Defending MarxismFiled Under: Political, Social

The questions, “Are you a Communist?” “Why are you a Marxist?”, are often posed to me. Usually in some sort of condescending and disgusted tone, as if automatically assuming that I am either an idealist, or some sort of Stalinist. I must begin by saying, just about everything that Stalin, Mao, and Castro did in their regimes is in opposition to what I believe. I will not defend anything they have done because I do not support them whatsoever. What I am more concerned with is the sheer ignorance most people have to the actual philosophy and mode of thought that is Marxism.

To begin we must define what Marxism is. Marxism is a firstly, a “way of thinking.” That means, Marxists can disagree on conclusions, but often use the same process to arrive at their conclusions. Here are the principles of Marxist thought.

• Capitalism relies on exploitation to operate
• Class struggle is the driving force of history
• Dialectics as process of thought

Now, to defend such positions. Capitalism is a system based on private ownership and privately operated business. What are the foundations of modern Capitalism? Exploitation. Take for example the case of either England or America, the two nations at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. You couldn’t have a successful modern Capitalistic nation without some sort of industrialization. This is where private ownership, business and labor come into play. In the case of England, the exploitation of people is clear and obvious, millions of Irish can testify to such. How did England become a modern superpower in the 20th century? Imperialism. Their conquest of India, China, Africa and Canada is exactly how they built their power and wealth as a nation. Truly, I don’t believe anyone could actually deny this. Their ability to extract natural resources and rare goods at cheap prices is what gave them such a high profit margin. They did this through exploitation of the cheap labor and of their situation. With the case of America, the exploitation is even more blunt and obvious. America is built on top of what use to be a nation of Native Americans tribes. The purposeful extermination of at the very least millions upon millions of Native Americans is what gave them the land to begin with. So it began with the exploitation of Native Americans. It then carried over to the exploitation of African slaves (which is a common trend throughout most nations in the world in this time). Once this ended, how exactly did the Northern States become a force? Mass immigration. Again, cheap labor, which could be easily replaced. In the 20th century it is certainly the case that much of the Northern states used this immigration to their advantage. Again we see that the foundations of two of the stronger and well developed nations is built on exploitation of others. It couldn’t have existed without such. And this is what Capitalism relies on to this day in America, the exploitation of cheap labor in Asia, and the cheap labor of illegal immigrants.

The second position couldn’t be articulated better than by Marx. So I won’t try. I will however direct you to the opening chapter to the Communist Manifesto. And provide some quotations as well.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

The Communist Manifesto - Full Text

What is Dialectics? There are two answers to this question. Both of which I fully support and use in practice. First, the Greek method. Defined as, “A philosophical term applied to methods of debate or argumentation that seek to prove or disprove the truth of something by the rules of logic or the laws of reasoning.” and “an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue.” Then there is the Marxist method, which is slightly different, “describes the process of change: the struggle of opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) produce synthesis.” To me, this is the proper, and an extremely useful method to either eliminate the impossible answers (reductio ad absurdu) and to possibly result with a conclusion that is both logical and practical.

Tags: communism, communist, karlmarx, marx, marxism, marxist