7 Key excerpts on "Marxism"

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  eBook - ePub

  Social Policy in a Changing Society

  • Maurice Mullard, Paul Spicker(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Marxism

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203981078-3

  Marxism in theory

  For many years, Marxism dominated academic discussion of particular issues on the left, and although fewer commentators would now refer to themselves as ‘Marxist’, the influence of Marxism is still evident in the vocabulary which is used to discuss social issues. Sociology as a discipline was also profoundly influenced by Marx; the main opposition to Marxist analysis was Weber, and Weber drew on and modified a Marxist vocabulary – terms like class, capitalism and power – as a means of arguing against Marx's position and conclusions. The effect was, however, that much of the debate was framed, and sustained, in the language of Marx.

  There is a basic problem in outlining and explaining Marxism. Marxism was not just a social theory, and not just a political doctrine, but a system of belief. For those who followed it, it explained everything important in life, including family, sexuality, art, culture, politics and religion; it predicted the future; and it provided a sense of worth and a social life. As a social theory, Marxism was never very satisfactory. Despite his dogmatic claims to be ‘scientific’, Marx's reasoning was often obscure; he expressed himself in inconsistent and sometimes contradictory terms, and his predictions were inaccurate. In the hands of intellectual Marxists, Marxism became much more sophisticated, and a force to be reckoned with: it was used, not as a theory, but as a flexible set of tools and arguments to provide an analysis of society, and it is on that basis that it needs to be considered here.

  The materialist base of society

  Marx's thought was based in a materialist view of society and history. The central view is that the nature of economic production determined the pattern of relationships in a society. The structure of economic production – the ‘forces of production’ – shaped the relations of production, or the role which people had in the economy. The forces and relations of production together produced a substructure of society, which was then reflected in everything else, including politics, culture and intellectual activity. ‘As in material, so in intellectual production’, Marx wrote;1

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  International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First Century

  An Introduction

  • Martin Griffiths, Martin Griffiths(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Marxism Mark Rupert

  Introduction

  Deeply enmeshed in intellectual and political projects spanning well over a century and much of the world, Marxism – the tradition of ‘practical-critical activity’ founded by Karl Marx – defies reduction to any simple doctrine or single political position. Its breadth and diversity is illustrated by the sheer mass of Leszek Kolakowski’s multivolume survey Main Currents of Marxism (2005), a schematic overview of historical and actually existing Marxisms. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand this constellation of intellectual and political positions as constituting variants of historical materialism (the core of the Marxist worldview) insofar as they are animated by a critique of capitalism, understood as a particular historical form of organization of human social life, rather than a natural or necessary expression of some innate and invariant human nature. Without pretending to speak for the whole of Marxism, this chapter will present a particular interpretation of historical materialism and its relevance for global politics.

  Contrary to simplistic caricatures which retain in some quarters a measure of academic currency, historical materialism has focused its attention upon capitalism as a material way of life, an ensemble of social relations which has never been coterminous with ‘the economy’ as we know it in the modern world, nor with the so-called ‘domestic’ sphere putatively contained within the boundaries of the sovereign state. Marxism has much to say about historically evolving structures and practices which have crossed national boundaries and linked the domestic and the international, the economic and the political – much to say, in short, about the social production of global politics. Historical materialism suggests that states and systems of interstate and transnational power relations are embedded in and (re-)produced through systems of relations that encompass (among other things) the social organization of production. The latter is itself structured according to relations of class (and, many contemporary Marxists acknowledge, by race and gender as well as other relations of domination), and is an object of contestation among social classes, state managers, and other historically situated political agents. Thus politics is not confined to the formally public sphere of the modern state, but permeates the economic sphere as well: just as the state and interstate politics can profoundly shape economic and social life, so the politics of the economy can have enormous implications – not generally recognized within the terms of liberal worldviews – for the historical form taken by particular states and world orders constructed among states. The point here, it must be emphasized, is not to reconstruct global politics on the basis of an economistic reductionism in which all causality is seen as emanating from an already constituted, foundational economic sphere (a sort of universal independent variable), but rather to argue something very nearly the opposite – that politics and political stru ggle are essential aspects of the processes by which all social structures are (re-)produced, and hence that the analytical separation of political from economic life – as well as domestic and international aspects of these – represents a false dichotomy which obscures much of potential political importance.

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  An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Routledge Revivals)

  • A. R. M. Murray(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  a priori necessity which they do not possess but to discover, by scientific enquiry, their empirical relationship to the material environment of those who profess them. And he believes that observation shows that these relationships are of a constant character, so that laws may be formulated specifying the sort of ideas which will result from a

  1 ibid., p. 150.

  2 loc. cit.

  given type of material environment. There is, according to Marx, no other sense in which these beliefs can be ‘understood’.

  Marxism may therefore be briefly defined as the theory that (a ) the only possible knowledge about the universe is empirical knowledge, and (6) scientific investigation shows that the evolution of society is determined by the interaction between men’s material conditions and their ideas in accordance with certain empirical laws which may be discovered by scientific investigation.

  While Marxism is thus a philosophical and scientific theory about the nature of social evolution, ‘Communism’ and ‘Socialism’ are words which are usually employed to designate certain political policies, i.e. programmes of action devised in order to achieve certain ends. The relationship between these policies and Marxism is that they aim, in varying degrees, at achieving the ends which Marxism is believed to justify. The difference, in so far as there is a difference, between Communists and Socialists is that Socialists accept the principle of achieving their ends through the machinery of a free democracy while Communists accept this only in so far as it is inevitable, and are ready to resort to unconstitutional means to attain their ends when such methods appear likely to be more successful. But both policies are mainly shaped by the Marxist ideal of changing existing society into one in which ‘the labour power of all the individuals is consciously applied as one single social labour power’ i.e. in which the means of social production are placed under central control with a view to ensuring that these means are used for the maximum satisfaction of what are assumed to be the ‘social needs’ of the community. Both policies are directly opposed to the policy of free enterprise or laisser-faire,

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  An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture

  • Dominic Strinati(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This career of political activity and struggle, as Anderson (1979:50 and 45) has noted, makes Gramsci something of a unique figure as a theorist. Usually the writers, including Marxists, whose work is assessed for its theoretical importance are based in universities and follow intellectual careers, although they sometimes dabble in a bit of political journalism. But Gramsci is very different, even if he, too, saw himself as an intellectual, an ‘organic intellectual’ of the working class. Gramsci’s politics shaped his ideas directly in that they grew out of his political experiences and the political repression and hardship he suffered. For Gramsci, Marxism is not simply a science whose concepts have to be defined and developed in a rigorous and logical manner, nor merely a perspective well equipped to make sense of the world, but a political theory focused upon the emancipation of the working class. Marxism in this sense is a theory which guides, motivates and inspires, while monitoring and building, the socialist working-class revolution.

  Like Althusser, Gramsci wants to eradicate economic determinism from Marxist theory and to improve its explanations of the superstructure. However, Gramsci is more interested in Marxism’s significance as a theory of political struggle than in its scientific credentials. In fact, Gramsci is opposed to scientistic and deterministic interpretations of Marxism. Instead, he prefers an interpretation which stresses the fundamental role performed in historical change by human agency in the shape of class and other social struggles. The concept of hegemony and related ideas are designed precisely to advance this interpretation. Gramsci is opposed to economic determinism because it reduces the superstructure to the economy, and involves a strict determinism; Althusser, on the other hand, is prepared to accept some variant of determinism because it is scientific (Gramsci 1971: 378–419).

  A couple of brief examples should make this clear. The theory of class consciousness and political action characteristic of some schools of Marxism uses the ‘class in itself, class for itself’ distinction to trace the history of the working class within capitalism. This argues that the working class is first formed objectively in the mode of production because it is exploited, excluded from property rights and coerced to perform wage labour. Gradually, as a result of its objective class situation, it begins to develop class consciousness and forms its own industrial and political organisations, and its own ideology and culture. These institutions enable it to eventually seize state power, and usher in the socialist overthrow of capitalism.

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  Toward a Critical Theory of States

  The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate after Globalization

  • Clyde W. Barrow(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  According to Poulantzas (1978a, 11), dialectical materialism (i.e., Marxist philosophy) “has as its particular object the production of knowledge; that is the structure and functioning of thought” (see also, Althusser, 1969). Marxist philosophy is essentially a process of reading the classic texts rigorously to produce the concepts necessary to an understanding of history and society and, for this reason, Poulantzas (1978a, 11) emphasizes that the raw materials of political theory are “the texts of the Marxist classics.” Althusserian structuralists viewed the historical development of Marx’s thought as exemplary of this process and to that extent they emphasized a distinction between the young Marx and the mature Marx. For Althusserians, Marx did not become a “Marxist” until he wrote The German Ideology, which constituted his “epistemological break” with bourgeois categories of thought, although Marx’s thought does not reach full maturity until the publication of Capital (Therborn, 1976). Thus, while Miliband places Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto at the center of Marxist political theory, Poulantzas (1978a, 20) identifies Capital as “the major theoretical work of Marxism” (see also, Althusser and Balibar, 1977)

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  Sport and Leisure in Social Thought

  • Grant Jarvie, Joseph Maguire(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Such approaches, suggested Marx, do not take account of how production takes place or how the relations of production are produced at any given time. Economic categories, it was suggested, ‘are only the abstractions of the social relations of production so these too will change as society changes’. 10 Thus Marx used the notion of historical materialism to demonstrate the historicity of capitalism. While liberal political economists tended to view the stage of commerce as an end in itself, Classical Marxists tended to view capitalism as but one stage in the development of the materialist conceptualisation of history and human progress. As a critique of capitalism Marxist political economy deals with the following questions: What is wealth?; How is wealth produced?; How did the ownership of the means for producing wealth fall into the hands of the minority; What do we mean by class and how did classes come into being?; What are the causes of slumps and economic crises under capitalism?; What is the economic and political significance of the term imperialism? and what is the economic foundation of socialist and communist society? In a similar sense political economies of sport and leisure have tended to highlight some or all of the following concerns: How has sport and leisure been organised under capitalism?; Who profits from professional sport and the leisure industry?; What is the basis of wage-labour relations in the world of sport and leisure?; To what extent are professional sports people and recreation workers exploited?; To what extent are the employee rights of the professional athlete recognised?; How do monopolies, corporations, and cartels influence decisions, profit and ideologies concerning sport and recreation practices?; How has imperialism affected world sporting development?; and how is sport and leisure in the periphery mediated by global, economic, political and cultural relations? The work of Rob Beamish may be used as an example of a programme of research that is informed by classical Marxist political economy. 11 Beamish illustrates the close relationship between professional sport as work in Canada and America and

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  The History and Philosophy of Social Science

  • H. Scott Gordon(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Principles of Political Economy and his hope that a scientific study of the formation of human character (‘ethology’ he called it) would one day be developed, and Alfred Marshall’s emphasis upon the sociological character of the demand side of the market and his expectation that economic theory could be developed into a comprehensive science of ‘economic biology’, as steps towards, and encouragement for, the union of economics and sociology. But, again, we must turn to Marxism for the most important attempt to forge such a union. Marx’s analytical economics continued in the tradition established by Ricardo, as we shall see in the next chapter, but Marx viewed economics in a much broader context. Ricardo’s theory of economic development does not have the cosmic character of Marx’s theory of history or the import of his ‘laws of motion of capitalism’. Marx’s broad perspective can be regarded as an attempt to construct a comprehensive theory of society through a union of the sociology of Saint-Simon and Comte and the economics of Ricardo (freed of its utilitarianism and individualism). The attempt to find an emulsifying agent for this intellectual oil and water remains a central concern of modern Marxist social science.

  D. FRENCH POSITIVISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

  Despite their reverence for science and their emphatic insistence that the study of social phenomena must be scientific, neither Saint-Simon nor Comte discussed any aspect of epistemology in more than a superficial way, and it is not possible to synthesize a coherent philosophy of science from their writings. Modern interpreters of French positivism are sometimes boldly assertive in describing and evaluating its philosophy of science, but this is sustained by focusing on some aspects of Saint-Simon’s and Comte’s work and disregarding others, or by insistence on fitting it into the author’s own procrustean bed of historical interpretation. Some interpretations take at face value Saint-Simon’s and Comte’s demand that the methodology of investigation must treat reality as objectively existent, independent of our preconceptions, and construe French positivism as a continuation of eighteenth-century empiricism. But it must be plain from our survey of Saint-Simon and Comte in this chapter that the tradition of empiricism in the philosophy of science and French positivism are poles apart; whatever similarity they possess is confined to Saint-Simon’s and Comte’s rhetorical exhortations and is not evident in their own methodological practice. The fact that they did not follow their own epistemological precepts does not, in itself, disqualify Saint-Simon and Comte as philosophers of science but it means that we cannot resort to their writings to amplify and clarify their epistemological views.

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