When was marxism invented

That dream collapsed before the century had ended. The people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and the USSR rejected Marxist ideology and entered a remarkable transition toward private property rights and the market-exchange system, one that is still occurring.

Which aspects of Marxism created such a powerful revolutionary force? And what explains its eventual demise? The answers lie in some general characteristics of Marxism—its economics, social theory, and overall vision.

If a pair of shoes usually takes twice as long to produce as a pair of pants, for example, then shoes are twice as valuable as pants. In the long run, the competitive price of shoes will be twice the price of pants, regardless of the value of the physical inputs.

Although the labor theory of value is demonstrably false, it prevailed among classical economists through the midnineteenth century. Adam Smith , for instance, flirted with a labor theory of value in his classic defense of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations , and David Ricardo later systematized it in his Principles of Political Economy , a text studied by generations of free-market economists.

So the labor theory of value was not unique to Marxism. Marx did attempt, however, to turn the theory against the champions of capitalism, pushing the theory in a direction that most classical economists hesitated to follow. Marx argued that the theory could explain the value of all commodities, including the commodity that workers sell to capitalists for a wage.

Marx, using principles of classical economics, explained that the value of labor power must depend on the number of labor hours it takes society, on average, to feed, clothe, and shelter a worker so that he or she has the capacity to work.

In other words, the long-run wage workers receive will depend on the number of labor hours it takes to produce a person who is fit for work. Suppose five hours of labor are needed to feed, clothe, and protect a worker each day so that the worker is fit for work the following morning.

If one labor hour equaled one dollar, the correct wage would be five dollars per day. Marx then asked an apparently devastating question: if all goods and services in a capitalist society tend to be sold at prices and wages that reflect their true value measured by labor hours , how can it be that capitalists enjoy profits —even if only in the short run? How do capitalists manage to squeeze out a residual between total revenue and total costs?

Capitalists, Marx answered, must enjoy a privileged and powerful position as owners of the means of production and are therefore able to ruthlessly exploit workers. Marx was correct when he claimed that classical economists failed to adequately explain capitalist profits.

But Marx failed as well. By the late nineteenth century, the economics profession rejected the labor theory of value. Mainstream economists now believe that capitalists do not earn profits by exploiting workers see profits. Instead, they believe, entrepreneurial capitalists earn profits by forgoing current consumption, by taking risks, and by organizing production.

Marx wove economics and philosophy together to construct a grand theory of human history and social change. His concept of alienation, for example, first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of , plays a key role in his criticism of capitalism. Marx believed that people, by nature, are free, creative beings who have the potential to totally transform the world. But he observed that the modern, technologically developed world is apparently beyond our full control.

He maintained that the way the market economy is coordinated—through the spontaneous purchase and sale of private property dictated by the laws of supply and demand —blocks our ability to take control of our individual and collective destinies.

Marx condemned capitalism as a system that alienates the masses. His reasoning was as follows: although workers produce things for the market, market forces, not workers, control things.

People are required to work for capitalists who have full control over the means of production and maintain power in the workplace. By critique is meant the disclosure of this ideological kernel, the social interest which is expressed in and sustained by this or that form of thought, which actually connects it to the real, material life of people. Philosophy had been developed to such a high degree in Germany precisely because Germany was a social and political backwater in Europe; while Revolution was being made in France and the English making an Industrial Revolution — and lots of money!

By subjecting these generalisations and theories to specialised study, the study of philosophy gives us a deeper window into the nature of the social reality from which theoretical ideas have been abstracted. Philosophy does not talk about social reality, rather, it is the purified voice of reality. What is the day-to-day reality of bourgeois society?

That is, Marx found in the theories of the political economists a distilled essence of the ideology and ethics which actually govern the way people live under capitalism, which make market relations appear natural , and allow people to actively give their consent to their own exploitation, entering into relations of exchange of commodities as if this was a non-political value-free activity.

From the very beginning of his study, Marx almost single-mindedly pursued his critique of political economy; his first work Comments on James Mill was written in , while Volume III of Capital was published after his death, in Marx did not confine himself to literary work, but was an active participant and leader in the struggles of the working-class of his day. The construction of the First and Second Internationals were concrete leaps forward in the self-organisation of the working class, uniting workers in many countries in a single organisation.

Marxism aims not to teach the working class, but to understand and give voice to the strivings of its most advanced sections and generalise that striving both theoretically and practically.

The second major working class struggle of their time was the Paris Commune — the first time in history when the working class seized state power.

From a critical examination of the Commune, Marxism develops its ideas about democracy , the state and revolution. Even the Communist Manifesto of was amended to include the gains of the Commune, principally that the working class could not simply take over the state machine, but had to utterly smash it and build its own organs of class rule, based on proletarian democracy.

During the latter part of their lives, the works of Marx and Engels were translated into many languages, and through the work of the Second International , Marxism became known and understood in all corners of the world and deeply entered the heart of the organised working class, now united across the world in a single organisation.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism had become a vast party with a mass working class membership and in the case of Germany for example, members of Parliament. In order to meet the needs of a mass movement of this kind, Marxism had to develop a rounded out alternative view of the world in such a way as to arm millions of workers with the means to challenge the bourgeoisie at every point.

Consequently, this understanding of Marxism is part and parcel of what Marxism is. In the exposition of dialectical materialism , the Marxists summed up the achievements of German idealist philosophy from Kant , and especially Hegel, and the critique Marx had made of this philosophy, drawing on the work of philosophical materialism, particularly in France.

His two works Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy , give the best possible short summary of dialectical materialism. Historical Materialism is the whole body of historical research which Marx and other Marxists have carried out, studying the development of forms of social organisation and consciousness, how they have succeeded one another in history and their interconnection with the development of the forces of production mobilised by social formations at each stage in the unfolding of history.

In order to understand bourgeois society and its way of thinking, Marx and Engels had to critically assimilate the whole body of historical knowledge of their time and this interest and close study of history is an integral and necessary part of Marxism.

Along with others of his time, such as Adam Smith and Henry Morgan , Marx discerned from the historical record important stages of development running right throughout human history and these stages of development of politics and culture corresponded to broad stages in the development of the relations of production. While the further progress of historical research continuously sheds new light on the nature of past epochs — the work of non-Marxists just as much as that of Marxists — the Marxist study of history, i.

Putting this another way: while philosophical materialism has shown that changed people are the product of changed social conditions, it is first of all only people who change conditions.

Marx had set out to make a thoroughgoing critique of bourgeois society by showing how the fundamental values and production relations which underlie all social life are founded on a chimera of equality and freedom of choice. By the time of the publication of Capital in , bourgeois economic science itself had abandoned the great tradition of classical political economy, in favour of more pragmatic, technical approaches to management of the economy and getting rich See the Theory of Marginal Utility.

Consequently, it came about that the very theory that Marx had set out to critique, i. Thus, Capital became, for the Marxists of the Second International, a work of political economy, and was seen as a work which explained how capitalism came about and offered an approach to predicting the course of its development and arming revolutionaries with a better understanding of the phenomena of the economy.

The onset of the war created a crisis: the leaders of social democracy as Marxists called themselves at that time were simply unprepared to rally the working class against the war. A conference of social democrats opposed to the war at Zimmerwald in September finally brought about a break.

After this, Lenin began to elaborate a critique of the politics and theory of the Second International. Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about in his book Das Kapital , published in They are driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history that play out through the behavior and conflict among social classes.

According to Marx, every society is divided into social classes, whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other social classes. Thus Marx thought that the capitalist system inherently contained the seeds of its own destruction. The alienation and exploitation of the proletariat that are fundamental to capitalist relations would inevitably drive the working class to rebel against the bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of production. As a result of the revolution, Marx predicted that private ownership of the means of production would be replaced by collective ownership, first under socialism and then under communism.

In the final stage of human development, social classes and class struggle would no longer exist. Marx and Engels' ideas laid the groundwork for the theory and practice of communism, which advocates for a classless system in which all property and wealth are communally rather than privately owned.

Socialism predates communism by several decades. Its early adherents called for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, solidarity among workers, better working conditions, and common ownership of land and manufacturing equipment.

Socialism is based on the idea of public ownership of the means of production , but individuals may still own property. Rather than arising out of a class revolution, socialist reform takes place within the existing social and political structures, whether they're democratic, technocratic, oligarchic, or totalitarian. Both communism and socialism oppose capitalism, an economic system characterized by private ownership and a system of laws that protect the right to own or transfer private property.

In a capitalist economy, private individuals and enterprises own the means of production and the right to profit from them.

These include worker exploitation and inequities between rich and poor. Although Marx inspired multitudes of followers, many of his predictions have not come to pass.

Marx believed that increasing competition would not produce better goods for consumers; instead, it would lead to bankruptcy among capitalists and the rise of monopolies as fewer and fewer were left to control production. Bankrupt former capitalists would join the proletariat, eventually creating an army of the unemployed. In addition, the market economy , which by its nature is unplanned, would experience huge supply-and-demand problems and cause severe depressions.

Yet over the years, capitalism has not collapsed as a result of fierce competition. Wages have risen and profits have not declined, although economic inequality has increased in many capitalist societies. And though there have been recessions and depressions, they are not thought to be an inherent feature of free markets.

Indeed, a society without competition, money, and private property has never materialized, and the history of the 20th century suggests it is likely an unworkable concept. Marxism is a philosophy developed by Karl Marx in the second half of the 19th century that unifies social, political, and economic theory. It is mainly concerned with the battle between the working class and the ownership class and favors communism and socialism over capitalism.

Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself. The oppressed workers would become alienated and ultimately overthrow the owners to take control of the means of production themselves, ushering in a classless society.

Not so far. Some countries, such as the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, have attempted to create a communist society, but they were or have been unable to entirely eliminate personal property, money, and class systems.

In , capitalism, in its various forms, remains the dominant economic system. American Journal of Public Health.