism is to achieve a classless society that is not only adopted in one society but on a global scale.

Marx’s idea was to design a social system that eliminates exploitation and differences in power between groups of people.

In communism, the proletariat has political power, and private property is abolished. In a communist society, private ownership will be replaced with collective ownership over economic assets.

What Is The Importance of Marxism In Society?

Karl Marx is one of the most prominent and influential figures in sociological theory. These ideas on conflict theory have given rise to different conflict theories, such as race-conflict theory, gender-conflict theory, and intersectional theory.

Marx’s explanations of capitalism have provided a deep understanding of how society functions and enabled people to think critically about the labor they do.

Marx further offered that capitalism may be why society holds particular views about labor, including negative judgments about those who do not work and why people are competitive and conformist.

Is Marxism Still Relevant Today?

While some ideas of Marxism may be outdated and may not necessarily be a comprehensive theory for social change, they can still help understand some of the key social mechanisms in a society divided by class.

Marxism offers a way to understand history and economics, as well as an explanation of the global capitalist crisis. It can be argued that exploitation is still at the heart of a capitalist system enforced by those in the upper social classes.

Marxism also captures how capitalism develops and impacts specific world regions, specifically how some regions are developed unevenly relative to one another. Marxists would argue that unregulated commodification comes with environmental hazards, the costs of which are becoming increasingly clear (Fasenfest, 2018).

What were the criticisms of Marx on capitalism?

Karl Marx criticized capitalism for its inherent exploitation of the working class, who, he argued, were not fairly compensated for their labor. He also highlighted the alienation workers experience due to a lack of control over the production process and the products they create.

Marx further criticized capitalism’s tendency towards periodic economic crises and its creation of social inequality through the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, or the capitalist class.

Burawoy, M., & Wright, E. O. (2001). Sociological marxism. In Handbook of sociological theory (pp. 459-486). Springer, Boston, MA.

Callinicos, A. (2011). The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. Haymarket Books.

Fasenfest, D. (2018). Is Marx still relevant?.  Critical Sociology , 44(6), 851-855.

Marx, K. (1873).  Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production . Humboldt.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). The communist manifesto . 1848. Trans. Samuel Moore. London: Penguin, 15.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2019). The communist manifesto. In Ideals and Ideologies  (pp. 243-255). Routledge.

Mukhopadhyay, R. (2020). Karl Marx”s Theory of Alienation . Available at SSRN 3843057.

Poulantzis, N. (1975). Social Classes in Contemporary Capitalism . London: New Left Books.

Prychitko, D. L. (Ed.). (2002).  Markets, Planning, and Democracy: Essays after the Collapse of Communism . Edward Elgar Publishing.

Rosen, M. (2005). Marx, Karl. Ed. Edward Craig. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 619-631.

Rummel, R. J. (1977). Understanding conflict and war: Vol. 3: Conflict in perspective.  Beverly Hills: Sage.

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The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

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The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel , who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.

For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:

The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:

The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath , or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.

Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto .

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.

Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.