Political Thought Dersi 7. Ünite Sorularla Öğrenelim

There are a number of Marxisms, including Classical Marxism, Orthodox Communism and Modern Marxism.

According to Marx, how do humans express their creativity, develop their humanity, and fulfill themselves?

Marx believed that humans express their creativity, develop their humanity, and fulfill themselves through work. Work, in other words, is a form of self-creation.

According to Marx, work under capitalism causes alienation. What are the three aspects of alienation?

First, the working conditions were very heavy in the 19th Century and work itself became a form of persecution for workers rather than a joyful process of the self- creation.

Dialectical materialism is the scientific foundation of Marx’s theory.

The roots of dialectical materialism lie in the dialectic method of Hegel, who developed a theory of history focusing on change. According to Hegel, the world moves toward a goal, which is predetermined by God. He called this goal as “idea” and believed that people could not understand, change or escape from it.

According to Marx, what are the two basic parts in every society?

According to Marx, there are two basic parts in every society, these are the substructure and the superstructure. The economic system is the foundation of the society. In other words, it is the substructure, or material base.

Which notions do Marx’s thoughts on social classes in general include?

• There are two main social classes in all stratified societies, these are a ruling class and a subject class.

• The ruling class owns and controls the means of production such as land, capital, labor, buildings and machinery.

• The ruling class exploits and oppresses the subject class in order to maintain and reinforce its advantages.

• There is a fundamental contradiction, a conflict of interest between the two classes.

• The institutions of superstructure (social institutions such as religion, law, political system etc.) serve to the ruling class and function as tools for the ruling class domination.

• The exploitation and oppression of some people by others would only end when classes disappear, and classes would disappear only when the means of production are commonly owned by the society.

Marx defines social classes according to their property relation to means of production. There were no classes in primitive communist societies, because nobody owned the means of production. Every member of the society was a producer (as hunter or gatherer) and owner, because the production was shared by the society.

In capitalist societies, there are two major classes. One of them is bourgeoisie who is an owner of the means of production and purchaser of labor of the workers. The other is proletariat who does not own the means of production and sells their labor to capitalists. Besides, there is a middle class, which consists of (a) petit bourgeoisie (who owns means of production but does not purchase any labor), (b) people engaged in the circulation of commodities (marketing, purchasing, sales), (c) mediators (wholesalers, stockers, shop owners), (d) managers, accountants, lawyers, journalists, clergy, army and police officers.

First, because of the competition in the capitalist market, capitalists will increase the use of machinery in the factories. This will eliminate the skill differences among the workers, because in these factories, the only duty of a worker is to follow the instructions in order to make the machine work. When all workers become unskilled as such, the working class will be a highly homogeneous class.

Marx considered that the nation-state system is a part of the capitalist superstructure. National borders and identities are artificial divisions which served to reinforce the capitalist system, because they separate people who indeed share much in common. For Marx, people from the same social class in different nations have more in common than people who are from the same nation but different social classes. This is what Marx means with his well-known call “proletarians of all countries, unite!”. Believing that “workingmen have no country”, Marx thought as different countries become socialist, they will recognize that nations divide the proletariat. Thus, they will eliminate national borders and the whole world will become a single socialist society.

Anarchy is typically defined as a society without state.

Anarchism aims to eliminate the state and liberate people from political domination and economic exploitation.

The roots of anarchism can be found in the thoughts of Taoists in ancient China, Greek philosophers, rioters in Middle Age Europe, and the leftists in the English Revolution. But it has become a clear ideology only after the collapse of feudalism. As an ideology “which combined the Renaissance’s growing sense of individualism with the Enlightenment’s belief in social progress”, anarchism emerged at the end of the 18th century.

The origin of the well-known graffiti, the ‘A’ letter in a circle, derives from the slogan ‘Anarchy is order; government is civil war’, first used by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1848 and symbolized by the revolutionary Anselme Bellegarrigue.

• Both Anarchists and Marxists have their roots in the Industrial Revolution. Both appeared as reactions to the aggravated conditions, and intense oppression during the mid-19th Century. For both, the perfecting of industrialized economics and the reach of their economic organs resulted in an increasing mechanization and quantification of productive activity. 

• Both are materialists and believe that people are shaped within the social and economic context of the society they live in.

• They both accept Marx’s theory which suggests that labor creates value and much of this value is seized by capitalists during the production process.

• They both believe that due to their role in the production process, working class has potential to destroy capitalism and create a classless society.

• Both believe that the only way to destroy capitalism is revolution that must be international to be successful.

• For anarchists, the main source of social injustice is the existence of the state. Hence, all kinds of state ideologies should be rejected. State is not necessary. It is indeed harmful and hindering for human progress. Marxists, on the other hand, think that the state is an end-product of the class conflict. They think that the capitalist state must first be overthrown to defeat capitalism.

Pacifists and revolutionaries were the two groups of prominent anarchists in the 19th century.

Bakunin is known as the founder of collectivist anarchism and violent anarchism. He thought that the greatest obstacle in front of human freedom was the state. He advocated terrorism, destruction and revolution for social change. He thought that the social institutions were devices to deprive people of their freedom, dominate and enslave them. He rejected religion and belief in God, because he thought that believing in a superhuman power such as God meant the abandonment of free human spirit, and the enslavement of people to a suggested supreme being. He rejected all forms of institutionalized authority and hierarchy and aimed absolute freedom. He suggested that true freedom can only be realized with the complete destruction of the state.