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CHAPTER 4
Classical Marxism Philosophy
The core of classical Marxism – the Marxism of Marx – is a philosophy of history that outlines why capitalism is doomed and why socialism is destined to replace it, based on supposedly scientific analysis. But in what sense did Marx believe his work to be scientific? Marx criticized earlier socialist thinkers such as the French social reformer Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Fourier and Owen as ‘utopians’ on the basis that their socialism was grounded in a desire for total social transformation unconnected with the necessity of class struggle and revolution. Marx, in contrast, undertook a laborious empirical analysis of history and society, hoping thereby to gain insight into the nature of future developments. However, whether with Marx’s help or not, Marxism as the attempt to gain historical understanding through the application of scientific methods, later developed into Marxism as a body of scientific truths, gaining a status more akin to that of a religion. Engels’ declaration that Marx had uncovered the ‘laws’ of historical and social development was a clear indication of this transition. What made Marx’s approach different from that of other socialist thinkers was that he subscribed to what Engels called the ‘materialist conception of history’, or historical materialism (see Figure 4.1). Rejecting the idealism of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), who believed that history amounted to the unfolding of the so-called
‘Legal and political superstructure’ lt r , liti s, rt, i l , r li i , t .
‘Legal and political superstructure’ Culture, politics, art, ideology, religion, etc.
‘Economic base’ Economic system; the ‘mode of production’ including the class system ‘Economic base’ i s st ; t ‘ f r ti ’ i l i t l ss s st
Figure 4.1 Historical materialism
‘world spirit’, Marx held material circumstances to be fundamental to all forms of social and historical development. This reflected the belief that the production of the means
of subsistence is the most crucial of all human activities. Since humans cannot survive without food, water, shelter and so on, the way in which these are produced conditions all other aspects of life; in short, ‘social being determines consciousness’. In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , written in 1859, Marx gave this theory its most succinct expression, by suggesting that social consciousness and the ‘legal and political superstructure’ arise from the ‘economic base’, the real foundation of society. This ‘base’ consists essentially of the ‘mode of production’ or economic system – feudalism, capitalism, socialism and so on. This led Marx to conclude that political, legal, cultural, religious, artistic and other aspects of life could be explained primarily by reference to economic factors (see pp. 3–5 for an account of how this applies to Marx’s theory of ideology). While in other respects a critic of Hegel, Marx nevertheless embraced his belief that the driving force of historical change was the dialectic . In
Historical materialism: A Marxist theory that holds that material or economic conditions ultimately structure law, politics, culture and other aspects of social existence. Dialectic: A process of development in which interaction between two opposing forces (thesis and antithesis) leads to a further or higher stage (synthesis); historical change resulting from internal contradictions within a society.
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