Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: What does a Marxist believe?
The Western Left academics are nowadays very happy to talk about "varieties of capitalism", but talking about "varieties of socialism" remains almost an absolute "no-no". Most Marxists continue to believe in "only one" (Marxian) socialism: either that, or nothing at all. "Either" a society or movement conforms to the true concept of socialism, "or" it does not; and if it does not, it "cannot be" socialism. However, precisely "because" there are many different Marxist beliefs about socialism, Marxists cannot agree among themselves whether Soviet-type societies were socialist, capitalist, or something else. Some countries meet with the moral expectations which Marxists have, and others do not.Originally Marx and Engels themselves had heckled the advocates of "true socialism", but later Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky promoted Marxist socialism as the one and true "scientific socialism" within the Socialist International. When he was 43 years old, Lenin stated: "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true". Lenin's Communist International (a deliberate split with the social democrats) adopted Marxist socialism as its official political doctrine.
György Lukács's "History and Class Consciousness" and Karl Korsch's "Marxism and Philosophy", published in 1923, are the works that inaugurated Western Marxism. In these books, Lukács and Korsch proffer a Marxism that emphasises the Hegelian components of Karl Marx's thought. Marxism is not simply a theory of political economy that improves on its bourgeois predecessors, nor is it a scientific sociology, akin to the natural sciences. Marxism is primarily a critique, a self-conscious transformation of society. Marxism does not make philosophy obsolete, as vulgar Marxism believes; Marxism preserves the truths of philosophy until their revolutionary transformation into reality.
Sophia Antonopoulou developed this critique of Marx and Marxism in her book "The Marxist Theory of Development and its Convergence with the Bourgeois Theoretical Paradigm" (Papazissis, Athens, 1991) (in Greek), in which she criticizes the theoretical model that Marx had developed with respect to the economy, society and history, as well as Marx’s philosophical theory (Dialectical and Historical Materialism). The conclusion she arrives at is that Marxism did not fail as an alternative to the bourgeois theoretical and political paradigm, but, on the contrary, because it did not succeed in the formulation of such an alternative paradigm. She considers that Marxism, and Marx himself, constitutes a peculiar type of bourgeois thought and that it is not accidental that Marxist theory led to the creation of “state capitalism” in the former USSR.
Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism and its derivatives such as Stalinism, Ceaușism and Maoism. Libertarian Marxism is also often critical of reformist positions, such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Marx and Engels' later works, specifically the "Grundrisse" and "The Civil War in France", emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.
Bernstein coined the aphorism: "The movement is everything, the final goal nothing". But the path of reform appeared blocked to the Russian Marxists while Russia remained the bulwark of reaction. In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had saluted the Russian Marxists who, they said, "formed the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe". But the working class, although many were organised in vast modern western-owned enterprises, comprised no more than a small percentage of the population and "more than half the land is owned in common by the peasants". Marx and Engels posed the question: How was Russia to progress to socialism? Could Russia "pass directly" to socialism or "must it first pass through the same process" of capitalist development as the West? They replied: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."
Marxism–Leninism was the cornerstone of Soviet ideology. It explained and legitimized the CPSU's right to rule while explaining its role as a vanguard party. For instance, the ideology explained that the CPSU's policies, even if they were unpopular, were correct because the party was enlightened. It was represented as the only truth in Soviet society; the Party rejected the notion of multiple truths. Marxism–Leninism was used to justify CPSU rule and Soviet policy but it was not used as a means to an end. The relationship between ideology and decision-making was at best ambivalent; most policy decisions were made in the light of the continued, permanent development of Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism as the only truth could notby its very naturebecome outdated.
The term "Marxism" was popularized by Karl Kautsky, who considered himself an "orthodox" Marxist during the dispute between the orthodox and revisionist followers of Marx. Kautsky's revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein also later adopted use of the term. Engels did not support the use of the term "Marxism" to describe either Marx's or his views. Engels claimed that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as "real" followers of Marx while casting others in different terms, such as "Lassallians". In 1882, Engels claimed that Marx had criticized self-proclaimed "Marxist" Paul Lafargue, by saying that if Lafargue's views were considered "Marxist", then "one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist".
For Marx, dialectics is not a formula for generating predetermined outcomes but is a method for the empirical study of social processes in terms of interrelations, development, and transformation. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx's "Capital", Ernest Mandel writes, "When the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality, structured around, and by, a basic predominant mode of production."
The term was coined by Vladimir Lenin in 1895, responding to Peter Struve, to counter what he considered to be the futility of objectivity in political economic analysis.
Class interests and material conditions of existence determine ideology, and thus, in a Marxist-Leninist view, true objectivity (in terms of non-partisanship) is not possible in a society of antagonistic classes. Marxists, in Lenin's view, should openly acknowledge their partisanship on the side of proletarian revolution. Bourgeois emphasis on the normative goal of objectivity is thus considered to be delusional. In this sense, "partiinost"' is a universal and inevitable element of political and ideological life, but its presence is not always acknowledged, or is often flatly denied, by the ruling class.
Both Comte and Marx intended to develop a new scientific ideology in the wake of European secularization. Marx, in the tradition of Hegelianism, rejected the positivist method and was in turn rejected by the self-proclaimed sociologists of his day. However, in attempting to develop a comprehensive "science of society" Marx nevertheless became recognized as a founder of sociology by the mid 20th century. Isaiah Berlin described Marx as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."
György Lukács, Minister of Culture in the brief Béla Kun government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), published "History and Class Consciousness" (1923), in which he defined "dialectical materialism" as the knowledge of society as a whole, knowledge which, in itself, was the class consciousness of the proletariat. In the first chapter "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined "orthodoxy" as fidelity to the "Marxist method", not fidelity to "dogmas":
Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the "belief" in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a "sacred" book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded, and deepened, only along the lines laid down by its founders. (§1)
In his later works and actions, Lukács became a leader of Democratic Marxism. He modified many of his formulations of his 1923 works and went on to develop a Marxist ontology and played an active role in democratic movements in Hungary in 1956 and the 1960s. He and his associates became sharply critical of the formulation of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union that was exported to those countries under its control. In the 1960s, his associates became known as the Budapest School.
The term right-wing socialism is a term used by some free-market right-libertarian movements and politicians to describe paternalistic conservatism as they see it supporting paternalism and social solidarity as opposed to individualism, commercialism and "laissez-faire" economics. They argue that paternalist conservatism supports state promoted social hierarchy and allows certain people and groups to hold higher status in such a hierarchy, which is conservative. The term is also used—more commonly, but distinctly—to refer to moderate social democratic forms of socialism when contrasted with Marxism–Leninism and other more radical left-wing alternatives. In "The Communist Manifesto", Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticised the "Philosophy of Poverty" by the anarchist writer and theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as representing conservative or bourgeois socialism. Military socialism, guild socialism, agrarian socialism and some forms of Christian socialism are also termed right-wing socialism by various authors.
Marxist archaeologists in general believe that the bipolarism that exists between the processual and post-processual debates is an opposition inherent within knowledge production and is in accord with a dialectical understanding of the world. Many Marxists archaeologists believe that it is this polarism within the anthropological discipline (and all academic disciplines) that fuels the questions that spur progress in archaeological theory and knowledge. This constant interfacing and conflict between the extremes of the two heuristic playing grounds (subjective vs. objective) is believed to result in a continuous reconstruction of the past by scholars (McGuire 1992, 2008).
A major section of the Anushilan movement had been attracted to Marxism during the 1930s, many of them studying Marxist–Leninist literature whilst serving long jail sentences. A minority section broke away from the Anushilan movement and joined the Communist Consolidation, and later the Communist Party of India (CPI). The majority of the Anushilan Marxists did however, whilst having adopted Marxist–Leninist thinking, feel hesitant over joining the Communist Party. The Anushilanites distrusted the political lines formulated by the Communist International.They shared some critiques against the leadership of Joseph Stalin and the Comintern, but the Anushilan Marxists did not embrace Trotskyism.
At the 13th National Congress, Zhao concluded that the common rightist error when analyzing Chinese development was to question the legitimacy of the revolution and socialist superstructural elements established in its aftermath and that the common leftist error was to believe that you could skip over the primary stage of socialism directly to advanced socialism, a view that Zhao designated as utopian. However, there was a problem; according to official statements, China had an advanced superstructure and a backward productive forces; this went against classical Marxism, which said the superstructure was "solely determined by economic factors"in China the mode of production was determined by the superstructure. All this went against the general notion of Marx' theory of historical materialism, which states that a mode of production is solely grounded on the material base. However, Su and Zhang did not believe these discrepancies had proven the theory wrong; they concluded that historical materialism should be considered "a scientific methodology for the analysis of the general trend", not a universal law that explained former and future historical processes. According to Su and Zhang, instead of viewing one factor—economy—as dominant, as was previously done, one should analyze how all factors interact with each other, especially the effects of the superstructure on the rest of society. In their view, superstructural elements "played an obvious role in China's 'leap' from semifeudalism to socialism". Socialism in China was safeguarded by the CPC and its commitment to Marxist ideology.
Orthodox Marxism is contrasted with revisionist Marxism as developed in post-First World War Social Democratic parties. Some writers also contrast it with Marxism–Leninism as it developed in the Soviet Union, while others describe the latter as firmly within orthodoxy: Orthodox Marxism rested on and grew out of the European working class movement that emerged in the final quarter of the 19th century and continued in that form until the middle years of the twentieth century. Its two institutional expressions were the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, which despite the great schism in 1919, were marked by a shared conception of capital and labour. Their fortunes therefore rose and fell together. Trotskyism and Left communism were equally orthodox in their thinking and approach, and therefore must be considered left-variants of this tradition.
The socialist market economy is seen by the Communist Party of China as an early stage in the development of socialism (this stage is variously called the "primary" or "preliminary" stage of socialism), where public ownership coexists alongside a diverse range of non-public forms of ownership. The Communist Party of China maintains that despite the co-existence of private capitalists and entrepreneurs with public and collective enterprise, China is not a capitalist country because the party retains control over the direction of the country, maintaining its course of socialist development. Proponents of this economic model distinguish it from market socialism as market socialists believe that economic planning is unattainable, undesirable or ineffective and thus view the market as an integral part of socialism whereas proponents of the socialist market economy view markets as a temporary phase in development of a fully planned economy.
In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological bad news for the PRC, because Russian interpretations and applications of Leninism and Orthodox Marxism contradicted the Sinified Marxism–Leninism of Mao Zedong — his Chinese adaptations of Stalinist interpretation and praxis for establishing socialism in China. To realise that leap of Marxist faith in the development of Chinese socialism, the Communist Party of China developed Maoism (the Thought of Mao Zedong) as the official state ideology of the People's Republic of China. As the specifically Chinese development of Marxism–Leninism, Maoism illuminated the cultural differences between the European-Russian and the Asian-Chinese interpretations and practical applications of Leninism and Orthodox Marxism in each country. The political differences then provoked geopolitical, ideological, and nationalist tensions, which derived from the different stages of development, between the urban society of the industrialised USSR and the agricultural society of the pre-industrial PRC. The theory-vs-praxis arguments escalated to theoretic disputes about Marxist revisionism, and provoked the Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966), and the PRC and the USSR broke their international relations (diplomatic and political, cultural and economic).
In the late 1920s, after the death of Lenin, Stalin established universal ideologic orthodoxy in the Communist Party, the USSR, and the Communist International, with his coinage "Marxism–Leninism", a term which redefined theories of Lenin and Marx to establish universal Marxist–Leninist praxis for the exclusive, geopolitical benefit of the USSR. In the late 1930s, Stalin's official textbook "The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)" (1938), made the term "Marxism–Leninism" common, political-science usage among communists and non-communists.
"The Culture" novels by Iain M Banks are centered on a communist post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated, and there is no use for money or property (aside from personal possessions with sentimental value). Humans in the Culture are free to pursue their own interests in an open and socially-permissive society. The society has been described by some commentators as "communist-bloc" or "anarcho-communist". Banks' close friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has said that The Culture can be seen as a realization of Marx's communism, but adds that "however friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane."
Within Hegelianism, the word "dialectic" has the specialised meaning of a contradiction between ideas that serves as the determining factor in their relationship. Dialectic comprises three stages of development: first, a thesis or statement of an idea, which gives rise to a second step, a reaction or antithesis that contradicts or negates the thesis, and third, the synthesis, a statement through which the differences between the two points are resolved. Dialectical materialism, a theory or set of theories produced mainly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into arguments regarding traditional materialism.
Marxist ethics is a doctrine of morality, i.e. ethics that is based on, or derived from, Marxist philosophy. Marxism–Leninism believes that morality, like other forms of ideology, is of a class character and is manifested in people’s behaviour in different ways in different historical conditions in accordance with the interests of what classes or social strata a person advocates.
"The Marxists" (1962) takes Mills's explanation of sociological models from "Images of Man" and uses it to criticize modern liberalism and Marxism. He believes that the liberalist model does not work and cannot create an overarching view of society, but rather it is more of an ideology for the entrepreneurial middle class. Marxism, however, may be incorrect in its overall view, but it has a working model for societal structure, the mechanics of the history of society, and the roles of individuals. One of Mills's problems with the Marxist model is that it uses units that are small and autonomous, which he finds too simple to explain capitalism. Mills then provides discussion on Marx as a determinist.
Other leftists believe in Marxian economics, which are based on the economic theories of Karl Marx. Some distinguish Marx's economic theories from his political philosophy, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the economy is independent of his advocacy of revolutionary socialism or his belief in the inevitability of proletarian revolution. Marxian economics does not exclusively rely upon Marx, but it draws from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist sources. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "workers' state" are terms used by some Marxists, particularly Leninists and Marxist–Leninists, to describe what they see as a temporary state between the capitalist state of affairs and a communist society. Marx defined the proletariat as salaried workers, in contrast to the lumpenproletariat, who he defined as outcasts of society, such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes. The political relevance of farmers has divided the left. In "Das Kapital", Marx scarcely mentioned the subject. Mao Zedong believed that it would be rural peasants, not urban workers, who would bring about the proletarian revolution.
B. R. Ambedkar criticized Marxists, as he deemed them to be unaware or ignorant of the specifics of caste issues. A number of historians have also debated Marxist historians and critically examined their analysis of history of India. Since the late 1990s, Hindu nationalist scholars especially have polemicized against the Marxist tradition in India for neglecting what they believe to be the country's 'illustrious past.' Marxists are held responsible for aiding or defending Muslims, who figure in Hindu nationalist discourse as the enemy within. An example of such a critique is Arun Shourie's "Eminent Historians" (1998).