Category: English

The Critique of Proletarian Labor

From his analysis of wage labor as necessarily leading to the progressive immiseration and oppression of the workers, Marx shows that the proletariat has to overcome wage labor if it is to ever achieve well-being and freedom. The equality of wages and redistribution of wealth preached by socialists like Proudhon is insufficient. Given that this alienated wage labor has been shown to be the precondition of private property and hence, of bourgeois society, it follows that any attempt at overcoming it is an attempt at overcoming bourgeois society itself.

Origins of Marxism: The Critique of Feuerbach and Hegel

Marx’s simultaneous critique of Hegelian idealism and Feuerbachian materialism is immanently dialectical, in the sense that it grasps the two philosophies as the antinomic poles constituting philosophy’s self-contradiction at the time. Both poles contain a one-sided truth about the world: Feuerbach the truth of the importance of material reality and Hegel the truth of the historicity of humanity. Marx seeks to derive social truth and social tasks by working through these two poles. In other words, Marx is not rejecting Feuerbach and Hegel, but attempting to go beyond them by drawing social and political conclusions from their insights.

What is Marxism?

Marxism is most often viewed as a socioeconomic theory which privileges class relations and economic factors for understanding history and social reality.  In other words, it is reduced to sociology. On the left, it is currently considered by most as bad sociology because it does not recognize the importance of social structures beyond economic ones in shaping the modern world. Its import is therefore further reduced to economics: Marxism is a theory which gives an adequate explanation of how the capitalist economic system works, and must be supplemented by other theories illuminating other aspects of the social fabric. 

The State and the Ruling Class

The state is not just a tool in the hands of the capitalists, but flesh of the flesh of class society in its totality. It therefore cannot be instrumentalized as a ready-made machine by the working class in its political struggle to overcome capital as a self-contradictory totality. On the contrary, through its independent organizations and parties the working class politicizes the problem of the state as it assumes responsibility for capital as a self-contradiction of social relations. It does so in the course of exercising power in the dictatorship of the proletariat—by developing historically new institutions, such as the Commune or workers’ councils (soviets). These new institutions are characterized by the principle of the electability and revocability of all officials who undertake to carry out public duties, without any separation of powers and without independent bureaucratic, judicial, or armed bodies and mechanisms. Once the old state machine is smashed, these new institutions will allow, for the first time in history, serious political engagement with the problem of the state, putting on the agenda the possibility of its historical transcendence.